Blur!

Today I had the urge to listen to Blur. Only to discover I had already stashed all my Blur CDs at the bottom of boxes I packed last weekend. Had to download them instead.

I LOVED Blur ever since I first saw them on MTV. I was 15 and still a bit confused about what music I actually liked. I had dabbled in Arrested Development (who nobody will remember, they were like an eco-friendly hiphop collective), Bjork and Jamiroquai. Bjork is okay, but Jamiroquai? Whoops. Then there was the ghastly rave stuff most of my friends were into at the time (and I had already been forced to attend a couple of raves. I was way too young to do so, one time there was a police raid and we had to escape through a toilet window. I am not fond of raves.).

I went out and bought Parklife. I listened to it incessantly. I must have spent two month not listening to anything else. Annoyingly, I could not buy the other albums anywhere. Not even the import section of World of Music in Munich had them. I found Modern Life Is Rubbish on an exchange trip to France eventually and mailordered everything else I could find.

Then, rather excitingly, I found out Blur were playing in Munich! In a small venue (couple of hundred capacity) called Tilt! I made my friend tag along (who was into New Model Army, Deep Purple and the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the time …). Off we trundled to the ticket shop to buy out beautiful Blur tickets. None of this Ticketmaster printout crap. Those were real, shiny tickets with the album cover printed on them. I still have that ticket in a scrap book somewhere.

We got the train to Munich way too early. Then we couldn’t find the venue for ages. Then we arrived there at 4pm. As in waaay to early (this was NOT an underage show … but then, this is Munich, people didn’t really check how old you were). Only to find people were already having some kind of picnic outside the venue. Turns out some of them were from our hometown, and the other two were from a village next to the village I am from. Lasting friendships started on this very day. One of them I moved to London with years later. She then moved back home because she ran out of money. We have since fallen out I think. Although she is now back in London and I bumped into her at Camden Sainsburys a few years back. She is going out with the guy from the Sneaker Pimps that noone has ever heard of (possibly a session musician!) and we never met up again.

Anyhow, back to the gig (Echobelly were supporting, by the way!). I had a Blur T-shirt on which I acquired on a trip to London I did with my parents a couple of weeks before. My T-shirt had UK tourdates on it! How cool was I (ok, not very actually … the thing was X-large!)? The doors opened, one of my new friends decided she had to RUN to the front and went smashing into a pillar. Very amusing it was, too.

The venue was small, there were no barriers or anything like that! I ended up in the second row. It was absolute mayhem. Damon Albarn was wearing a green-blue stripey T-shirt (as could later be seen in one of those life-size posters from Smash Hits. The sort that came in 4 pieces you had to collect and glue together). People were jumping up and down, people tried to grab Damon Albarn’s leg (and succeeded for a while. Then a bit of his trousers ripped off and the people let go), there was screaming, someone passed out and I was so, so happy. This was brilliant. Even though this was … god … shit … in 1994 I think (Jesus Christ that’s 14 years ago!!) … definitely one of the most memorable gigs I’ve ever been to (and I have been to quite a lot since then). I can still smell that gig when I think of it. And I got half a setlist. I meant to get the whole one. But as I was picking it up, some stupid girl, who was a lot louder than me, a lot bigger than me and a lot stronger than me tried to snatch it from my hand and ripped it in half.

This gig was the beginning of the beginning. Suddenly I had friends that liked the same music as me. We went to the international press in the train station together to buy the Melody Maker and the NME. Q and Select we erm took for free because we hid those inside the Melody Maker.

Then, a penfriend of mine (who wasn’t into music at all) somehow telephoned a radio station (I think it was a programme about people looking for likeminded friends?) and announced that her pen friend (ie me) would like to meet more people who liked Blur (WTF?).

I then received a letter (at this point I had no idea about this radio program or that my name had been bandied around!) from a guy from a town near Munich. This guy then turned into the best friend I’ve ever had (I know this sounds slightly OTT but he really was). After I moved to London, he visited a couple of times, but we had silly arguments and we rarely hear from each other now. Sometimes I really miss him a lot.

We did all sorts of bizarre things. He had a car, so we’d go to gigs together and he dropped me off home afterwards (this involved a two hour detour for him). We even ended up following Blur’s tourbus once (shameful, I know. It was all perfectly innocent though. We just really wanted to meet them) and ended up drinking Bacardi and Coke with Graham Coxon in a hotel bar (for the record, Graham Coxon is a lovely man! Alex James is an arrogant shit. Damon Albarn is a lot taller than you’d think and Dave Rowntree is so averagely normal it’s almost painful!).

Oh I nearly forgot my trip to Colchester now! Me, my friend from my village and my friend from town went on a holiday to Colchester. Most of Blur are from Colchester. We spent ages trying to find the house Graham Coxon grew up in. We even found it in the end. Along with his primary school. Once we were there, we weren’t sure what we were meant to do. So we took a photo and left very quickly. Embarrassingly, we did show those photos to Graham Coxon at a gig soon after. He looked worried. I don’t blame him.

This all seems to crazy when I think about it now. All these gigs where we’d turn up at the (very small) venue at 5pm, hoping to meet bands (again, I repeat, this was all very innocent as far as I was concerned. I just wanted to meet them. My friend, on the other hand, managed to shag one of the Bluetones and Placebo’s something or other technician. I was quite pissed off with her, because I genuinely was only there because I liked the music and I thought it was really stupid of her. I love music but have little time for groupies. I find them tedious and annoying. Most of them don’t even buy the records. Losers.). I have a whole selection of photos of bands outside that same little venue in Munich. And it all started with this one Blur gig.

Somehow, I lost interest in Blur after Think Tank came out. I didn’t even buy it, because I wasn’t keen on the direction they were heading into. I like fun pop songs. I don’t like semi-experimental weird stuff that much.

I still have a soft spot for Blur, but it all seems like another world now. I have moved away, lost touch with most of the people I was hanging around with, that venue in Munich has long closed down, I never got to see Blur in a small venue again. The other gigs were quite big, there were barriers and stuff … I don’t like big gigs as much. I still have my scrap book though, with tickets and that ripped set list in it. And the signed pictures. Sometimes I look at it and wish I was still 16.