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Back to: Archive · 2004

From Q magazine, January 2004. Article by Alex James. Photographs by Jurgen Teller.

There was a phone call from our manager asking if there was anything I thought I should tell him, and a pause. I thought a bit, and told him thanks very much for everything. But this wasn't what he was after. I was under investigation by American immigration control, and they wouldn't issue a work visa. It was making things quite tricky.

Hotels and flights had been booked. "Have you ever done anything wrong in America you haven't told us about?" he said. I hadn't heard him this perturbed since I missed a jet that had been chartered specifically for me in 1995, or since he came round to my house and told me to go to bed a week into my 30th birthday party. Gave me the Phil Lynott lecture.

I started racking my brain. It's fair to say that America has been the stage for some of the most monumentally disgusting bad behaviour. "I did get arrested once, but I escaped when they let me go inside to put some clothes on. Didn't get my name, wasn't me anyway."

"Well it's not that," he said. "Anything else?"

It's just a horrible feeling, examining yourself and trying to work out what they're thinking about. If you're in a decent band, then you've definitely done something they wouldn't like. They won't tell you what they think you've done - you just have to wait for them to finish their investigations. One consolation was that if you've done something really, really, really bad, they let you in and nab you there and then. This much we know.

We were supposed to be launching the new album Think Tank at South By South West, a sort of American music business eat-as-much-as-you-like orgy. Immigration were still farting around as the date approached, and the record company were starting to eye me over with some suspicion, as if I was a subversive beardo who had been hiding in a band since the collapse of communism. They thought me very rude and suggested it would be best if Blur got another bass player anyway.

I might have been more indignant had I not had my wedding to organise, and I suggested that Graham could do the show in my place. That would have confused everybody. Anyway, it was a rather different looking Blur that took to the stage in Texas for the first gig of the year.

A year is a long time in rock; it's practically an epoch. Rock music travels into the past at superluminal velocities. A rock year is probably further than a light year.

It has been a momentous 12 months; I'm basically someone else now. Over the course of the year I stopped smoking, started eating meat, went round the world, got married, went to Mars... sort of.

We finished Think Tank a couple of weeks before Christmas 2002 in Devon. We really didn't know if we'd be able to play live at all without Miss Coxon, or at least whether we'd be able to play any of the old stuff any more. Tongy - that's Simon Tong to you; he's our tour guitarist - has been immense, a deft and dignified presence. It soon became obvious that the shows would go on.

The wedding day was the best day of my life. I feel light thinking about it. My wife and I went to Italy, where they know just how to look after a lady. The hotel was full of harps and gold shit everywhere. A far cry from our next assignment; a week of shows at the Astoria, a dark and sticky place on Charing Cross Road, and nevertheless one of the best places to see a band: a great old-fashioned, ram-jammed, sweaty, cool, theatre.

We'd already done a few gigs at this point, so we knew we'd be alright. If it worked in a stadium in Mexico City, it was going to be just fine five minutes' walk from home. Actually, you can always tell how good a London show is going to be by looking at the guest list. They were up for it.

Then my visa arrived. No explanation. Fine. Off to Palm Springs, an awful suburb in a beautiful desert, home to the Coachella music festival. The site was a polo club; I have the feeling that the owner didn't have quite the same motivation as Michael Eavis did when he started Glastonbury. It was a stadium rock gig in some naff rich bloke's garden. Still, they do have proper famous people in America. It's where they make them.

We were supposed to be doing a tour of radio station-sponsored shows, playing fifth on the bill with bands who have a lot of tattoos and are called things like The Transplants. They were all lovely boys, but no thanks - I mean, we're Number 1 in Chile, we're half way to Mars, what are we doing playing stadium cock-ring heavy metal concerts in America? Damon suggested we cancel. The label eyed him with suspicion and suggested we continue with a different singer.

We cancelled the radio station bollocks, took the rap and did our own gigs, which were much better, hysterical even. Many times I've whirled around North America in a giggling raspberry-blowing stupor. Your 20s are about finding your limits; your 30s are about finding a balance. You have got to be strong to keep your balance. Whatever you do, there's always some f***er trying to f*** you.

I've traded in my rock'n'roll credentials; they don't really fit me any more. My preoccupations are: making lists, thinking up art exhibitions; voodoo; my wife; wedding thank-you letters; scientific endeavours of the present; choruses; looking for a pair of plain canvas plimsolls; old rhythms; drawing; stuff and just stuff, you know.

Gigs, gigs, gigs. Concerts, shows, festivals, performances; whatever you call it when you play music together, that's what we've been doing. The real joy of being in a band, the deep thing that it all flows from, is when you are making a really good loud noise. Being on the telly, having your photograph taken, talking about it, travelling, it's all bollocks after a while. The mass media as a whole is so cheesy. It needs cool music desperately to stop the flow of cheese. The whole of the media does.

A band playing live has total control over everything. It's the real thing. No editorial, no censorship, no telemetry, no marketing, just juice, sweaty warts and all. Watching music on the telly and even listening to records is like watching the holiday programme and thinking you've been somewhere. It's just an image of a thing, it's not the thing. The thrill of volume and dazzling lights and being in a crowd and losing it, that's the service we like to provide.

It's the music that links us; we all have quite separate lives on tour. Dave is blue-toothed to a small computer at all times when not playing drums. Playing drums makes him very happy.

To say one town is pretty much like another would be quite true, like saying one person is pretty much like another. Of course, they have similarities, but the closer you look the more they reveal their differences, the more individual and interesting each one becomes.

We've been to a lot of places this year. We played at Mexico twice. Who goes to Mexico twice a year? In Portland, Oregon, was Powell's bookshop. I thought (notoriously labyrinthine London store) Foyles was the world's biggest bookshop, but this is bigger. They must have 10 million books there, new and second-hand. It's like a museum, except you can leave with the things you like. I bust my suitcase, which I've had since Britpop, with books about gardens and magnets.

The Tunnel Club in Bournemouth was another good one. I had always avoided it when I used to live there - bit too sexy. We'd spent the week in Europe's great cities - Paris, Berlin, Milan and Barcelona - and then I'd gone straight to Bourno for my stag night. The Tunnel is one of the best places in the world. End of story. It shits all over Paris.

I love just to go to new places, where bands don't normally play. You get jaded schlepping round all the usual circuits, whatever level you're doing it at. You're on autopilot after a while. What's the point? Nobody in a decent band does it for the money. Well, unless the money's amazing. Let's do Ghana, let's do Riga, China, Burma. Sunrise in Zurich. Nice.

Russia was life-affirming. We were well looked after. If we'd wanted to eat caviar out of prostitutes' twots, we would not have been disappointed. I did have some caviar, but off the spoon. Moscow reminded me of New York before Giuliani made everyone go to bed. You got a sense of something so different. You could have stayed forever and been happy; but you could probably do that most places.

A 118 is when you walk off stage and straight onto the bus, which pulls away while the audience are still cheering.

I persuaded Flying Tony Ryan to bring the aeroplane into Brussels. The aeroplane Dave and I run isn't really practical for touring - it's not weatherproof - but Brussels is only a 40-minute hop from where we keep it in Elstree, and the forecast was good. The plan was to rock Brussels, and then for Damon and I to dive straight into a cab with Tony, get chips and hoss the f*** back to our own beds for the night. We called this a 100. A 100 with chips.

We smashed through the set, chopped off all the long endings, dropped a couple of slow ones and - Thank you very much, bye - were grinning our way to the airport by 10 o'clock local. The taxi driver was a nice beardy. He said that he'd driven us back in '95, and that Tony Blair had been through the airport earlier. There's a lot of that in Brussels. It's a huge busy airport, with an all-night chip shop Portakabin. The best. I really like Belgium.

At some airports they still make you go through the security beeper when you're getting on your own aeroplane. Twats. But we were licking our greasy fingers, engines running, and taking down complicated taxi instructions by 11. Taxiing around big airports is the hardest part of flying. They really shout at you if you go the wrong way.

After take off I pushed the wrong button and we missed a couple of radio calls. The dude in the tower was hopping mad about our altitude transmitter not working by the time we caught up with him. He wanted us to come back and land at Brussels. Tony stepped in and gave him the chat. He's got the BA voice.

Because our altitude doodah wasn't working, they told us we would have to stay below controlled airspace.

"What would have happened if we'd ignored him?" said Damon.

"Well, he would have scrambled a fighter or two," said Tony.

"Oh right."

The evening was immaculate and you could see forever, it made you want to just keep flying. All the little towns and the tankers lying out to sea. There was nothing doing at Heathrow, so we crept all the way up the Thames as far as Tower Bridge. Cities never look ugly at night, and London is a glittering, futuristic, golden thing. Blows your head off. I used to feel like this coming back down the M1 in the van in the middle of the night. Feel free. Coming home. We landed in the dark at Elstree.

"F***in' wicked mate!" said Damon. Cheers.

You can see a long way from the top of Jodrell Bank radio telescope too. You can see Manchester and Liverpool next to each other if you stand up there. Hopefully, we'll be able to see Beagle on Mars when it lands on Christmas Day. Beagle 2 is the British space effort; it's as big as a motorbike wheel and it can detect signs of life if there are any. Looking for it will be like trying to find a mobile phone 25 million miles away. A mobile phone on Mars, basically. Blur on Mars. How are we going to top that next year?