Bigger Than the War

On August 14, 1995, two singles landed in British record shops simultaneously. Blur's "Country House" and Oasis's "Roll With It" went head to head in what the NME called the Battle of Britpop, a clash that made the TV news and divided the country along vaguely class-based lines. Blur won the sales battle by 58,000 copies. Oasis won essentially everything else: the album, the cultural moment, the Knebworth shows that drew 250,000 people over two nights, and the decade-long argument about which band mattered more. Blur bassist Alex James later said Blur won the battle, Oasis won the war, then Blur went on to win the whole campaign. It is a good line. The more accurate version is that Damon Albarn won the campaign by eventually refusing to compete in it at all, and by the time he was done, the Britpop war looked like a very small argument about a very limited idea of what British music could be.

What Britpop Actually Was and Why Albarn Outgrew It

Britpop was a movement built on nostalgia and geography. It looked back at the British Invasion, the Kinks, the Small Faces, the mod era, and insisted that this specific lineage was the authentic heart of British music. It was joyful and parochial in equal measure. Blur arrived at it almost accidentally, having started as a shoegaze band before Parklife turned them into something more explicitly English. Oasis arrived at it by being exactly what they were: working-class Manchester kids who worshipped the Beatles and were not embarrassed about it. Both bands were genuinely great within those parameters. The parameters were the problem.

Albarn understood this before most of his contemporaries did. By 1997, as the Britpop party was curdling into self-parody and Tony Blair was photographed shaking hands with Noel Gallagher at Downing Street, Blur released 13, a fractured, emotionally raw record that had almost nothing to do with the chirpy English pop of Parklife. It was influenced by American lo-fi, by noise rock, by the dissolution of Albarn's relationship with Elastica's Justine Frischmann. Graham Coxon's guitar playing became distorted and confrontational. The album was greeted with critical respect and commercial indifference by a public that had come to Blur looking for something else. Albarn did not adjust course. He accelerated away.

Gorillaz and the Invention of a New Thing

In 2001, Albarn and artist Jamie Hewlett released the first Gorillaz album under the name of a fictional cartoon band. The concept was to make the music the story and hide the creators behind animated avatars. The music itself was unlike anything in the British rock tradition: a fusion of hip-hop, dub, electronic production, alternative rock, and pop melody that drew on influences from across the globe and made no reference whatsoever to the Kinks or the Small Faces or the British Invasion. It featured collaborators including Del the Funky Homosapien, Dan the Automator, and a host of others who had no connection to the world Britpop had mapped out. It sold 17 million albums across the first two records alone. "Clint Eastwood" and "Feel Good Inc." became global hits that sounded like nothing else on the radio.

The Gorillaz project demonstrated something about Albarn that no amount of Britpop success could have: that his creative ambition was genuinely boundless in a way that his contemporaries' was not. The Gallaghers were magnificent within a clearly defined lane. Albarn had no lane. He was interested in everything and willing to follow that interest wherever it led, regardless of whether the destination made commercial sense or fit any existing category. Demon Days in 2005, produced by Danger Mouse, is one of the most fully realized albums of the 2000s by any measure, a coherent artistic statement that moves from hip-hop to orchestral pop to punk to soul without losing its identity for a single track. It was nominated for the Mercury Prize. It deserved to win.

Mali, Bobby Womack, and the World That Britpop Ignored

In 2000, Albarn went to Mali on an Oxfam commission. He recorded with kora master Toumani Diabaté and guitarist Afel Bocoum in Bamako and released the result as Mali Music in 2002. It was not a vanity project or a credibility exercise. It was a genuine act of musical curiosity from someone who had grown up in a household where his parents listened to blues, Indian ragas, and African music, and who had never fully left those sounds behind even during the height of Britpop. The Mali sessions led directly to Africa Express, the initiative Albarn founded in 2006 to bring African and Western musicians together in collaborative performance. Over the following years Africa Express grew into something significant, recording in Kinshasa, staging concerts across two continents, and producing the album Maison des Jeunes in 2013.

The other project from this period that demands attention is Bobby Womack's final album, The Bravest Man in the Universe, released in 2012. Albarn wrote and produced it, working with one of the great voices in the history of soul music at the end of his life. The record is tender and strange and completely unlike anything else in either man's catalog. It is the kind of collaboration that happens only when both parties are operating without ego, and it stands as one of the more quietly extraordinary things Albarn has attached his name to, which is a competitive field.

The Good the Bad and the Queen, and the Opera Years

In 2007 Albarn formed The Good the Bad and the Queen with Paul Simonon of the Clash, Simon Tong of the Verve, and Tony Allen, the Nigerian drummer who had defined the Afrobeat sound alongside Fela Kuti. The self-titled debut album was a meditation on London, on belonging and displacement, on what the city had become in the years since Britpop had claimed it as its spiritual home. It was produced by Danger Mouse. It was also, in its quiet way, a rebuke to the entire tradition Britpop had constructed: here was a record about Englishness that required a Nigerian drumming legend to fully tell its story.

The opera years ran parallel to all of this. Monkey: Journey to the West, a stage production co-created with Jamie Hewlett, debuted at the Manchester International Festival in 2007. Dr. Dee, a baroque opera about the Elizabethan alchemist and astrologer John Dee, followed in 2011. Wonder.land, a Lewis Carroll-inspired musical, came in 2015. These are not side projects in the way that rock musicians usually produce side projects, the holiday album or the acoustic record recorded between tours. They are fully realized works in a completely different medium, requiring a completely different set of skills, produced alongside everything else Albarn was doing simultaneously. The breadth is genuinely staggering when you lay it out sequentially.

The Argument for Albarn

The Britpop war comparison is fun but it misses the point. Oasis were a great rock band. Blur were a great rock band. Noel Gallagher is one of the finest melodic songwriters of his generation. These things are true and they coexist easily with the argument that Damon Albarn is something categorically different from both of them. He is not simply a better rock musician. He is a different kind of artist entirely: a composer and collaborator and cultural bridge-builder whose work has crossed more borders, engaged more traditions, and produced more genuinely unexpected results than almost any other British musician of his era.

The catalog Albarn has assembled since 1991 includes nine Blur albums, eight Gorillaz records, two Good the Bad and the Queen albums, multiple operas and stage productions, film soundtracks, the Mali and Kinshasa recordings, the Bobby Womack album, Africa Express, and two solo records under his own name. That is over forty albums of material across thirty-five years, almost none of it repetitive, almost all of it produced with genuine creative investment. The Britpop war produced two great bands who made some of the best guitar records of the 1990s. Albarn took the credibility he earned in that war, decided it was not enough, and spent the next three decades demonstrating what enough might actually look like. He is still going. He has not found the ceiling yet.

Explore Blur on Sonic City