Whipped into shape
After a long hiatus, British band Blur returns with a brand new Hong Kong- inspired album, The Magic Whip.
GETTING stranded in a foreign country sucks. Just ask Chris Brown, who was not able to leave the Philippines for three days last month due to a fraud claim made against him.
Blur, however, decided to make the best of its unfortunate situation when the band was stranded for five days in Hong Kong in 2013. Blur was supposed to play at the Tokyo Rocks festival but the event was cancelled at the last minute. Unable to leave the city, Damon Albarn, Alex James, Graham Coxon and Dave Rowntree decided to spend their remaining days there jamming together, even playing new material and demos.
This resulted in the band recording a few tracks at Avon Studios in Kowloon – a pretty much impromptu decision, but one that bassist James and guitarist Coxon were glad took place.
At a press conference in Hong Kong recently, James talked about the 2013 incident, or at least he tried to. “There was so much material, it was five days of solid playing. But we’ve spent so many years playing together that we were able to do a big chunk of recording in a very short space of time.
“That’s really how they used to do things before recording studios became sophisticated with all that technology. Just a bunch of cats ... really good musicians just banging away,” he shared.
That pretty much explains how The Magic Whip, Blur’s first album in 12 years since Think Tank in 2003, was conceived. And recorded. Soon after returning from Hong Kong, Coxon teamed up with producer Stephen Street – whom he worked with on his solo projects – to see if they can polish off the “album”.
“I knew him and trusted him. I knew that he was meticulous and had a good eye for detail. He knew when we were playing well and also knew to edit out the rubbish that we put on ( the initial recordings),” said Coxon.
Reports claim that Coxon secretly got James and Rowntree in the studios to work on the new material first, before revealing the end product to Albarn. Coxon revealed that he had another reason for wanting to work on the recordings: “I was bored! I think there were other nicer reasons for doing this, but initially I was just really, really bored.”
Coxon also seemed pretty bored and awkward at the press conference, but perhaps these are just Coxon’s signature traits, a stark comparison to James’ more approachable personality.
Coxon continued: “I didn’t want to get so far away from ( the new music) and at those jam sessions, I couldn’t really connect properly. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for everybody, really. I suppose in a way I was quite selfish – I just wanted the board all to myself and kind of kick things about.”
Albarn went back to Hong Kong soon after that to again get inspiration from the city and its people, and fine tune the lyrics to some of the new tracks. He was there during Occupy Hong Kong and some critics say that he successfully described what the situation was like and the emotions felt during the protests in the album.
“I know that for people here it means quite a lot that I mentioned it. Because it’s difficult to talk politically here. That’s why they like this record. It’s done abnormally well here. There will be a lot of people here tonight who were at the protests, so it will be interesting to see the reaction,” Albarn noted in an interview with The Guardian, shortly before the full- house concert at the Hong Kong Convention And Exhibition Centre.
“In England, in the 1990s, there was a comic of us in one of the papers. It was about how we bonded and there was a nice image of us with our arms around each other, naked. Which is of course what we do before every set, in a sauna or something. We just wanted to do our own comic with the nice colours and graphics, like the ones you have here. It’s a bit like Flash Gordon and A Hard Day’s Night, innit? No? Maybe not,” Coxon rambled on when a journalist asked about the comic book by Hong Kong artiste Kongkee that was inspired by The Magic Whip.
“I think if I’m totally honest, the comic was a cynical marketing device. I think it’s very nice, I’m very pleased we have a comic, I think we were well represented in it. I think it’s something that’s pertinent in Hong Kong. We were told there’s a very big comic book culture here, so we thought it would be nice to do it.
“When you’re promoting a record you’re looking for things to sort of support it. It wasn’t a big artistic torment, it’s just a nice little thing that we thought people would like it,” explained James.
Later that night, the band kicked off the concert with a heady mix of strong tracks from The Magic Whip and older tunes like There’s No Other Way and Badhead, which the audience lapped up excitedly. Throughout the 90- minute show, it was clear that there were three sides to the crowd – one that loved everything about Blur, one that probably only discovered the band via The Magic Whip, and one that was more familiar with Blur’s hits from the 1990s. Not a problem, though, as the band seemed to know just where to place each track on its setlist.
With a colourful backdrop showcasing ice cream cones much like the one on The Magic Whip album cover, the concert also featured songs like My Terracotta Heart, Beetlebum, Coffee & TV, This Is A Low and Trim Trab, which Albarn said was “a little silly song” to play after Though I Was A Spaceman. The band invited several fans on stage during Parklife; Albarn even obliged to a selfie snap or two saying, “No, I’m not doing any of that selfie s***. Oh OK, let’s do one quickly, quickly!”
Before starting on Pyongyang, the lead singer prepared the audience for a more “serious” mood by saying how the track touched on important matters and how everyone should think about it.
Song 2, the perennial favourite of any Blur fan, came and went like a maniacal spurt of energy. It was, in short, the best.
Blur ended its set with 1990s staples Girls And Boys and The Universal.
Earlier, James – who is also a well- known cheesemaker and journalist – noted that he felt the band could not have gone on back then just playing old hits, so he’s pretty chuffed that The Magic Whip was made. “We couldn’t have carried on without new material. I think none of us wants to be one of those people who just fizzles out.
“It’s incredible that these ( Blur’s current promotional tour) are some of the biggest shows that we’ve ever done and we’ve been getting great reviews. I haven’t seen a single bad thing being said about the record, I can hardly contain myself” he said jubilantly. Digi Music Freedom rewards customers and fans.