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The Magic Whip

April 28, 2015

Early in the jarring opening pages of science fiction novelist Ray Bradbury’s 1953 masterpiece Fahrenheit 451 , the author appears to catch a glimmer of the actual future. Protagonist Guy Montag comes home from work to find his wife limp and dying of an overdose on sleeping pills. Montag calls for assistance and hangs back helplessly as paramedics revive her, thinking to himself, "There are too many of us. There are billions of us and that’s too many. Nobody knows anyone." Could Bradbury have foreseen the quiet anomie of faces bathed in smartphone light, shuttling through overcrowded cities, alone together in only tangential acknowledgement of one other’s humanity? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Singer-songwriter Damon Albarn invokes Bradbury’s sentiment on "There Are Too Many of Us", the emotional centerpiece of The Magic Whip , the reunion album from his reconstituted flagship Blur, as he muses about an Australian hostage crisis he once spectated on television from a hotel room above it. "For a moment I was dislocated by terror on the loop elsewhere," he admits in verse two—not horrified, just momentarily "dislocated"—as if to call into question our dwindling concern for people in places outside our cubicles of convenience. Technology has made our world smaller, but it hasn’t made us less isolated. Ease of access doesn’t equal closeness.

The Magic Whip is the first Blur album since 2003’s Think Tank , the first with guitarist Graham Coxon onboard since 1999’s 13 (Coxon was booted from the Think Tank sessions a week in and summarily quit), and the first with producer Stephen Street since 1997’s Blur . In 2013, a lucky twist of fate netted the group some downtime between festival dates in South China and Indonesia, and Blur holed up in a Hong Kong studio to workshop new material. Anyone who’s waited a decade and a half for Albarn and his songwriting foil to resume tussling over bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree’s lithe low end will find a lot to enjoy; something special happens when these four get in a room, and you can still hear some of it happening here.

The distant traveler’s conflicting sense of wonder and alienation is the running theme here. "New World Towers" gazes at the web of neon signs overhead in awe of their glow, "Go Out" details nights alone at the bar and defeated late-night self-love. On "Thought I Was a Spaceman" Albarn recasts a longing for the comforting familiarity of London as a space-wrecked astronaut’s homesickness. The Magic Whip was conceived as Albarn wrapped work on his 2014 solo album Everyday Robots , and it’s tempting to see its disaffected tourism as a sister to Robots ’ shattered workaday ennui back home.

Sensibilities from Albarn’s extracurricular projects frequently bleed into the frame, especially the Gorillaz , which shows both in dubby, beat-oriented cuts like "New World Towers" and in the lyrics’ pervasive sense of Englishness-in-exile. "Thought I Was a Spaceman" could easily serve as a prequel to Demon Days ’ post-apocalyptic opener "Last Living Souls" in sound and story, and "Ghost Ship" wouldn’t look out of place anchored off the shores of Plastic Beach . At times the sonic tug-of-war feels like Albarn clawing at the restrictions of a framework his ideas have outgrown.

In the moments when The Magic Whip is most interested in sounding like a Blur album, it is perhaps too interested. There’s a nod to nearly every epoch, from the synth-accented Parklife alt-rockisms of "I Broadcast" to the busy Great Escape pop of "Lonesome Street", the Blur -ish guitar squall of "Go Out" and the winding 13 -influenced electro-psych of "Spaceman".  Whip  functions as a career travelogue in that sense; one wonders whether the decision to have Street, the band’s Britpop-era producer, helm the sessions hasn’t aroused a certain sense of nostalgia. Restless innovators deserve a cycle back through the worlds they’ve crafted here and there (see: the last decade worth of Prince and Beck ) but it’s disorienting for a band as keenly interested in artistic recombination as Blur.

Sometimes the album veers into sleepy territory: The ambient washes and close mic’d, reverb-drenched strumming of "Spaceman" are welcome flourishes, as is the cluttered keyboard-and-acoustic bounce of "Ice Cream Man", but both are better showcases for production than song structure. There’s also sluggish, saccharine adult contemporary on "My Terracotta Heart" and closer "Mirrorball", though, momentum-killers in a back end that sometimes lags where it should lift. The tempo only picks up on "Lonesome Street", "Go Out", and "I Broadcast"; the rest of the album bobs calmly adrift. It suits the album’s geographical fixation on Hong Kong, Indonesia, and especially the beaches and waters in between, but not the band’s own sweet spot.

All these frustrations fall away when the quartet locks into its signature jangly strut, as it does on the late album highlight "Ong Ong", a chugging rocker outfitted with a chorus of lilting la-la’s. Its sunny soul is infectious, as Albarn, who once lamented he had "no distance left to run," professes a love no measure of forbidding space could quell. Coxon’s in the wings playing hokey luau guitar, zeroing in on Damon’s seafaring yearning and playing it up for yaks until he storms center stage as the song draws to a noisy close. Blur’s always been puckish in spirit, its greatest gift the identification and gleeful subversion of listener expectations, and in moments like these it re-emerges, untarnished by the passage of time.

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Blur’s The Magic Whip Is a Weird, Lovely Return to Form

If you’re a Blur fan, you owe a hearty thank-you to the organizers of Tokyo Rocks … a festival that in 2013 flubbed up its management so badly that it was  canceled at the last minute . Having already mapped out the Asian leg of their reunion tour around that date, former headliners Blur found themselves in Hong Kong with a couple of sweltering days to kill before their next gig. So — why not? — they decided to spend the unexpected downtime in a studio, jamming to stay limber for their upcoming shows. Rumors flew of a new album; the band shot them down at every turn (“Just because you record 15 ideas doesn’t mean that you’ve got an album,” front man Damon Albarn  told  NME  last year). But while the indefatigable Albarn was busy touring the latest of his endless post-Blur projects (in this case, a solo album called  Everyday Robots ), guitarist Graham Coxon and longtime producer Stephen Street spent some time tinkering with the Hong Kong tapes, trying to edit the sprawl into something that sounded more like an assemblage of pop songs (albeit some pretty out-there ones). Albarn admitted in a recent press conference that he wasn’t looking to make another Blur record; he thought that last victory lap of a reunion tour had made a clean, sensible ending to the band’s arc. So what Coxon and Street brought back to him complicated the matter. “When they played it for me,” he recalled at the press conference, “I was like” — and here he puts his head in his hands—“Oh,  nooo . This is really good.”

Albarn was right to be skeptical of an epilogue tacked haphazardly onto the end of the Blur story — after all, we’re talking about a band that had one of the most prolific, adventurous, and impeccable discographies of the ’90s. Blur began the decade a gang of mop-topped, vacant-eyed Stone Roses wannabes (see: 1991’s Leisure ); in the middle, they matured into tart, tuneful pop satirists (1994’s stone-cold Britpop classic Parklife ); and by the end of the century, they’d finally conquered the States with one unexpected stadium-jam and a pair of achingly lovely art-rock masterpieces, Blur and 13 . Blur’s brilliance was fueled by an artistic restlessness and egos that clashed just hard enough not to destroy each other completely. They often sound like they are members of four different bands, or — often at their very best — native species of four different planets. Drummer Dave Rowntree gives Blur’s sound a grounded muscularity, and bassist Alex James lends a buoyant, hair-flipping pop sensibility, but at its core, Blur is all about the aesthetic tug-of-war between Albarn and Coxon. Cheekily charismatic, Albarn was always seen as the source of the band’s melodicism and pop appeal; the more introverted Coxon was the one pulling them in darker, more experimental directions (he’s usually given credit for the stylistic shift of the 1997 self-titled album). In the liner notes to the band’s boxed set 21 , Rowntree summed up the dynamic between his bandmates succinctly: “Graham used to say that he wanted to make an album that nobody would want to listen to. But you can’t do that in a band with Damon.”

What’s interesting about The Magic Whip is how, in a sense, that dynamic has finally reversed. In recent years, and especially on Everyday Robots , Albarn’s melodies have had a tendency to grow a little too dreary and soggy — here, Coxon provides the electrical jolts that zap them back to life. Coxon loves to mess around with texture and tone, and Magic Whip is his aural playground. Take the great, jaunty first single “Go Out” (which sounds like the sneering, tattooed older cousin of “Coffee & TV”), across which he splatters different varieties of distortion like so many colors of paint. The atmospheric, post-rock reverie “Thought I Was a Spaceman” is just as exciting; it reminds me of the proggy, extraterrestrial spirituals on the back half of 13 , like “Caramel” and “Battle.” Too many bands tend to sound defanged or diluted on reunion records, so it’s refreshing that The Magic Whip finds Blur indulging — and downright reveling — in many of their weirder tendencies.

Roughly speaking, Albarn’s Blur lyrics tend to come in two varieties: Character sketches like those he perfected on Parklife , and then the wounded, confessional, hyper personal songs that came afterwards. The Magic Whip falls somewhere between those two extremes: Its gaze is focused outward, but there’s something intimate about its observations, as though they’re handwritten travelogues. The lyrics mostly evoke the band’s time in Hong Kong, a city they found stimulating but overcrowded — thus the stately, regal march of “There Are Too Many of Us,” a.k.a. the feel-good population-growth-anxiety jam of the summer. Once deliciously bratty (I mean, the man had a way with a nyah-nyah-nyah ), Albarn’s voice has matured into an instrument of wearied but prismatic melancholy, modulated finely enough to convey 50,000 shades of grey. But that also makes his rare bursts of exuberance that much more satisfying, as on “Ong Ong,” The Magic Whip ’s one slab of pure pop sunshine. On the sing-along-ready chorus, you can almost hear him struggling to keep it so simple, so sweet: “I wanna be with you.”

The Magic Whip isn’t as immediate as the band’s most inspired work, and I’ll admit on the first few encounters I thought it a bit dull. But over repeated listens, I’ve found it blooms into something immersive, complex, and understatedly lovely — a worthy inclusion in the band’s arc. It’s impossible to say whether it will be the last Blur album, but if it is, I’ll disagree here with Albarn and say it’s an even more satisfying ending than what came before. Up until now, the final Blur record had been 2003’s Think Tank  — a fine, adventurous record, but one that many diehards didn’t consider a Blur album at all because Coxon didn’t play on most of it. Blur is a band of distinct chemistry, four irreplaceable elements. In promoting the return-to-form The Magic Whip , it’s been surprising to see how readily they’ll admit that, even at the expense of the previous release. “[ Think Tank ] wasn’t a Blur record, that was the three of us,” Albarn admitted in a recent interview  — joking that maybe, if anything, it was a “LUR record,” or a “BLU” one. Sharp and uncompromising, The Magic Whip is here to deliver some good news: Blur is once again a four-letter word.

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The 10 best Britpop B-sides, featuring Oasis, Supergrass, Ash, Elastica, Blur and more

It wasn’t all about Parklife, Alright and Live Forever, you know. Here’s some Britpop magic you might have missed…

Britpop was an excellent time for singles, huge indie-rock anthems that have stood the test of time (longer than a lot of the bands lasted, actually). But there was also a literal bonus flipside to all the hits, and that was the sheer magnitude of brilliant B-sides. Even better was that it was the era of both the maxi CD and bands being forced by their labels to release two versions, all backed with a plethora of bonus material to throw yourself into. For some bands, this extra homework resulted in songs to match the A-sides. Here are some of the best Britpop B-sides, crack cuts that never made a Shine compilation:

Ash – Sneaker (1996)

Northern Irish trio Ash were one of Britpop’s finest singles bands, their songs a perfect balance of punk-pop chaos and classic melodicism. If their lead tracks required something a little more refined, it was on their B-sides where they really cut loose. Their B-sides usually fell into two categories: cover versions of the sort that you didn’t see their more serious, frowny-faced peers attempting (John Williams’ Cantina Band or ABBA’s Does Your Mother Know , anyone?) or the sort of sonic carnage you save for the final ten minutes of a particularly drunken band rehearsal. From the Goldfinger single, Sneaker is one of the best from the latter category, a thrashy and riotous three and a half minutes that was a sort of cover version – the song was originally by a band of the same who featured Ash’s Mark Hamilton and Rick McMurray in their line-up.

Blur – Young And Lovely (1993)

It was around their second album Modern Life Is Rubbish that Blur really became Blur. Burnt out by an exhausting US tour, they returned to the UK determined to tap into a more British, homespun sound, emerging with a collection of songs melding Damon Albarn’s Kinks-y hooks with Graham Coxon’s Smiths-style guitars, Albarn's lyrics exploring the mundanity and melancholy of humdrum Britain. In doing so, they found their natural selves, to the point that classics such as this lovely, swaying number was relegated to a B-side, featuring on 1993’s Chemical World single. They’ve made sure since that it’s had its moment in the spotlight, featuring as part of the setlist in some of their warm-up shows in 2023.

Oasis – Acquiesce (1995)

Peak Oasis were so good at B-sides that the album collating them all, 1998’s The Masterplan , ranks as one of their best. In fact, if Noel Gallagher hadn’t been quite so antsy to get all these gems he’d written out there as soon as possible, then there might well have been a third classic Oasis album to sit alongside Definitely Maybe and … Morning Glory instead of Be Here Now and, you know, the other ones. There is a lot to take your pick from amongst their B-sides, whether it be Noel Gallagher in acoustic, contemplative mode ( Talk Tonight , Half A World Away ), one of their punkiest moments ( Headshrinker ) or straight-up how-the-hell-is-this-a-B-side epics ( The Masterplan ) but Acquiesce gets the nod. It’s an Oasis all-timer, combining a chest-pumping rock’n’roll groove with soulful vocal interplay between Liam and Noel Gallagher, the only time they duetted on an Oasis song. Surely, as they did around its release, they’ve got to open with this next summer?

Mansun – Ski Jump Nose (1996)

At their best, Chester quartet Mansun were wonderfully strange, both a prime Britpop band whose rattling indie-rock had super-powered 60s pop melodies but who were also too restlessly weird to properly fit in. By the time of their 1998 second record Six , they had mostly shaken off their poppier moments and become a sort of awkward indie-prog hybrid but with their debut album and a number of singles and EPs, they left behind plenty to mine for gems. From their ’97 Closed For Business EP, the pulsing, skulking Everyone Must Win deserves an honorary mention but Ski Jump Nose , from 1996’s Egg Shaped Fred single, is Mansun at their finest, giddy and silly and armed with a big riff and infectious, holler-along chorus.

Elastica – See That Animal (1994)

Led by the insouciant singer and guitarist Justine Frischmann, London quartet Elastica were one of the 90s most effortlessly cool guitar bands. Their best singles are draped around that streak of whateverness nonchalance – their big hit Connection might as well have been called I Don’t Actually Care If You Don’t Listen To Me – and their B-sides were just as soaked in art-school attitude. This one, which backed up Connection, is an excellent whirlwind of stomping drums, clanking guitars and Frischmann’s vocal eye-rolls.

Radiohead – Talk Show Host (1996)

Are Radiohead Britpop? Definitely not. Would they blacklist me for life if they saw I had put them on a Britpop list? Almost certainly. But if you consider Britpop to cover British bands with guitars making music that took a 60s template and put a modern spin on it then you can (sort of) include Radiohead. Just don’t tell them, please. Radiohead pushed things further forward than most, though, and Talk Show Host isn’t just one of their best B-sides, it’s one of their greatest songs, period. With its minimalist minor chord riff, stop-start, hip-hop-tinged rhythmics and a mesmeric Thom Yorke vocal, it’s the sound of a band beginning to turn rock music inside out. It was a blueprint for their next move, and their next move was OK Computer .

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Manic Street Preachers – Dead Trees And Traffic Islands

Well, I’m playing fast and loose now, aren’t I? The Manics were not Britpop before Everything Must Go (if they were, 1994’s proto- Faster cut Comfort Comes would be in this list instead) and they weren’t Britpop after, but for a brief moment around 1996, they were definitely part of the Britpop parade. They were even on the bill at Knebworth, which is basically the gig version of getting a tattoo that says We Were Part Of Britpop. Plus this B-side to the era-defining A Design For Life is a proper little gem, a curio in their catalogue because (a) it contains a flute, (b) James Dean Bradfield sounds a bit like Sting on it and (c) it’s really good.

Supergrass – Wait For The Sun

The run of singles around Supergrass ’s debut I Should Coco were basically E number rock’n’roll, fantastic and frantic indie anthems that were gone before you could get to grips with them. But in the Oxford trio’s B-sides, they were already hinting at something a little more contemplative to come. There was the doleful splendour of Odd? , which backed up the bouncy Mansize Rooster , and this, from the Lenny single, a plaintive acoustic number with lush melodies and a gentle sadness in its soul.

Suede – My Insatiable One

Even more than their albums, B-sides were where Suede fully and wholedarkheartedly embraced maximum Suedeness. It was a standard they set from the off – My Insatiable One featured as the B-side to their Britpop-igniting debut single The Drowners , setting a standard that they rarely let slip (well, until they got to Head Music and A New Morning , anyway).

Super Furry Animals – Guacamole (1996)

Welsh rabble Super Furry Animals were one of Britpop’s most inventive bands and they didn’t curb their wildly imaginative ways on B-sides, as this shows: it sounds like Elvis singing a Ziggy Stardust-song from the middle of a sleep psychosis breakdown. Glorious stuff.

Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleagues Ted Kessler and Chris Catchpole. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he's interviewed some of the world's biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more. Radiohead was only for eight minutes but he still counts it.

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Blur Debut ‘The Magic Whip’ in Its Entirety at Small London Club

By Mark Sutherland

Mark Sutherland

Blur kickstarted the next phase of their comeback with a tiny, fanclub-only gig in London Friday night, airing songs from their new album The Magic Whip for the first time.

Taking to the stage at West London club Mode, frontman Damon Albarn told the 300-strong crowd of competition winners that the band would play the album “in sequence, from beginning to end.”

At last month’s press conference  to announce the new album – Blur’s first since 2003’s Think Tank  and first with guitarist Graham Coxon since 1999’s 13  – Albarn had stressed the importance of fresh material to the band’s return. But, while the songs were new, some tracks harked back to the classic sound of previous Blur incarnations. Opener “Lonesome Street,” with its chugging guitars and lyrical references to catching “the 5:14 to East Grinstead,” could have fitted snugly onto 1995 album The Great Escape .

“New World Towers” was folkier and more esoteric, echoing Albarn’s recent solo work, as Coxon played gentle arpeggios, boosted by backing singers and a string section perched on the small venue’s balcony.

“Go Out,”  the first track to be released from the album last month, followed, sounding punkier and more hypnotic than on record and prompting the crowd to sing along with its “oh-oh-oh-oh” refrain. “Ice Cream Man” and “Thought I Was a Spaceman” were more understated — Albarn swished a tambourine as he worked the crowd — before “I Broadcast” took the band into almost “Song 2”-esque noisy guitar territory with Albarn adding his best sneering vocals.

The band — which had earlier played an afternoon warm-up set for family and friends — looked relaxed and up-for-it throughout the rapturously-received show, with Albarn in particular in rabble-rousing mode. Things slowed down again for “My Terracotta Heart,” featuring falsetto vocals from Albarn, before “There Are Too Many of Us,” which premiered online Friday , brought an “Out of Time”-style downbeat lyrics/uplifting tune double whammy, with Albarn saluting drummer Dave Rowntree during its military beat-driven coda.

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Bassist Alex James took center stage at the start of the lightly funky “Ghost Ship,” while the post-punk beats of “Pyongyang” – a new song about Albarn’s visit to North Korea – showcased the band’s experimental edge.

“Ong Ong,” meanwhile, is the most instantly catchy song Blur has written in years, powered by “na-na-nas” and a rowdy chorus of “I wanna be with you.” Fans immediately sang the chorus with gusto to Albarn’s evident delight. The group ended the set with the moody final song “Mirrorball.”

“I hope you’ve got something out of it,” said Albarn, before announcing “Trouble in the Message Centre,” the evening’s sole old song taken from 1994’s classic Parklife album. Albarn said the band hadn’t played it live for 20 years, but there were no signs of ring rust as Coxon punked up its jerky riff and the frontman sprayed the pogoing crowd with water before bowing as he left the stage.

Blur will next take a bow in front of a rather larger crowd – its next scheduled show is at the 65,000-capacity British Summer Time festival in London’s Hyde Park on June 20th. The Magic Whip is set for release on April 28th.

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1. “Lonesome Street” 2. “New World Towers” 3. “Go Out” 4. “Ice Cream Man” 5. “Thought I Was a Spaceman” 6. “I Broadcast” 7. “My Terracotta Heart” 8. “There Are Too Many of Us” 9. “Ghost Ship” 10. “Pyongyang” 11. “Ong Ong” 12. “Mirrorball” 13. “Trouble in the Message Centre”

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