The Blur tour Graham Coxon wanted to walk out of
For all of us outside of that world, the vision of touring is a glamorous one.
Big parties, a rotating cast of famous friends dropping in, days and nights spent travelling with your best friends in the band you built, before hitting the stage for hordes of screaming fans. It’s the ultimate sex, drugs and rock and roll image of a life on the road – but as Blur, along with probably every other band, found out, that’s not really the truth.
Let’s zoom in. Let’s focus on the simple image of a tour bus. Instantly, you think ‘wow’. You think of something like the brightly coloured Wings tour bus from the 1970s, or the countless iconic images of rockstars staring out the window or kicking back on the leopard print, silk-sheeted double bed at the back, reserved for the leader and their groupies. You think of something like Almost Famous and this glorious image of a band living wild and free.
The reality is cramped bunk beds and uncomfortable nights driving down some road in the middle of nowhere. Entire days spent simply travelling, trying to make conversation with the same small group of people you’ve been with non-stop for weeks. Add to that, having no sense of where you are, as you feel disconnected from normal life and can’t enjoy simple moments, like waking up and making a cup of tea and some breakfast.
You’re ripped from routine and stuck in a small space with a small group, likely crippled by jetlag or exhaustion, but still partying hard, partly because that’s what you’re supposed to do, but also partly because what else is there to do.
It’s no wonder then that so many bands hit an intense wall of burnout after a tour, or even completely break down and end up breaking up on the road. They’re pushed to their limits, just like Blur were in the mid-1990s.
During their tour in 1994, while they were also trying to record The Great Escape, Graham Coxon felt so out of sorts that he wanted out. “It was a very odd situation, really,” he said. “With ‘The Great Escape’ we were collecting awards and going out and getting drunk when we were recording it.”
He thinks you can hear the exhaustion and weirdness on tape as he added, “I think you can sense a little tension sometimes, there’s a kind of despair there. We were smiling when we wanted to be screaming. I was getting sick of the glibness, the jolliness of the music.”
Because the reality didn’t feel like that. In 1994, after the release of Parklife, the band were obscenely busy. They were zipping around Europe and the States, dropping back into the UK to do appearances, heading to London to record, then hitting the road again. In 1994 and then in 1995, when The Great Escape was finished and released, the band played over 140 shows across the world. In short, they were knackered.
“It seemed absurd to me to be on the road doing things like ‘Country House’ when I felt like just shoving my guitar through my amp and running offstage,” Coxon admitted as he felt like he was at the end of his tether. But there was a silver lining, adding that it was at least “probably good for the live versions ‘cos it made them really punked up.”
