How Blur Kept The Magic Whip A Secret The Old-Fashioned Way

For Australian fans of London outfit Blur it's been a long time between drinks indeed, in pretty much every way imaginable. They've not only been starved of new music from the much-loved Britpop sensations for over a decade, but Blur - who were originally announced as headlining the Big Day Out in 2014 before cancelling mysteriously at the 11th hour - haven't played a single show in Australia since 1997. Now both of these oversights are being rectified, and understandably hardcore fans are beside themselves with anticipation.

But there was plenty of saga before the eventual redemption. Having dominated much of the '90s with their cavalier attitude and string of hit albums, Blur had struggled following the departure of founding guitarist Graham Coxon in 2002, releasing one further album - their seventh, 2003's Think Tank - before splitting altogether and going their separate ways.

"We had absolutely no money, yet we were flying first class around the world playing shows ... We used to call ourselves the 'poverty jetset'."

The original line-up reunited in 2009 and have since been playing sporadic gigs and festivals, yet despite the rumour mill running rampant the announcement last February of the imminent release of their eighth album, Magic Whip, still came as a shock to many. Even then, as it turns out, the album's very existence owes as much to accident as it does design.

"It was recorded in a very different way than any of our previous albums," explains Blur's drummer Dave Rowntree. "We started doing the recording process in Hong Kong, where we had a week off because the next show on the tour had been cancelled. We thought we'd spend that week in the studio just like we used to in the old days, so we just ended up recording about 40 hours of material in total in those sessions. The album grew out of those sessions really.

"A week really isn't long enough when you're in Hong Kong to go home, do anything meaningful and come back again - we were mid-tour and our flights were booked out of Hong Kong at the end of the week - so our options were to spend a week being tourists or spend a week being musicians. Usually if you give musicians the choice between those two they'll pick the music option, because that's where we have most fun - making music. We kind of jokingly said, 'Well let's see if we can make an album in the week,' and of course that was a joke because that would be completely impossible - but we did put down the foundations of the album in the week, and this is possible.

"And you never know how these things are going to pan out; it could have been fun but unfruitful, and it could have been fun but not sounded like an album - maybe it would have turned into a film soundtrack or some singles to put out on Record Store Day, who knows? It wasn't until 18 months later when Graham went in and had a listen to what we'd done that it became clear to him that it actually could be an album."

The Hong Kong sessions had essentially been left to fester until prodigal son Coxon enlisted producer Stephen Street - who'd overseen Blur's big quartet of albums Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993), Parklife (1994), The Great Escape (1995) and Blur (1997) - and the pair saw enough promise to drag the rhythm section (Rowntree and bassist Alex James) back into the studio to embellish the existing music, while frontman Damon Albarn returned to Hong Kong to recapture the original mindset for the lyrics. For Rowntree, the crux of Magic Whip can be traced back to those original Hong Kong sessions.

"It all worked like it used to in the old days. What it was most similar to was the very early days of the band. In the first four or five years of our existence we had absolutely no money - we didn't have two beans to rub together - yet we were flying first class around the world playing shows and doing all this stuff and we used to call ourselves the 'poverty jetset'. We'd fly first class to Berlin, stay in a top hotel, then fly home again and not have enough money for a cup of tea when we got there. We used to loot all of the stuff in the hotel rooms, all of the tea bags and the shampoos and everything so we had enough stuff to get by when we got home.

"I actually came back to Australia and spent nearly two months there - I hired a car and drove up and down the east coast and I had the time of my life."

"So we made friends with a local studio owner and we had an arrangement whereby every day we'd spend in the studio he would buy us a pizza each and a packet of cigarettes, plus of course there was all of the tea and coffee you could hope for in the studio so really our life was made! Every day where we weren't doing something else where somebody would buy us lunch we were in the studio. That was why the early days of Blur were so insanely productive - night and day we were always in the studio turning out demo after demo after demo after demo.

"[The Magic Whip sessions were] pretty much like that. The studio in Hong Kong wasn't a bad studio - it was a basic small studio, much like the basic studio we used to work in back in London. We fell into the rhythm of putting down lots of ideas very quickly, which was something that we'd learned to do back in those days, which is why we managed to churn out such a large amount of ideas really. I think we had 40 hours of material by the time we came out of the studio, and I think we had 15 or 20 individual song ideas, some of which will probably never see the light of day, some of which morphed into new ideas and were reworked and some of which are pretty much there on the record with some patched-up vocals as we did it in the day."

There was even some good old-fashioned subterfuge involved as the band kept news of the new album quiet until a matter of weeks before Magic Whip dropped, no mean feat in this technological age.

"The whole project was kept secret up until February of this year," Rowntree smiles. "That was the idea, partially for practical reasons and partially because we thought it would be fun to see how long we could keep it a secret for. To be honest I didn't think we could do it - I was convinced we wouldn't be able to keep the secret beyond Christmas really. The music industry is the worst industry to try and keep a secret in - everybody knows everybody else's business, and everybody wants to blab your business to the newspapers - so I thought if we could keep it a secret until Christmas we'd have done really well. But, gobsmackingly, the story didn't break until the day before the announcement! We didn't do anything special to keep it a secret, we just didn't tell anyone - we did it the old-fashioned way!"

On a personal level, Rowtree's friendship with Coxon pre-dates Blur's 1998 formation so he was particularly excited to have his mate back in the fold. "Absolutely, absolutely," he admits. "It was essential really - we tried it without him and it wasn't really Blur. It was good I think, but not Blur."

Now all of that's in the past, Blur are finally winging southwards to headline their inaugural Splendour In The Grass, as well as hosting a couple of their own shindigs.

"No one's more excited than us I can tell you - we're absolutely thrilled to bits that we can put straight what went wrong last time we tried to come down there. [The extended absence was] just the way things panned out. We absolutely loved the time we spent in Australia, and we've all talked about it ever since. After that tour I actually came back to Australia and spent nearly two months there - I hired a car and drove up and down the east coast and I had the time of my life. I was just staying in little hotels along the way, and along that coast road there are wildlife reserves for every type of animal you can think of - from kangaroos and koalas, right through to spiders and lizards - so I just went and saw all of this berserk and amazing nature, and I learned to dive on Lizard Island and did a lot of scuba-diving on the [Great Barrier] Reef. Then we ended up in Tasmania, and that whole island is like a nature reserve! It was absolutely amazing, so for me Australia has always been a really special place."