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 Back to: History
Hell on Earth

From Blur: 3862 Days, the official history © 1999 Blur and Stuart Maconie.

Blur's 44-date American tour beginning May 1992 is perhaps the greatest single shaping influence on them. In the same way, albeit much more seriously, that certain writers or film directors will return constantly to Vietnam in their work or Billy Bragg, Ken Loach and Ben Elton will never truly forget the miners' strike, so Blur's perspective of the world around them for the next five years would be forged in the blood- and vomit-spattered odyssey of their ten-week tour of duty through the baffled, unforgiving heartlands of the United States. Rueful exaggeration, of course, typical pop writer hyperbole, but if each year's Glastonbury Festival is routinely and feebly compared to the Somme, then let's compare Blur's '92 tour of America to a trip up river along the Mekong Delta to the heart of darkness.


Rita Rudner once said of the Pope 'I have great respect for him. I admire anyone who can tour without an album.' Why were Blur returning so soon after their last trip without new material to a country which had no great yearning for them? Money. As part of Chris Morrison's swift and decisive package of emergency measures aimed at keeping the band afloat, he had landed a lucrative deal with a merchandising company. They were willing to advance some of the money on condition that the band returned to the States for another tour which SBK were very keen on. This, however, puzzled Chris Morrison. 'I'd had no previous dealings with SBK. So I was surprised that they wanted us to tour again to promote an album that was a year old. They said that they believed in really working a record. Getting the most out of it. OK, I thought, great.'


But that meant returning to America and a gruelling lengthy slog cross-country, SBK allocating them two days off in 44. Across a country, more to the point, where they meant nothing. America's soon to be christened Generation X were in the thrall of Nirvana, whose move from Seattle indie Sub Pop to baby boomer corporate label Geffen, with subsequent sales of nine million for their album Nevermind, was the touchstone moment of the era. Languor, indifference and morbid self-absorption were the order of the day. Later they elevated it to a movement, 'slacker', and its 'Do I have to tidy my room?' petulance to a creed.


'America had found its voice,' Alex observes, 'and no one wanted to know about these bouncy, floppy-fringed indie kids on the tail end of this failed Jesus Jones/EMF so-called British invasion. Balfe, though, was so keen on breaking in America that we were shipped off on this mind-bogglingly tedious tour of a country where nobody had heard of us. Nobody had heard of the biggest English bands. Nobody had heard of The Stone Roses so why the f*** should they have heard of us?'


DAMON ALBARN: We were doing two and a half months in America basically to sell T-shirts to pay off our debts. This whole massive tour was a direct consequence of the previous managerial shit we'd got into. That second tour changed everything. For one thing, we were drinking obsessively. Ridiculous amounts of booze every day. So I don't remember that much beyond the fact that we were very drunk at most gigs and we smashed up places all the time and there was very bad behaviour and it was relentless and depressing. It was hell and it just didn't stop.


GRAHAM COXON: It was a horror story. We hated every minute of it. We'd have these gruelling day and night drives to towns and cities where we meant nothing to the people there. I smashed all the mirrors on the tour bus in one of these emotional outbursts I was having. I was drinking too much and having this awful homesickness, completely at the end of my tether. We all felt the same. Me and Alex came to blows out of sheer misery and frustration. We had a fight in the car park at some godforsaken place and then we had this three-hour drive to the next gig. There'd been this scrap and Alex had really tried to break my nose and I started to cry and I decided to say the word 'arse' every five seconds for the whole three-hour journey. It was stupid and horrible. We meant nothing over there. We'd be drunk on radio interviews and would end up getting thrown out of radio stations and making people really angry. And the record company didn't understand our humour at the time which was very dry and, er, humourless, especially after a few drinks. We were very, very close to imploding.


There were new horrors at every turn. Damon's habit of throwing water into the crowd saw them chased from the stage by security guards and audience members more than once in the first week. Vox magazine reported that their gig at the Venus De Milo club, Boston, was 'a full-scale rock and roll riot featuring every rock and roll cliché in the book: promoter switches power off, audience destroys hall, band assaults bouncers who chase band into broom cupboard, band escape via window to waiting car, run into blood-soaked fans and so on.'


When the band arrived for their first meetings with the detested SBK label, they found that the label's talk of repromoting the Leisure album was disingenuous. There was, indeed, a new Blur product to be issued: namely several new mixes of 'Bang' under the appalling title 'Blur-ti-go'.


'We didn't know,' explains Chris Morrison, 'but they were about to put out this version of "Bang" no one had ever heard. Damon was upset about this but I didn't know how upset really. My attitude was more pragmatic. I thought we should just let them stick it out.'


Alex has a clear memory of visiting SBK's offices and seeing teetering piles of these loathed artifacts arranged around the room. 'What the record company had done was commission these unauthorised remixes of "Bang" and the promotional gimmick was if the radio station was, say, 99x they got 99 of them, if it was 209 FM they got 209. So there were millions of these f***ing Blur-ti-go things waiting to be shipped out. And they were odious. A bit housey but in a really cheesy, six months out of date way. They had no sense of aesthetics, these people, they were just after a fast buck. You know how if there's a cool, fashionable pair of trousers you can buy in good shops then Carnaby Street will sell you a shit version of it six months later? That's what SBK were like. They just counterfeited the cool stuff. We all went back to the hotel in despair. We hadn't seen Spinal Tap at this point but looking back it was total Tap. They were total Artie Fufkins. And on and on it went, playing these pubs in Wichita, Kansas. You can drink a lot at that age too so we were steeped in alcohol. Booze is fine but if you drink all the time for ages you turn into a nasty aggressive piece of work. If you're in a band in Los Angeles there's lots of things to do but when you're in Wichita and Topeka ... Balfe's advice was take more drugs but SBK would be whining if I even turned up in the office having had a drink.'


The tour had a profound influence on Damon Albarn, who began to suffer, as did all four, from constant, gnawing homesickness. 'I started to miss really simple things. I missed people queuing up in shops. I missed people saying "goodnight" on the BBC. I missed having fifteen minutes between commercial breaks. I missed people having some respect for my geographical roots, because Americans don't care if you're from Land's End or Inverness. I missed everything about England.'


Dave Rowntree today is a wry and reasonable fellow with a lucid perspective refreshingly free of hyperbole and rockbiz bollocks. But even he is at pains to impress that Blur's account of their second US tour is no lurid self-mythologising. If anything, he doesn't think they adequately relate the soul-destroying trauma of it. 'It was really horrifying stuff. I went to sleep one night and Graham had smashed the whole bus up, every available pane of glass, and I hadn't even woken up. Slept right through it. The level of drinking was phenomenal. The crew actually nearly left us which is extraordinary - the crew are usually the worst. But the sound engineer had actually packed his case and was on his way to the airport. One of us had to go and stop him and tell him it would all be OK. But these weren't good-time antics; it was pure misery. An appalling time. The worst time. We were taking it all out on each other. There were permanent punch-ups. At one point we all had black eyes. Me and Alex would just be sitting there and suddenly he'd throw his drink over me and that would be it, another scrap. We were unbelievably pissed and upset and depressed all the time.'


By the end, Blur were so unhinged, according to Mike Smith, that there was talk of replacing Dave Rowntree with Senseless Things drummer Cas, who was seen as 'more of a pop star'. But all things must pass, as George Harrison rightly said on his 1970 triple album. Eventually, the tour was over. Incredibly, The Senseless Things, who had accompanied them on this trek, had loved it and decided to stay on an extra month. But Blur were coming home. Psychotic, alcoholic, bloodied, bruised and on the verge of hospitalisation but coming home none the less.


That's when things really started going badly.