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Damon Albarn Biography Tainted By Outdated Rivalry




















Let’s get one thing straight: life has been very, very good to Damon Albarn. Even today, the back catalog of his best-loved band, Blur, plays like a veritable Encyclopedia Cool Britannia ­— a seven-album testament to the cultural high planned by the press, patented by Suede and perfected in Blur —and his is the mockney accent plastered all over it. If Britpop made England cool again, Blur made it count.

In “Damon Albarn: Blur, Gorillaz and Other Fables,” co-authors Martin Roach and David Nolan cover the ways in which, through Blur — and through Damon — the British Empire struck back. In doing so, they have created the most complete evaluation of Albarn’s life and career to date, if not the most insightful one.

“Fables” provides an outstanding entrée into the United Kingdom of the 1990s for fans born in the wrong country or at the wrong time. For those who were re-introduced to the Union Jack by Ginger Spice’s dress instead of Noel’s Epiphone, it’s important to understand that for all intents and purposes, Blur was Britpop. Suede might have been the misnomer’s first patron, Pulp its brightest and Oasis its biggest, but no band belonged to it, and subsequently loathed it, quite like Blur. Which made Albarn the movement’s pretty face.

His band’s formative years included all the shenanigans you might expect from four twenty-somethings who have never held proper jobs: press wars, infighting and over-indulgence — in short, serial chaos. (It’s telling that the most oft-used adjective is “shambolic.”) In “Fables,” all the Blur boxes are ticked: there are the Seymour years, followed by the anti-American years, the anti-Oasis years, the anti-Blair years and the anti-Graham years — in the same order in which Stuart Maconie covered them (in “Blur: 3862 Days: The Official History”), just without the same panache.

The trouble with an unauthorized biography, and with this one in particular, lies in the nature of its construction. Nolan and Roach may know that Albarn is afraid of becoming Sting, but they got that tidbit from recycled NME and Mojo clippings, not from the cover star himself.

Unsurprisingly, Fables also suffers from the generally anti-Mancunian, specifically anti-Gallagher bias both camps tired of 10 years ago. (One band’s members has two eyebrows, the other’s has one — the rest is trivial.) Too many of the book’s pages are spent rehashing the difference between second-to-none and second-to-one.

By page 100, the nostalgia the bio was soaked in starts to grow tired, in the same way the quote about Noel Gallagher wishing “Damon caught AIDS and died” did before it was uttered and subsequently repeated in this book. Add to this an apparent lack of copy editing and any mention of the bankruptcy scare that shook up Maconie’s version, and Blur fans would be better served by bassist Alex James’ autobiography, until such a time as Damon puts down the operas and pens his own.

Source: www.themaneater.com

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