BLUR’S last performances at Coachella in California concluded with a sense of uncertainty.
Famously an influencer haven obsessed with style over substance, the festival crowd’s lacklustre response to the Brit band’s first set in 2024 saw frontman Damon Albarn exclaim: “You’re never seeing us again.”
Blur have more music left to give, says drummer Dave Ronwtree Credit: Getty
Dave documented the band’s early days on his trusty Olympus camera Credit: Getty
But two years on, drummer Dave Rowntree, 62, reveals the band parted ways at the airport in high spirits and is confident they will return.
“I think there’ll be something else,” he told The Jattvibe. “There’s nothing in the diary, but you can’t read anything into that. There’s never anything in the diary.
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“So we all finished the last tour thinking, well, that worked pretty well, that was fun, and we haven’t always felt that at the end of three years of touring.
“So I seem to remember us at Heathrow picking up our bags, giving each other a hug and saying, ‘we’ll do that again’.
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Blur’s huge fame felt like it happened ‘overnight’, according to Dave Credit: Getty
The band played two sold-out shows at Wembley Stadium in 2023 Credit: Getty
“That’s my take on it, that it’s a question of when rather than if, but of course you ask the other people in the band, they may give you a different answer.”
The band’s last album, The Ballad of Darren, was a commercial and critical success, with its melancholy music and intimate lyrics striking a chord with fans who propelled it to number one in the UK chart — their seventh consecutive chart-topper.
In 2023, the band performed two emotional sold-out nights at Wembley Stadium, which reduced Albarn to tears after performing Under the Westway.
The triumphant stadium double-header would have been an incredible swansong for a band that, three decades ago, teetered on the brink of succumbing to the alt-rock scrap heap.
Dave’s photo book was named after the rollsign on Blur’s US tour bus Credit: Supplied
Graham Coxon and Damon Albarn ride a roller coaster during a break from performing Credit: Supplied
Dave documented those heady days on his trusty Olympus OM10 camera, capturing the intimate, exciting, and occasionally mundane moments in-between gigs shared with his ‘brothers’ Albarn, Graham Coxon and Alex James.
They were finally released to the public last year in his debut photobook No One U Know which is the focus of an exhibition at Indelible Fine Art in Brighton right now.
The title is based on an acerbic joke by the driver of a tour bus in the States who changed the rollsign on their bus to the phrase to deter endless questions about who was actually on board.
“The mood in the early days was of remorseless ambition and the thrill of doing all these things for the first time,” says Dave.
“You know, world tours and recording and interviews and TV shows and making videos, all of that kind of stuff we were doing for the very first time at the time when I was taking these pictures. So that’s the most exciting time, to do all this stuff for the first time. Over the years, that kind of thing became routine.
“And by the time we were successful, we’d already been doing that kind of stuff for a while. But the success happened very, very suddenly. We went from being incredibly unfashionable to the main fashionable band almost overnight, it seemed to me, around the time of Parklife, when suddenly we started to win awards and we started to have actual proper hit singles, and suddenly the mainstream of music just flipped to accommodate us.
“We were being ignored, ignored, ignored, ignored, and now we’re the real deal, now we’re the main event, which was very, very weird. Suddenly our audience changed, again, seemingly overnight, from indie kids to screaming girls. It didn’t last long, they moved on.”
The drummer is the oldest member of the band at 62, while the other three are all in their mid-to-late fifties.
He admits to still viewing his friends as boyish 20-somethings before the occasional “glitch in the matrix” exposes their middle-aged reality.
It’s the joyful enthusiasm of youth that really strikes a chord with him when he looks at his old photographs.
“I remember it being really exhausting and draining,” he says. “I don’t remember what fun it was. What bursts out in these pictures is the fun we’re all having.”
Post-Millennium, the band’s recorded output slowed. They’ve released just three albums since 1999 — Think Tank (2003), The Magic Whip (2015) and The Ballad of Darren (2023).
Fans might have craved more over the years, but the lengthy breaks have kept the mood in the Blur camp fresh and creatively abundant.
“I suppose these days it’s almost full circle in that we don’t do it enough for it to be routine anymore,” says Dave.
“So we’re back to the thrill of playing together and things being a very exciting idea, the band getting back together, and us being in the studio again. We only do it every five years or so, so it’s a real pleasure to play with these people and rediscover their musicality.
“We’re all making music still, so we’re all developing as musicians. It’s really interesting to get back together again and see how our musicality has changed.”
That quest for development and new sounds also emanates from Dave’s own listening habits.
“I couldn’t stand to listen to my era of music, it would drive me up the wall,” he says.
A modern favourite of his is Canadian math-rock duo Angine de Poitrine, the viral polka-dot aliens who have taken social media algorithms by storm this year.
“They’ve got these custom instruments that play notes in between the notes. When you describe what they do, you think, ‘oh, that sounds terrible’, but it’s brilliant.
“It rocks, it’s experimental, but you can dance to it and throw yourself around to it and it’s just brilliant. And also they look absolutely extraordinary.”
Beyond hits like Country House, Coffee & TV and Song 2, Blur’s music is more experimental than they’re often given credit for.
But Dave doesn’t mind if fans want to focus on the more commercial hits.
“I’m certainly not someone who thinks that we should have been regarded in a different way.
“You know, we’ve done what we’ve done. The music there speaks for itself,” he says.
“If people want to delve deeply and see the nuances of what we’ve done, then, you know, I certainly support that. But if people just want to listen to the hits, that’s absolutely fine.
“And the same for Radiohead. They’re famous for a couple of tracks. You know, even for them and for us, the tracks they’re famous for aren’t representative of the body of work in any way because their work and our work is so diverse, really.”
When it comes to songwriting, Dave says he always thinks the band’s tracks will “dominate the world” after first hearing the completed versions in the studio.
“You invest your heart and soul in it, really,” he says. “And so you come out really, really proud of it and just as convinced as you can be that everybody else is going to see the genius of it as well.
“So really the opposite is true for me. It always takes me by surprise when a track isn’t a massive worldwide hit.”
His career has taken many sharp turns over the years including two attempts at running for Parliament as a Labour Party and time spent as a solicitor for law firm Kingsley Napley.
Currently, he classes making TV and film soundtracks for big shows like The Capture and Bros documentary After the Screaming Stops his ‘day job’.
Adapting to a normal working schedule took some getting used to, he admits he kicked against the concept of a ‘regular job’ his entire life, but the deadlines help fuel his creativity and the music-making method feeds into his other projects.
One of those is in progress now, the follow up to Dave’s debut solo album, Radio Songs.
“I definitely will put out another album. Yes, I’m supposed to be working on my solo album in August,” he says.
“That’s as far as I’ll go. This is a busy week. But yeah, that’s my plan, to make some progress on that solo album this month.”
The recording sessions will be followed by Dave heading out for a number of solo in-conversation shows, including at the Edinburgh Fringe, where he’ll share more Britpop tales.
