Blur Have No Intention of Reactivating

Blur won’t be getting back together anytime soon.

Blur lead guitarist Graham Coxon has written off any chance of a reunion in the short term but it may happen at some time in the future. “That’s always been the thing with Blur – they’ll do it when they really need to and not for any other reason. It doesn’t really seem genuine to just get back together and just do gigs for a bit of spondage. We need to have some sort of focus for how we would work,” he told NME.

The last Blur album ‘The Magic Whip’ in 2015 was a reunion album. It came out 12 years after 2003’s ‘Think Tank’. ‘The Magic Whip’ happened by accident. In May 2013, Blur were set to perform at Japan’s Tokyo Rocks music festival but the festival was cancelled at the last minute after the band had arrived in Hong Kong. With five days to kill, they started work on writing new music at Avon Studios in Hong Kong. The seeds of ‘The Magic Whip’ had sprouted.

Damon Albarn already had a Blur album in his head. When Blur toured Australia in 2015 Albarn told Melbourne fans that “Some songs I had written in Melbourne before I went to Hong Kong, in fact.”

‘The Magic Whip’ reached no 1 in the UK, no 5 in Australia and no 24 in the USA.

Damon Albarn released Gorillaz new music in 2020. ‘Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez’ was released last October. A ‘Season Two’ is on the way.

Graham Coxon has been working on soundtracks. There were two ‘The End of the F***ing World’ soundtracks across 2018 and 2019. He released ‘I Am Not Okay with This’ soundtrack in 2020.

Drummer David Rowntree moonlights as a politician. He represents the Labour Party as a councillor on Norfolk County Council.

And as for Alex James, well, he is a cheesemaker. Seriously. James produces one he calls ‘Blue Monday’ (after the New Order song) as well as a range of artisan cheeses branded as ‘Good Queen Maude’, ‘Little Wallop’, ‘Farleigh Wallop’, and most recently ‘Goddess’.

Noise11.com