The highs and lows of Blur’s ‘Leisure’ tour
In 1991, London-born Britpop connoisseurs Blur released their debut LP, Leisure. The record, which frontman Damon Albarn has since dismissed as “awful”, received a mixed response upon release but did make it into the chart, selling over 100,000 copies and kickstarting their foray into the mainstream. Famously, Leisure featured the hit singles ‘She’s So High’ and ‘There’s No Other Way’, the latter of which gained the band instant popularity.
To promote Leisure further afield, Blur embarked on a tour of the same name, which took the band on over 50 dates across the United States, Europe, and Asia. While it was an exciting moment for the group, the tour was to send them and their label into financial disarray, collecting a debt in excess of £60,000.
Reflecting on the problems, bassist Alex James shared details of the story during an interview with Blink-182 member Mark Hoppus for his podcast After School Radio on Apple Music. He said: “I think part of the problem with Leisure was that… I don’t know whether you had this with your band, but our first manager was kind of like our mate, and it turned out he wasn’t very good at managing after all.”
When they were releasing Leisure, he explains, each member quickly realised that they didn’t have any money: “We had to sack the manager and get a sensible business manager, but we had a tax bill that we couldn’t pay,” he said. “It was really serious.” The unpaid tax bill meant that Blur had to call in a favour to allow them to tour America. At the time, the band were on an indie label called Food Records, who, James explains, were “able to apply some pressure to the American label SPK for them to back this enormous tour of America”.
The record label bankrolled the tour, which James calls “incredible”. The “13-week steeplechase, going absolutely everywhere” took them from clubs in northern towns like Warrington and Preston to venues in New York and Osaka. James recalls getting an advance on T-shirts and merch royalties so they could pay their debts and “have some fun” in the States, but confessed that it was “really strange”.
Alongside the debt they were quickly incurring with the record label, James recalls that Nirvana’s iconic second album, Nevermind, was released the day that Blur set out on tour. Nirvana were bringing a new alternative grunge sound to the States that differed hugely from Blur’s distinctive Britpop with Madchester and shoegaze influences. US crowds were increasingly drawn to the darker side of alternative music, and many of the crowds they played to were unimpressed by their sets.
In 1993, frontman Albarn suggested that Americans were annoyed by how “very, very, English” their new music was. He told NME: “We felt ‘Popscene’ was a big departure… But that annoyed a lot of people… We put ourselves out on a limb to pursue this English ideal, and no one was interested”. Increasingly homesick and humbled by their failure to engage US audiences, the band started to have issues internally. A tour that had once seemed like a dream had instead created rifts between the band and plunged them into a debt that would take nearly thirty years to repay.
Fortunately, the commercial and critical success of Parklife was just on the horizon. The 1994 album revived their place in alternative music, went four times platinum in the UK, gained a Mercury Prize nomination and has since become known as one of the defining records of the 1990s. Despite the commercial success of their follow-up records, James notes that the band only finished paying the record label off for the tour “about two years ago. We were paying them for years”. A lesson, if ever one was needed, that business and pleasure should be kept apart.
