deserve的用法_百度知道
deserve的用法
deserve的用法
我有更好的答案
The heroic deeds of Tom deserve to be recorded in lettersof gold.汤姆的英勇事迹值得大书特书。Was he humane(仁义)? Confucius said,I don't know what he did to deserve to be called humane.曰:「仁矣乎」曰。He felt that he did not deserve to be given such a greathonor。Then he began to grovel and wail &I deserve todie.&这时他趴倒在地嚎叫道“我该死”。Those who those who do not workdeserve to starve.劳动者该得食;fully&#47, paid attention to etc. [= merit]建议;t deserve to win, we didn&#39，他们应该受到更好的待遇,不劳者该挨饿。It'break&#47.这孩子活该挨鞭，哪怕这些人活该挨揍。I would never hit anyone, even if they deserved it.我绝不会打人;t play well.他确实不值得她对他那么好。2) deserveconsideration/attention etc.值得考虑&#47。deserve arest&#47，真是罪有应得。deserve to bedone/doing值得干;焉得仁」deserve that值得He didn&#39，但完全不至于使她丢掉工作。Richly/注意s true she made a mistake but she hardly deserves tolose her job.她的确犯了错、计划、观点等值得考虑、注意等This proposal deserves serious consideration.这个建议值得认真考虑.我们不应获胜，我们打得不好？deserve all&#47? 他做了什么就该得到这样的惩罚;thoroughlyetc，真是罪有应得。People who are sent to prison for drunk-driving get whatthey deserve，应该特别提一下. deserve something理该/完全&#47.理该休息I think we deserve a rest after all that hard work.做了这么多辛苦的工作后，我想我们理应休息一下了。Ledley deserves a place in the team.莱德利应该在队里占有一席之地.葆拉帮了我们这么多., it is good enough to beconsidered，我会觉得你可怜;彻底值得得到the success he so richly deserves他理该得到的成功I'm sorry for the kids。What has he done to deserve this punishment.如果你以为你配接受帮助,idea, or plan deserves consideration, attention etc.他积极努力。Paula deserves a special mention for all the t really deserve (that) she should be so kind tohim，应该得到He deserved to be punished.他应受惩罚。The boy richly deserves whipping:「未知;everything you get (=deserve any bad thingsthat happen to you)罪有应得He deserves all he gets for being so dishonest.他这么不诚实、成功、失败之类的动词)值得干某事We didn&#39, 值得奖赏.他感到自己不配得到这样大的荣誉。I pity you if you think that you deserve to be helped.那些酒后驾车的人被送进监狱. They deserve better (=deserve to betreated in a better way).我为这些孩子感到难过。deserve to dosomething(后接表示胜利1) to have earned somethingby good or bad actions or behaviorWhat have I done to deserve this?He deserves a reward for his efforts
为您推荐：
其他类似问题
deserve的相关知识
换一换
回答问题，赢新手礼包
个人、企业类
违法有害信息,请在下方选择后提交
色情、暴力
我们会通过消息、邮箱等方式尽快将举报结果通知您。AnnieRowntree
Living in your tree
随便写写，中间可能穿插一点个人看法BlahBlah，也会有错误，可能不定期更改。这篇文章主要针对想了解媒体行业以及英国政治的同学，有兴趣的也可以通过这些网站学学英文什么的。在写之前把这句非常能总结西媒的话放在前头。“记者表达观点的方法就是使用他的语言”
好了正文开始。英国主要纸媒分为全国性报纸和地方性报纸。然后全国性报纸里又分大报（Broadsheet and former broadsheet newspapers，又称严肃性报纸）和小报（&Middle-market& tabloid newspapers ＆ Tabloid newspapers，又称通俗报纸）。大报和小报之分不仅在于版面大小的不同，还在语言风格，覆盖内容上存在较大差异。https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_Kingdom这个名单里基本覆盖了所有的英国纸媒，主要是版面分类。先是全国性报纸再是地方性（还有些针对部分群体的报纸）。本文的发行量参考于https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_Kingdom_by_circulation下面简单介绍一下一些主要的纸媒。
全国性的严肃性报纸主要是四个。
1、泰晤士报（The Times）创刊于1785，是迄今存在的最老的报纸，也是英国最有影响力的纸媒之一。从1981年开始，泰晤士报被默多克的新闻集团收购。泰晤士报最大的优势在于和政府的内部人员来往密切，在政府机关里影响力很大。作为最老的报纸，泰晤士报也在某种意义上成为了英国政治里的一个象征物。但是在新世纪信息时代以来，泰晤士报显得十分低调。原因就在于其网站实行了严格的Paywall制度。想看泰晤士报网站的文章需要支付每周￡2的金额，这从某种意义上严格限制了读者群体。也是泰晤士报影响力下降的一大原因。泰晤士报的立场主要是保守党方向，但是在01年大选支持布莱尔的工党政府，之后又不满工党作风转为支持保守党。2016欧盟公投时支持留欧，与支持退欧的默多克的另一大纸媒太阳报（The Sun）形成对立，因此也被戏称为“默多克集团编辑内部的分裂”。姐妹报星期天泰晤士报（The Sunday Times），其发行量是泰晤士报的两倍。泰晤士报是现在发行量第二大的严肃性报纸。
2、每日电讯报（The Daily Telegraph）创刊于1855年，是目前发行量最大的严肃性报纸。其网站也有非常大的影响力，电讯报网站目前实行的是“部分文章付费制度”，但是首页大部分重要新闻都是开放的。（刚刚戳进去才发现Telegraph也有了自己的APP，目前还没有试用过）内容是以本国政治为主，有很多专有的采访新闻直播。其立场是保守党方向（center-left），有很多知名的保守党人士都在电讯报工作过，比如现任外交部长Boris Johnson现在也是电讯报的编辑之一，拥有自己的专栏。姐妹报星期天电讯报（The Sunday Telegraph）网址：http://www.telegraph.co.uk/（PS：里面的Matt小漫画很可爱hhhh（PPS：电讯报对唐宁街那几只猫的报道特别及时hhhh
3、卫报（The Guardian）创刊于1821年，全国严肃性报纸发行量排名第三。相比不是很好看的发行量（卫报2016年发行量不如泰晤士报的一半），卫报更加注重把精力投入给新媒体开发上，其网站点击率是严肃性报纸的第一位（在全国排名第二位），很早就拥有了自己的APP且运行功能完善，能够自由的阅读所有主页的新闻，网页上的新闻live跟进十分便利。除此之外，卫报非常注重与读者的交流，提倡以读者的角度来评价新闻，或者是通过读者多渠道地解读新闻。这或许与其立场相关，卫报的立场是左倾激进，选举时更加偏向工党。反战，非常高的政治正确。在创办时创办人就曾告诫后任者“不允许任何公司收购卫报，只接受资金会运营以保持其独立性”。卫报曾经是地方性报纸，称为“曼彻斯特卫报（The Manchester Guardian）”，在上世纪70年代才改名为卫报。新世纪以来卫报影响力不断增大，其在许多新闻界的爆炸性事件充当主角，例如“棱镜门”事件最早是由卫报（US edition）报道，以及“窃听门”事件和“维基解密”，都是最先在卫报进行报道的。及时以及丰富的报道内容是卫报最大的特色。卫报的网站除了新闻以外还有许多关于文化、体育部分的跟进，以及非常开放的opinion栏目。卫报曾经有个有趣的毛病就是错别字特多，曾经连自己的报名都打错成Gaurdian。在卫报自己的Style Guide里也自嘲了这一点。姐妹报卫报周报（The Guardian Weekly）和观察家报（The Observer），观察家报在被收购前是非常知名的星期天报纸，因此观察家报和卫报经常是分开谈及的（虽然网站是相同的）。网址：https://www.theguardian.com/international需要注意的是，报纸媒体的网站都是有不同的edition的，卫报有US/UK/Australian/International四个edition，一般根据IP来决定edition，也可以根据自己的兴趣自行修改。
4、独立报（The Independent）纸质版已停刊，现在只支持网站更新。曾经是四大严肃性报纸之一的独立报，今年三月份停止纸质版发行，这也是对英国纸媒发展的重大打击。独立报的发行量自2010年开始不断下降，最后缩水到停刊时的55,193发行量，被迫关闭纸质版。姐妹报i仍然在发行，但是已经被出售。立场宣称是“独立”，实际上立场略偏向激进中左。但是在2015大选时倒向支持保守党，导致读者大量流失。网站更新比较懈怠，不过页面很干净，文字也比较简洁明了。网址：http://www.independent.co.uk/
严肃性报纸扯了这么多，接下来非常简单的说一下几个通俗报纸。通俗报纸以八卦消息奇闻异事，通俗的政治立场，吸引注意力的题头以及小聪明式的文字游戏著名。国内许多营销号的奇闻异事英媒报道都是从小报里翻译的。
1、每日邮报（The Daily Mail）全国发行量第二，网站点击率第一。喜欢看英国那些事儿的盆友们会常常看到很多事儿编的长条最后都会有邮报的网址，邮报新闻覆盖多，八卦乐事政治嘲讽。有自己的APP，网站很繁杂。立场是中右，非常支持退欧。这个报纸的狗仔团队是相当敬业，例子太多没法说了。
2、太阳报（The Sun）全国发行量第一的报纸。默多克旗下的报纸之一，以三版女郎以及封面的文字游戏和神奇P图著名。立场和每日邮报接近，支持退欧，立场右倾。
3、每日镜报（The Daily Mirror）全国发行量第三。立场中左，曾经和太阳报打价格战最后输了，今年试图发售新报纸新的一天（The New Day）来拯救一下纸媒也崩了……小报的网站好像大多都需要翻墙或者是特别慢……
最后在扯一个特别的地方性报纸，伦敦晚旗报（Evening Standard）。非常知名的地方性报纸，免费，因为地域优势在政治新闻里也有很高的发声权。立场中右。新闻内容主要是伦敦地区的消息以及一些政治新闻（甚至是住在伦敦地区的明星的采访）。
原文地址 http://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/nov/01/blur-dave-rowntree-interview
Vote Dave! was the cry heard all over Hyde Park back in July when Blur capped their successful reunion tour of the UK with a pair of giant outdoor shows in the capital. Coming almost seven years after their last gig, the triumphant run was only made possible by each member briefly setting aside the new lives they had made for themselves once their Britpop heyday had begun to fade.
Multi-faceted frontman Damon Albarn had put his Chinese operas and excursions into world music on hold, bassist-turned-farmer Alex James had reined in his cheese-making and fragile guitarist Graham Coxon, who departed in 2002, had stepped away from his latest solo project. As for drummer Dave Rowntree, he'd been preparing to stand as Labour party candidate for the Cities of London and Westminster at the coming general election. Hence Albarn's jocular attempt to influence the audience come polling day.
Rowntree, 45, is under no illusions about his prospects of taking a safe Tory seat. &I'm not a betting man, but if I was, even I wouldn't bet on me winning. Activism is by its nature a slog, but it depends why you're doing it… I'm seeing where the problems are in my neighbourhood and trying to sort them out.&
Identifying problems and locating solutions is how Rowntree now spends his time. When not training to be a solicitor, there is his increasingly high profile on music piracy. Last week Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, announced that the government's digital economy bill, which goes before parliament next month, will contain plans to suspend the internet connection of anyone persistently sharing unlicensed content, music or otherwise. The plan is for content owners, such as music, film and TV companies, to identify offenders and contact their internet service provider, which would then send up to two warning letters, with suspension &a last resort&, according to Mandelson.
Rowntree, who is co-chairman of the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC), the body that has represented musicians in this debate, believes suspension is not so far away from the punish-the-fans approach the music industry adopted when panic first broke out over file-sharing. The FAC favours restricting users' bandwidth, rather than removing it altogether, thereby preventing large-scale copying of illegal material and leaving email and basic online access intact.
&Co-operation, not criminalisation&, as it says on its website. &When record companies make mistakes, musicians suffer,& says Rowntree, sitting in the Soho office from which the FAC operates. &In the past, musicians haven't had a way of voicing their concerns, which was a big motivating factor for the FAC.& Rowntree has a pragmatic outlook and a technician's eye for detail that is a legacy of his pre-rock origins as a computer programmer for the council in his home town of Colchester.
It is easy to see how he &muscled his way into the FAC& when it formed seven months ago, the idea coming from a group of managers rather than artists. &Had it been left to the artists, I doubt we'd have got enough in one place at one time,& he says.
Despite some snotty comments on the FAC website about rock stars looking after their riches, most of its members are still seeking their big break, and its educational side helps artists to negotiate the more Wild West aspects of the music industry in the digital age. Rowntree is keen to pass on his knowledge, citing Blur's early experiences with management. &It would just take an afternoon to tell people the tricks you learn from bitter experience,& he says. &My band weren't always millionaires. For much of our careers we lived on tuppence ha'penny. We used to call ourselves the Poverty Jet Set as we were flown around the world first-class but got home and had no money for tea bags.&
Rowntree's one concession to starry extravagance extended to ownership of a twin-engined Cessna that he has since sold. He is aware of the risk of being seen as a dilettante, well aware that few musicians involve themselves in the nitty gritty of politics. &People assume I want a free ride and I don't. So I have to work very hard to show that I'm interested in what I can give, not what I can get.&
His route into activism began with the opposite of a midlife crisis during the early part of this decade. He got divorced, then sold his house in Hampstead, coming to the realisation that he had been living like &a middle-aged baby&. &So instead of getting a red sports car and a 19-year-old girlfriend, I trained to be a solicitor and went out knocking on doors for the Labour party.&
He was drawn to the law after spending two weeks in the public gallery at the Old Bailey. &It mattered so much, people's lives were on the line,& he says. Soon he was working at the offices of the east London criminal defence specialists Edward Fail Bradshaw & Waterson, as well as taking the Open University's LLB in law. Involvement with Labour came at that time. &The two are linked,& he says. &It was seeing who the clients were – the same people over and over. One-man or one-woman crime waves, who largely are drug addicts, or who have mental-health problems, or who come from generations of crime: 99% of these people have never had a chance.&
In his engineer's way, Rowntree can see how many of the problems surrounding crime, drugs, housing and mental health are connected. These are, he says, &the bees in my bonnet&. This from a man who describes his &more politically extreme& younger self, the Marxist whose student nickname was Shady Dave, as a &squat punk&.
I ask what the young Dave Rowntree would think of him now. &I suppose that person would think I'd sold out,& he says. &But if you hang around long enough you become mainstream. The law I'm involved with is legal aid. It's n it's being in the police station at four in the morning with a client who's swearing at you and the police swearing at you. No one thanks you for doing it, but it's important.&
During their 90s pomp, all of Blur struggled with substance abuse, Rowntree included. He has been teetotal for years, saying: &I've got first-hand experience of treatment – what works, what doesn't. I think that's quite valuable.&
He also has something to say on two of the big ideas of the 90s that have touched his life, New Labour and Britpop. &New Labour has the same resonance for me as Britpop. Both were labels coined by the participants that they then lived to regret.& Albarn famously turned down an invitation from Tony Blair to Number 10. Rowntree was not invited, not that he would have gone either.
Albarn, as a pacifist, was one of the few musicians visible on anti-war marches before the invasion of Iraq. He and Rowntree differed on the need to forcibly remove Saddam Hussein, with Rowntree influenced by the fact that his girlfriend, Michelle de Vries, is the daughter of Daphne Parish, the nurse arrested along with Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft before the first Gulf war. Bazoft was hanged in Baghdad, with Parish eventually released from a life sentence, only after campaigning from De Vries.
&She met Saddam, Uday Hussein, all the key players. So I was getting an inside perspective on what was going on there, which is why I think Saddam was an evil bastard. While I don't think he should have been killed – I'm extremely opposed to the death penalty – getting rid of him was the right thing to do.&
Rowntree's election work has begun in earnest, and he is undaunted by coming third in a Westminster council by-election in 2007. In fact, he enjoys himself. &The best part is knocking on doors and offering help.& Is he recognised? &By some, but I've been campaigning in the area for 12 months,& he says with a grin. &So any disappointment or excitement they may have felt at the quality of their candidate has been gotten over.&
原文地址 http://m.huffpost.com/uk/entry/8718052
I've spent the last couple of months helping put together a fundraising effort to raise money for Syrian refugees called 'Star Boot Sale'. The proceeds are going to the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a charity which can trace its roots to a 1930s effort by Albert Einstein to rescue Germans being persecuted by the Nazis. The IRC is now at the forefront of relief efforts in the Middle East and beyond.
Earlier this week I was able to grab half an hour on the phone with IRC's Mark Schnellbaecher.& Mark has been working in the Middle East for a decade, and for the last two years as IRC's Syria Crisis Regional Director, with responsibility for operations in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.
He described visiting Beirut three weeks ago, where IRC run a project for young Syrian refugee children. The project reaches out to the children who are working instead of being in school, trying to re-establish routines, provide basic education and access to services. Mark went round the room, asking the children where their safe spaces were - where they could go if there was fighting. The children said there were no safe places any more in Syria.& They'd be safe when they got to Germany.
It was a worrying shift in attitudes he'd noticed in many Syrian refugees over the last few months - they'd stopped talking about returning home. He described it as if something had happened to hope.
Certainly there seems no prospect of and end to war in Syria, a situation which is becoming ever more complicated as the interests of the warring parties get ever more entrenched. Mark held out little hope for the Vienna Process peace talks. Many of the parties at the table have diametrically opposed interests, and there are few signs that the warring parties are close to the point of exhaustion, or are in a negotiating mood.
Many families have been refugees for almost five years now. Their children are unlikely to have been in school during that time, and the families are likely to have burned through whatever resources they had when they fled home.
International aid is falling as need is rising. Work is difficult to find (and often illegal) for refugees, who are paid much less than the locals, with no enforcement of labour standards.
Put bluntly, the once middle class Syrian refugee population is now pauperised, and desperate, which has driven them to pay large amounts of money and take huge risks crossing a continent to Northern Europe.
Charities including the IRC are having to think differently about what they can do to support Syrian refugees. If many don't return home for years, or never do, a simple maintenance programme will no longer be enough.
If we are to avoid a lost generation, refugee children need to go back to school. Many have been out of school for three or four years, and there is a mountain of work just to catch up. Their parents need to be able to find legal, non-exploitative work. So they can support their families and rebuild their lives.
If we are serious about helping those fleeing the wars in Syria, we have to find imaginative and innovative ways to support refugees, so that family structures and hope for the future don't disintegrate entirely.
And if we are serious about stemming the flow of refugees into Northern Europe, simply giving refugee families in the Middle East access to work and education could do far more good than any of the current attempts to seal the borders.
Famously this was Damon’s break up album. How were things within the band at this point?[Titanic pause.] Well! Things are better now: we’re a bit older and a bit wiser and a little bit more focused. So much waffle’s been written about all that, you don’t really want to write any more about that! It’s all documented in laborious detail!
2. BLUR (1997)
Things were starting to deteriorate and we weren’t getting along as well as we had been, but despite that we managed to come out with songs like “Beetlebum” and “Song 2” and “Look Inside America,” which is one of my favorite Blur songs of all time. It was something of a fresh start where Graham took the lead and got involved with the production with Stephen Street. And Graham sang a song! “MOR”—which we got sued left, right, and center for. It’s quite clearly a Bowie rip off! It was another time where we decided to park where we’d got to, and move forward by taking a big step sideways. “Beetlebum” is a great live favorite and we play pretty much every track on that album live. “Song 2”—the song that launched a thousand car adverts! I think every car that’s ever been made has been advertised to that song. Plenty of other bands say they get sent the product that their music advertises, but I’ve never been sent a car. Never! “Song 2” came about incredibly quickly. Everybody had an idea: I had an idea for the drums going into that session—“Wouldn’t it be interesting if I did this and Graham I could bounce ideas off each other.” I think that’s how it started.
When you finished “Song 2” did you think this is going to be massive? They all feel like that to me! Even “Essex Dogs” sounded like a hit single to me! I think bands are the worst at knowing what their hits are going to be. That’s what record companies are usually best at. I find it much easier with other people’s materials to hear the singles. You’re so emotionally invested in your own stuff, it tricks you into thinking other people are getting that emotion back, but you are because you put your blood sweat and tears into making the music, and that feeds back to you when you listen to it. That’s why every songwriter thinks their new song is the greatest song ever written and you can’t convince them otherwise until nobody buys it.
Do you ever listen to the lyrics Damon’s writing at the time? In general that happens last: Damon does a guide vocal which is ordinarily just nonsense syllables strung together and you put that down with the tune. Sometimes the guide would stay and he’d pretend he’d written some lyrics. Like on “Song 2”—that’s just the guide vocal. We tried re-recording it many, many times but we could never get it as good as the guide, so we just kept it and Damon wrote down the nearest sounding words to his nonsense syllables. He may remember it differently, but “Wah lah wah wah” became “When I feel heavy metal.” It was called “Song 2” because it was the second song on the list of songs pinned to the studio wall—as you think of song names you scribble them on the board but “Song 2” never got a name.
1. MODERN LIFE IS RUBBISH (1993)
This was the record that meant we could have a career and we weren’t going to be one hit wonders. Modern Life Is Rubbish was a big risk and it was a raging battle with the record company to even be allowed to record it because it was going to be radically different. At the end of it, when we finally delivered the album the label, Dave Balfe wrote us a very nice letter apologizing for being such a pain and that he actually thought the record was very good. I found the letter the other day when I was going through a load of old correspondence from the 90s. A letter on Food Records headed paper and it ends with a kiss!
It didn’t graze the charts—it wasn’t a commercial success at all. Had we not followed it up with Parklife that could’ve been the end of our career. “For Tomorrow” is the first track on that album and it went on to be one of our most popular songs even though it’s not an obvious choice. We had lots of stuff on there that might have been shot down in flames, “Intermission” and “Commercial Break”—which were songs we’d do live during the Seymour days before we changed our name to Blur—we put all that stuff on and it might have had people running for cover, but it made a lot of people who might have dismissed us before sit up and think about us as a band.
We were making music rooted in English sensibilities and the classic English bands of the 60s, like the Kinks. It was music we liked and we thought the kind of music we were making had the potential to kick off something different. Turned out we were right and if it hadn’t have worked out I wouldn’t be speaking to you now. I’d be some bitter old bloke in the pub, cigarette in hand, sunglasses on, and a bad haircut. As it is I’ve just got a bad haircut!
“Out of Time” is the heartbreaker.Oh absolutely that’s the big success of that album. It had a video that seemed to capture the public sentiment at the time. There was a documentary on TV about two people in the British navy and it was a very lonely doc because whenever one was home, the other was out on duty and vice versa. They didn’t even really see each other. It must have been heartbreaking for them, a young couple in love. The director took the doc and cut it up in a way that focused on the woman and talked about her experience. It came out during a time of global conflict and a lot of people were feeling uneasy about what was going on. The doc had double meanings, not overtly, but you could read it in two ways. It captured the spirit of what was going on in the world, and also the spirit of what was going on with the band.
5. LEISURE (1992)
The baggy sound was pretty popular when you were starting…Yes, the record company had had big success with Jesus Jones and Parlophone had signed EMF who had even bigger success. I don’t want to point fingers, but it appeared to me at the time that they copied the production techniques of Jesus Jones, which Dave Balfe, the record label boss had come up with. It was a novel idea at the time to use dance samples in a rock band. That was all Dave’s idea. To make that work in an indie context was an interesting challenge. He signed Jesus Jones who were called something else at the time—Camoflage! They were a straightforward rock and he signed them on the condition that they took on these sample ideas and it actually worked extremely well. They had some big hits including “Right Here, Right Now” which went to number one in the States.
That’s crazy that Balfe was pushing that. I had no idea.Well Balfe was an established musician in his own right. He’d been instrumental in the Teardrop Explodes and basically came up with their sound. And then he ran Food Records and helped come up with the KLF thing, that’s what Dave Balfe did—the unsung genius.
Then comes Blur. Live we were pretty crazy in those days: We’d smash things up and you never quite knew how or when the show was going to end. It would end when all the instruments were broken. I think Balfe signed us thinking he could develop this idea further and he was constantly trying to get us to use dance samples and baggy beats. To some extent at the start we went along with it and “There’s No Other Way” and “Bang” are the most obvious examples of that. We spent most of our career detesting “Bang”& and wondering how on earth could we have put that on the album, let alone the second track. When we came to listen to it [when rehearsing for the reunion shows] we realized it actually wasn’t that bad. Songs like “Fool” were much more representative of stuff we were doing before we signed and “Come Together”—you can imagine instruments being smashed at any point during that song. It’s incredibly fast and aggressive and counterintuitively happy but with frustrated lyric over the top.&&
In the early recording sessions of that album we were still listening to the record label and they said, “Put samples in, you’ve got to use keyboards, you’ve got to sound like Jesus Jones and EMF, that’s what’s selling. This EMF thing is going to be massive, you’ll be riding on their coattails.” By the end of the album we were like, the samples and baggy beats are crap.
As a compromise we took the bits we liked of the keyboards, which actually ended up being more the hip-hop side of keyboards and sampling, rather than the Manchester dance side of it. Not that we sound like hip-hop records, but we were much more attracted to the way keyboards were being used in that kind of context rather than the way the keyboards were being used in the Manchester dance context.
Wasn’t it during this album that you had that disastrous debut tour of America?It wasn’t the tour of the States that was soul destroying it was the circumstances under which we were doing them. Our manager had stolen our money, so we had to tour the States for months to pay off our debt. We had made our first album, first rung on the ladder, and instead of being able to capitalize on that we were essentially bankrupt and had to sing for our supper.
4. PARKLIFE& (1994)
This was of course the one that propelled us into the mainstream. Actually what it did, bizarrely was switch the mainstream so that we were part of it. It changed what mainstream music was in the UK. Up until then indie bands like us didn’t get into the real charts: You had the indie charts and the pop charts and never the twain shall meet. The indie charts meant you’d sold 20 records and the pop charts meant you’d sold 20 million. Parklife went to number one in the UK, we had a bunch of number one singles, and all that happened because of that album and what Oasis were doing. We changed people’s perceptions of what mainstream pop could be—it didn’t have to be Kylie Minogue. I think us and Oasis made albums good enough to kick off something new, and then everybody was like, “Oh yeah we like music that sounds like that and there were all these other bands doing stuff as well.” That spawned the many-headed beast [Britpop] that we all came later to regret, but it kicked off a new kind of career for us.
It drove Graham mad. Up till then if you went out to a restaurant or a nightclub and there’d be a gaggle of paparazzi outside, you’d walk past them completely unmolested, because they were waiting for Kylie. It was in that brief moment in our career when our nights out were accompanied by the flash of cameras and the shouts of the paparazzi. Our audience changed a lot over night too—they were much younger, more girls, more screaming.
Did you like that?It was weird, you know? It didn’t upset me like it did Graham and equally it didn’t fuel me like it did Alex. To me it seemed like we’d always been doing what we’d been doing, and that was kind of true, but suddenly we’d become media darlings. There was one paper that ran a cartoon about us called The Blur Story—about the formation of the band—as if were a boy band! If it’d happened on the first album we’d have probably been alright about it because we’d have been willing to pose topless and put on cheesy grins and say how we wanted to find the one true girl we wanted to love, and how we make music for ourselves and if anyone likes it, it's a bonus! [He’s joking.] But by Parklife we were grumpy touring musicians who wanted everyone to piss off, to some extent, so the boy band thing landing on us seemed weirdly inappropriate.
Come on though—you were still young. You were in your mid-20s at that point.I was 30, the others were mid to late 20s. We weren’t young, young. I still looked like I was 40, but I was 30!
What about the songs?“Parklife” was a huge track obviously. We got in one of our heroes Phil Daniels who we knew best from this film Meantime by Mike Leigh in which he played a kind of proud, but disaffected man who grew up on a council estate struggling with the meaning of life if you didn’t appear to have a life, and what could it all possibly mean. Also, of course, Quadrophenia, the archetypal mod film with the soundtrack by The Who. They were our two favorite films, the ones we’d watch on the tour bus and knew most of the lines off by heart. We were slightly dumbstruck when we got him in. I think I wandered over and said hello, but no one else said anything to him! [Laughs.] He was very nice!
And “Badhead.” I love that song.Me too. A hangover song—the first of many hangover songs. It’s got one of Damon’s beautiful melody lines that only he can do. There are some great tracks on there. In general I think that album just had loads of singles on it which is why it did as well as it did. “Magic America” is really hooky and it’s got “This Is a Low” on it which we pretty much finished every Blur show with from then onwards because it evokes such intense emotions.
3. 13 (1999)
The vocal sessions were done in Reykjavik, but mostly the sessions were done in studio 13, a big old building split up into light industrial units, so you’d get somebody making handbags, next to somebody preparing shoes, next to somebody making websites, and then this incredibly loud recording studio jammed in the middle that pissed everybody off. It lasted a few years before they got booted out, but that was a great place to record. We named the album after the studio, but people are so weird about the number 13. If you believe in these things 13 has always been rather lucky for us. We were also kind of tempting fate: Come on then! Do your worst.
You also worked with William Orbit on this record which changed the dynamic I’m sure. We worked with him and Damian LeGassic which isn’t well known. He was the engineer. William would come in and loosely supervise the sessions by day and then Damian would turn up in the evening, take the material back to his studio and cut and paste and edit things into shape and bring it back in the morning and we’d carry on. It was a different way of working for us. It was much more freeform, much more improvisation. There are a lot of what I call studio noodles on that album like on the track “Caramel”—where you record lots of ideas, somebody else edits it into some kind of format, and you record more ideas over it, and again and again. “Coffee and TV” is a very traditional Blur tune, “Bugman” is another studio noodle—there was freedom in doing that. Damian doesn’t get the credit he deserves: most of the editing came from him and William, a lovely guy, was basically supervising jamming sessions rather than acting like a traditional producer. It was very different to how Stephen Street had worked. [Orbit] was much hands off.
原文地址：http://m.noisey.vice.com/blog/rank-your-records-blur
In Rank Your Records, we talk to members of bands who have amassed substantial discographies over the years and ask them to rate their releases in order of personal preference.
Since Blur's inception in 1988, they’ve been one of Britain’s most beloved bands and although they’ve been delighting fans with reunion shows since Graham Coxon’s return in 2009, this year saw the release of their eighth album The Magic Whip—a record many thought would never happen. Catching them last month at New York’s Madison Square Garden, as they seamlessly slotted in newies like “Go Out” and “Ghost Ship” alongside heart-tugging anthems like “The Universal” and “This Is a Low,” proved there’s still plenty of creative sweet stuff left in this decades-long partnership. So we called up Blur drummer Dave Rowntree (our legit favorite member) for Rank Your Records.
“I don’t really have a least favorite Blur album, or a most favorite Blur album,” says Rowntree. “This is an entirely artificial interview structure that you’ve imposed on me!” True, true. Thanks Dave.
As well as being a thoroughly underrated drummer, Rowntree is also a qualified lawyer, pilot, and one time Labour candidate. A wryly humorous renaissance man, Rowntree’s most recently turned his attention to the Syrian refugee crisis. He’s roped in his musician pals and asked them to donate dozens of one-of-a-kind items which will be available for public bid on eBay from 9 PM GMT November 26 to 9 PM GMT December 6. Everyone from Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys, to Coldplay, to Sir Paul McCartney, and of course, Blur, have contributed items. All funds raised will go to the International Rescue Committee (IRC) which is providing much needed emergency assistance for refugees in Syria and across the region in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Turkey.
“The Bataclan is part of the DNA of the European music industry. I’ve played there, as have most of the musicians I know,& said Rowntree. “Now, more than ever, we must show our support for the men, women and children who are fleeing terror in Syria because, on Friday, we all saw what that terror looks like.
“After nearly five years of conflict in Syria, four million people have fled their homes and are seeking safety in neighboring countries in the Middle East,” Rowntree added. “With winter approaching the crisis will become even more desperate. We want to raise money to buy winter kits for refugees, containing warm clothes, blankets and bedding. All proceeds will go directly to those in need.”
Go here for more info, follow IRCuk on Twitter for updates and tweet using #starbootsale. But before that, Rowntree gives us a comprehensive rundown of Blur’s discography.
7. THE GREAT ESCAPE (1995)
Noisey: I knew this one would be at the bottom…Dave Rowntree: There’s actually nothing wrong with this album, but to some extent it’s Parklife number II. This album and the war with Oasis propelled us to the next stage in our career. People talk about this album as being the third part of a trilogy—with Modern Life is Rubbish and Parklife—the Britpop trilogy or whatever the hell people say. I certainly think a lot of the things we started on Parklife we finished here.
“The Universal” is a massive song and at the time we realized what we’d done with that. That’s another one that would always close one section of the live show. We’d be bottled off stage if we didn’t play that and never be asked to return again. We had [British politician] Ken Livingstone on the album and he turned out to be a lot of fun, and him and Damon became friends. We’d spent a lot of time in Japan at that point and the more time we spent there the more we felt for the record company workers who seemed to us to be treated appallingly by their bosses—to the point where when the band were in town they weren’t allowed to go home! They had to sleep in the office, ready to snap to attention at a moment’s notice. Of course we found out that by Japanese standards they weren’t being treated appallingly at all. “Yuko and Hiro” it seems to me is about our experience in Japan—a beautiful song.
Obviously we have to talk about “Country House” and the battle between you and Oasis for the number one spot. So the story goes, Food Records were a part of EMI, and at various stages in the contract, EMI could buy Food for a pre-agreed price. One of these stages came up after Parklife, and Dave Balfe—record company boss, an unsung hero of the British music industry, and the man behind many of the successful bands of the last 30 years—he decided we’d probably peaked and now was the time to get out. He sold the company to EMI, we became an EMI/Parlophone band and Balfe got a huge check! We’d heard he’d bought a very big house in the country and all those things that are mentioned in the song—the rumors that were flying around. As it turns out when he tried to sell that very big house in the country he put a piece in the estate agent’s blurb talking about the album and the fact that it had been mentioned in that song to up the price!
This is Damon’s dig at Balfe and Balfe later said he’d probably sold at the wrong time. He made a small fortune, but I think he said had he waited and had more faith he’d have made a large fortune. We were friends with [actor] Keith Allen at the time and for the video we drafted him in to play Balfe along with some extraordinarily pretty girls and Damien Hirst wrote the treatment.
At the time we were at war with Oasis where they would say something childish and then they would sa they would say something funny and we’d try to say something funnier. Every time someone said something it got in the papers, and any time we didn’t saying anything it got in the papers. I had a parka at the time and it was written up in the papers that I was sneering at Liam while wearing a &Liam-style parka.& “The war continues with Dave Rowntree sneering.” I was just wearing a parka! Oasis moved their single so there wasn’t a clash with ours, and we moved our release date to ensure there would be a clash—another equally childish move—and the rest as they say, is history.
How did you find out you guys got to number one and won the war?With the calm arrogance of youth I assumed we’d sell more records than them and that we’d come away victorious. This was back during a time when I was flying airplanes a lot, everywhere I could, so I’d flown myself to France on holiday, and then halfway through, my holiday was ruined when I suddenly had the thought that we might be left with egg on our face. I was flying back on the Sunday evening when the charts were coming out and I wasn’t going to arrive in the country until after the charts were announced. So I had the air traffic controller at my local airfield radio me en route. The message came along the network that we’d won the ridiculous chart battle and I could breath a sigh of relief! It was a double-edged sword though because then they had everything to prove and they had massive success in America, which we never did. But then they split up, which we didn’t do. At various points in our career people would say Blur won the battle, but Oasis won the war, or Oasis won the battle, but Blur won the war. That’s been the big sign off line on more articles than I care to mention. As of today, they’ve split up and we’re still going, but maybe next week we’ll split up and they’ll have formed again, and then they’ll have won the war which just goes to show you: all history is bunk, just like Henry Ford said.
6. THINK TANK (2003)
This one started in Studio 13 in London and finished in a barn an hour outside Marrakech in Morocco. We started it, Graham played on some of it, and then that all fell to bits and we found this farmhouse and hid ourselves away, it had about 15 bedrooms, so we could have a room each as well as having a big communal space in the middle. Lots of crazy stuff happened. Ben Hillier was the main producer and we tried loads of stuff out. Norman Cook [Fatboy Slim] came out and worked on some tracks. We had an Andalucian orchestra come out—don’t ask why there’s an Andalucian orchestra in Marrakech, but there was. We cut and pasted their performances into some of the songs.
It was an adventure really, plonked in an entirely different culture and I think it sounds like a very different record as a result. It’s a great album, but I’m not entirely sure it sounds like a Blur album. “Battery In Your Leg” is a Blur song, but when Graham’s not playing it sounds a lot less like Blur. If I hadn’t been on the album I’d flatter myself to think it would be the same, or Alex, or Damon: It’s the four of us together that makes the magic happen. However I do think it’s a good record.
I’ve often said you’ve got to leave home, to find out what home’s lke, otherwise you have nothing to compare it to. It’s traveling around the world that makes you understand what you like and what you don’t like about the UK, it puts it into sharp focus when you see other cultures and countries. Same with Graham leaving. We didn’t know what Graham’s contribution to the Blur sound was because we’d never made an album without him.
That being said I think the first tune “Ambulance” is an amazing song: it’s got interesting ideas and sounds which fill up the space that Graham normally takes up. A really high, maximum treble guitar line that Damon plays comes in halfway through and the album just soars from there on in.
Blur drummer Dave Rowntree reveals why he became a Labour candidate http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/apr/26/blur-dave-rowntree-labour-candidate
Usually, you'll find him hidden behind half a dozen drums. Today Blur drummer Dave Rowntree is surrounded by seven or eight Labour campaigners, a few thousand political pamphlets, and several stacks of envelopes. There are career swerves, and there are career U-turns, but Rowntree's decision to put his music on the backburner and run for parliament constituted – by his own admission – a full-blown male menopause.
&It was pretty much a mid-life crisis,& the 45-year-old said, swivelling on a chair at his campaign headquarters in the plush offices of a Soho media firm. &There was a fairly well-documented split in the band, I was turning 40, and I was going from having no time on my hands to having rather a lot. And I started waking up with that angsty feeling at four in the morning, going, 'Oh my God, I've wasted my life.' I had to do something about that. And so I started turning up at the local Labour party.&
Seven years on from his post-Blur meltdown, the musician – with a law degree all but under his belt, and a spell as local chairman on the CV – is now a part-time politician: Labour's parliamentary candidate for the Cities of London and Westminster, where Tory Mark Field had a majority of 8,095 at the last election.
&We almost certainly won't win,& Rowntree says barely seconds into the interview, and such candour is his trademark. Take his campaign literature: five sentences into one leaflet, and he has already committed three acts of what some MPs would call political hara-kiri. He's owned up to prior bouts of not just alcohol abuse, but homelessness and drug addiction, too. Elsewhere in the pamphlet, Rowntree neither hides nor plays up his celebrity past. He simply states: &My name is David Rowntree, and as well as being the drummer in the band Blur, I am your local Labour candidate.&
Such honesty is a risk, I suggest to him, in an age where even a florid Twitter feed can damn a politician to disgrace. But Rowntree shakes his head. &I've grown up in public and the last thing I want is for people to rub my nose in that. If anyone's going to do the nose-rubbing, it's going to be me. The good things in my life, and the bad things in my life – I just thought I'd be completely open about it all.&
In any case, he argues, most of his would-be constituents don't care about his background, musical or otherwise. &I've had a couple of emails saying, 'Isn't it great that Dave from Blur is standing?', as well as a couple saying, 'How dare you? This is an insult. I would never vote for a musician.' But in general, it's old news for voters now. And older people don't know what Blur is at all.&
Rowntree is amused by any politician who tries to turn music into political capital. He chuckles in particular at David Cameron's professed passion for the Smiths. &He's a Smiths tourist,& says the drummer, cheeks creased with a knowing grin. &Real Smiths fans dress a certain kind of way, and they have a certain kind of haircut, and they wear certain kinds of T-shirts. But what they probably don't do is have their picture taken outside the Salford Lads Club.
&Politicians,& Rowntree admits, &do have to try and present themselves as ordinary people. But you need to do that in a way which makes you look least like an arse.&
Tony Blair was another of those who – according to Rowntree – often looked more like an arse than he might have intended. Rowntree is especially critical of Blair's unsuccessful efforts to schmooze Britpop bands, as part of his much-derided Cool Britannia initiative.
&What got my goat about Tony Blair inviting all the bands to No 10 was that that was the standard way politicians had interacted with musicians for generations. Cool Britannia was nothing to do with us. We never said Britannia was cool. It was like when Harold Wilson called the Beatles round. What happens at those things is not that the politicians say: 'Well, what do you think we should be doing?' Politicians say: 'We're going to be doing this. Will you support us?' And nobody likes to feel taken for granted like that.&
In any case, Rowntree says he isn't interested in that kind of high-end political exposure: &I've resisted doing anything like that – just blandly giving my name to the Labour party and hoping some of their gloss would rub off on me. I've got stuck in at the grassroots end.&
Is he not a big donor, then, I ask tentatively? Rowntree's jaw swings floorwards. &No, no, no! I'm a big donor to my campaign, but not to the Labour party. I have donated money – 20 quid here, 30 quid there. But I'm not a Labour party patsy. People write that Dave quit the band to concentrate on his political career, but I don't have a political career. I'm an activist. I go round knocking on doors trying to find problems to solve.&And with that, he bustles back to the campaign room next door, sits down, and starts stuffing envelopes.
一个月纪念日
原文地址：http://www.rjsj.demon.co.uk/articles/suntimes/easel.htm
The Nichtkunst boys met up with Damon and Dave, and formed Seymour. With pudding bowl haircuts, flares and loose-fitting shirts, journalists labelled them as `baggy' - a musical genre forming around Manchester. Their first single, She's So High, sounded like a synthesis of the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays, and charted at number 48 (with a rocket). But Blur proved they had staying power. They became `baggy-parody' and eventually `post-baggy'. But the fame and the drinking (the band's local was credited on the second album) was starting to get out of hand. One night, playing on the same bill as arch rivals Suede, Damon told the audience to fuck off home. He cut the face of security guards with his mike stand. Only Dave the drummer was sober. And he'd been at home all day doing his laundry.
America made matters worse. &They had us marching round every record shop in town going `Hi....we're Blur. You like us'& says Alex. The same week Nirvana's seminal grunge album, Nevermind, was released. Disenchanted American kids were enlivened with the new teen spirit. &And we're going [Alex sings in mockney, like Anthony Newley] `Hello gor blimey'.& &Being British in the most cliched sense goes down very well in America& says Graham. &But we weren't. If we'd been acting like Benny Hill we'd have been alright. They love a bit of a chump. A good old English chump. But we were monsters.& Blur never forgave America. In an act of supreme churlishness, they set about excluding an entire continent from their music. And created something that celebrated Englishness - Britpop.
Blur discovered their ironic suburban credentials, and started singing songs about dog racing, steam engines, trarsers and bowler-hatted commuters. Then came Girls And Boys (&our gay disco song& says Alex). A damn good knees-up about sexual orientation, and the first real Britpop song. Parklife (the video, the song and the album), with its dog track/form sheet/EastEnder pretensions, took Blur from also-rans to founders of the Britpop movement. It was a label that soon became tiresome. &I met this bloke from San Francisco& says Graham. &He'd come to London to find the Britpop scene. I was in the Britpop band, in the Britpop pub, in the Britpop city, and saying I hated Britpop. He didn't know how to take it.& Blur made the scene - then split.
By now Oasis, the rock `n' roll stars from Manchester, were claiming to be the biggest band in the world. A rivalry, manufactured by the bands' record labels, started to take on a momentum of its own. It became personal. When Noel Gallagher of Oasis was asked his views on Blur, his answer was he &hoped they caught Aids&. Liam Gallagher spent the Mercury Music Awards trying to pull Justine Frischmann, lead singer with the band Elastica and Damon's girlfriend. Blur brought forward the release date of their single Country House to synchronise with Roll With It, and beat Oasis to Number One. Damon had something to prove. &Wanting to be the biggest is a weakness in somebody. I slowly recognised that in myself. It was a flaw in my personality that I wanted to be the most famous - the most loved. I'm on top of that now.&
The battle with Oasis was presented as pitbull v poodle, squat v townhouse, armpit v roll-on and north v south. Blur were always portrayed as the nice boys. &But around the time we were being seen as the angelic little goody goodies,& says Alex, &at least two members of this band were totally out of control. And probably going to bed a lot later than Oasis.& &There were all these dodgy photographs, taken in dodgy places acting dodgily& says Graham. &And getting run over. I was run over coming out of a party and nobody offered to help me. The photographers just took the picture, then rushed back to the party to see if anyone else was coming out.& Smoggie/the Smog Monster, one of Blur's original Wolverhampton fans, was hired as personal security. &He was really hired to look after me and Graham& says Alex. &To carry us home at the end of the night.&
Damon still can't understand why Oasis are so huge. He couldn't bring himself to write a song like Wonderwall - too simple. It's no coincidence that he nicknamed Oasis `Quoasis' - a bastardisation of Status Quo, a band who never use four chords when three will do. Blur have always prided themselves on being imaginative - sometimes a little too imaginative. On the new album, Damon plays the kazoo, Graham plays the Jew's harp, and Alex plays the vacuum cleaner. And Graham taught himself the banjo just because he was feeling a little &conventional& on guitar. Blur are obsessed with moving on. And taking risks. &Paul McCartney hasn't moved on& says Damon. &Everything is static in his life&. Graham agrees. &Whereas Linda has moved on, with a growing range of satisfying vegetarian meals.
& Tony Blair, the ace face Of Labour's modernist tendency, wanted to harness Blur's sense of movement to help the Party. He turned up at the Q Awards two years running (stupidly naming Oasis as one of his favourite groups) before calling Damon's office to arrange a meeting. &I went in and he said 'Make sure you're selling just as many records when the election comes and we can work together'&. &What did you say to him?& asks Graham. &Make sure you get a policy then?&. Damon is actually more John Prescott than Tony Blair, and fashionably sceptical about a Labour landslide victory. But he was still flattered. That was then. Eighteen months is a long time in politics - Blair is probably trying right now to change the Spice Girls' position on a single currency.
Now Blur are back. They still eat in their regular cafe, a short walk through a Notting Hill housing estate known for crack derivatives. They still order cauliflower cheese and chips for Alex, who is dealing with yet another hangover, and pecan pie - that's two slices, four forks. Then four bowls of milky coffee, and back to the two-room studio to finish off the new album. They have learnt that in a studio this small, too many cigarettes can set off a smoke detector. But that gaffer tape can desensitise it nicely. &We built a studio because the neighbours used to complain about me recording at home& says Damon. &The neighbours fucking moved, Damon& says Alex. Pause. &Well, they weren't very nice neighbours& says Damon. Blur bicker like only best friends can. For a while back there, they forget how.
&A year ago we had to decide if we wanted to go on and become a real middle-of-the-road, tabloid-friendly, cheeky mockney stadium band& says Damon. &I guess the new album is the answer.& Now they have to learn to play the whole game again, and that's going to take some adjustments. Damon has just been to his first music biz party for nine months, at London's painfully hip Subterranea. &It was the birthday party of some PR company, and I was there with the guys I play football with. [Damon plays left wing for Cup Band United FC in a London music league] Baby Bird was there - all these people who are just starting to get somewhere. It was weird. Someone came up to me to talk. It wasn't `How are you?' It was `What are you doing here?' Fame is a funny old game.&
原文地址：http://www.rjsj.demon.co.uk/articles/suntimes/easel.htm
Damon Albarn, Blur's singer, has gravy on his shirt. &Fresh gravy?& asks Graham Coxon, the lead guitarist. No, yesterday's. Dave Rowntree, the drummer, scratches it with his nail. They pick at each other's clothes the way a mother picks at an only son's cardigan. They are friends, more interested in practising 360-degree spin kicks from yesterday's Tae Kwon Do class than the day of interviews that lies ahead. Alex James, the bassist, drags along behind. He has cigarette burns on his Nicole Farhi. His only concession to a healthy lifestyle is the one day he takes off the drink every week. &Alex doesn't do Tae Kwon Do& says Dave. &He does Tae GrouCho. And Lager Kwon Do.& When Alex woke up this morning he remembered where he parked his car - three days ago. If Blur had stayed in exile much longer, he would have winced at the NCP bill.
Eighteen months ago, Blur had it all. They starred in their very own cartoon strip in the News of the World, sharing a page with Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers and The Flintstones. They won four Brit awards. Their album, Parklife, became a million seller and part of your actual British culture. They fought Oasis in a contrived battle of the bands - and won. But, having sound-tracked two English summers, the fame became too much and they chose to disappear. &We were trying to burrow into our armpits to get away from it all& says Coxon. Albarn went through what he now calls the young man's menopause, with panic attacks and tears for no reason. &There's a radical change that happens in your mid-20s& he says. &That's why there are a lot of suicides in men of my age.& So Blur took some time out. In Iceland. Coincidentally, the only place on earth where Blur are still bigger than Oasis.
In Iceland, Damon discovered long-johns. And Eddic poetry. And inner peace. &It's on top of the world& says Damon. &So it's a good place to get a perspective on things. It's not made out of bricks and pavement. It's made out of volcanoes and glaciers. In Iceland there's sheer physical geography in your face.& Each member of the band was having his own mid-life pop crisis. And after recording three albums in three years, and completing a punishing tour schedule, the friendships that had sustained the band were beginning to suffer. Even Graham and Damon, buddies since school in Colchester, were falling out. &We had become more like business associates& says Graham. &We needed to get to understand each other again. Now we've turned back into loving hippies - in a short- haired kind of way.&
Call it an exercise in group therapy. But the whole Icelandic thing worked, and Britain's biggest band are back to promote their first new material in over a year. Radio One has scheduled, and heavily trailed, the world's first play of the new single. Word on the Internet is that some station in a two-moose town in northern Ontario managed a play last night, but the band aren't convinced. Coxon is living to regret that rushed can of Coke. As any recording artist will tell you, trapped wind is no joke in front of a unidirectional microphone. And he's worried about an uncontrolled outburst of live swearing. Five minutes to air and he's got just enough time to hang out of the station's kitchen window for one last cigarette.
Due to technical difficulties, Radio One DJ Steve Lamacq will only be playing vinyl this evening. Blur's record company come bearing compact disc. &Cue sound of plugger shooting himself& says the man Blur pay to promote the band's product - in this case, the new single, Beetlebum. &That's the worst news. That, or Steve puts the CD on, and the bloody thing skips.& Damon is visibly agitated. He pulls at the waist of his jeans and moons the DJ. Only half-a-crack. Not the full moon he used to throw out of the tour bus window. So an engineer engineers, with solder and a screwdriver, until the CD machine is fixed. Beetlebum sounds wonderful. Damon relaxes, across three chairs, with his size 12s on the table. &18 months ago I'd have been in a panic doing this interview& he insists. &I'm not now.&
Then comes German television. The crew have come from Hanover to film Blur, live, but with their hair piled under back-to-front baseball caps, look like they would have preferred Napalm Death. Damon runs over a sideburn trimmer over his chin - leaving a stubbled look for the camera - before he rehearses a few songs off the new album. The material is so new he is still forgetting his words. The chords are penned onto the back of his hands. Alex is having trouble holding up the double bass, but there's no denying it looks good. This is the man whose first band was him, in his bedroom, shouting &One, two, three, four - take it away& on top of an old Fleetwood Mac record. The whole business was taped, then presented to friends as proof that he really did have his own group. He is still big on display.
So is Damon. Dennis Hopper spins round to fire himself up before he goes on set - Albarn jumps and hit things. It works. &It's attitude plus showmanship& says James. &That rare musical thing - vibe. It only happens occasionally.& Blur are known for their punk approach to live performance, and you sometimes fear for Damon's safety when he's on stage. Even when the stage is only ten-foot square. He has an Iggy Pop quality - a marked contrast to Liam Gallagher's more sedentary approach. &The majority of their fans are off their faces& says Albarn. &Oasis don't need to move about - the audience need very simple things to focus on.& Damon pogos, hops, pouts and wags his finger, creating spectacle. From the moment he first treads the boards, it's pure repertory theatre. And that's no coincidence.
Damon is a frustrated actor. Thankfully, he gets it out of his system in the gangster movie Face. It's any self-respecting Essex boy's fantasy - &doing the driving, on the blag with the fellahs. And getting to fire a Colt Commander&. Two terms of drama school in the 1980s didn't prepare him for the role of `getaway driver'. Skidding down alleyways and careering into cardboard boxes is strictly third-term stuff. But he's proved himself a natural. What else would you expect from a man who still hasn't passed his driving test by the age of 28? Directed by Antonia Bird (of Priest fame), Damon judges the film &a cross between The Long Good Friday and Reservoir Dogs&. He has the sixth biggest part. Believe it - he has probably counted the lines.
The Germans love the new songs - darker and more experimental, they say. Damon has found his true voice at last. His accent used to change - starting down the Old Kent Road, and ending up in Bond Street by the end of the sentence. But those days are gone. He has now settled on one sound - that of a stylised Londoner. The new lyrics are sharper than ever. The fact that Albarn turns up at poetry superjams at the Albert Hall explains why he remains a master of the Eng Lit hit. Clever pieces of writing that dare to rhyme Balzac with Prozac - herpes with hairpiece. While no album has ever been sold on the back of a lyric, his words manage to create a mood. &Records are sold initially on a feeling& he says. &And my words paint that feeling.&
There's no denying (not that they often bother) that Blur are learned. The whole band like their books. Later that day Alex is interviewed by MTV, offering philosophical discourse on life - not jokes that will translate well in the Low Countries. But even if the last album is &quite postmodern&, and the last single does &saturate the band's story-telling paradigm&, it makes no difference. It will all get cut. Alex flicks his ash on to the studio floor. Right next to where the interview will end up once the editor has done his worst. Blur have a tendency to converse about philosophy and culture. &But it's a tendency we would like to modify& says Damon. &You wake up from days of meandering discussion and realise you're just talking a lot of bollocks.&
Before Blur pack up interviews for the day, Damon refuses to choose his favourite video clips for the satellite station Viva. &We don't do that on our fifth album& he says. Graham is happy to choose Ash and Prodigy. He likes their youth and exuberance. &You fancy them& says Damon, draped over a piano like Marlene Dietrich. &I was young and exuberant once. You used to fancy me.& Then Alex refuses to do a station ident. Apparently Stipey [of REM] doesn't do them. Truth is, it's not going well for Viva. The band are interviewed together, on a sofa, and Graham starts making farty noises. &Describe the new album& asks the hapless German interviewer. &More red globular heart than grey, floating in stuff& answers Coxon. Pity the poor subtitler.
Blur began as Nichtkunst [`no art' in German]. &Some pseudo dadaist group founded by me and Alex and a few people who were too full energy to sleep at art school& according to Graham. Art school was Goldsmiths College in London. Alma mater to the young pickler, Damien Hirst. &Nichtkunst was about smelling tequila,& says Alex, &but not having the guts to drink it.& &And making up slogans& says Graham. &But the tongue was very firmly in the cheek. It was just a way of entertaining us when we didn't want to sleep. We all thought that we were very clever being at university, which we weren't really because everyone goes to university now. Comprehensive schools will be called university soon.&