FEATURE:
It (Almost) Started with a Bang
Blur’s Leisure at Thirty
___________
PERHAPS Damon Albarn…
might not mark the anniversary of Blur’s debut album, Leisure, fondly - but I think a lot of fans will! Released on 26th August, 1991, we are coming up to the thirtieth anniversary of a great debut. Whilst the band would go on to do better albums that gained more positive reviews, Leisure’s upcoming thirtieth warrants attention! Maybe their lead felt that Leisure was a bit patchy and contained little of the genius Blur would be known for. Some might say that Damon Albarn, Dave Rowntree, Alex James and Graham Coxon were very young and they were finding their feet. I actually really like Leisure and feel that it is an album that is very underrated – I have written a feature specifically on that theme before. Rather than repeat my fairly recent piece about Leisure, I want to mention a few features about the album. Of course, we associate Leisure with the two big singles: She’s So High and There’s No Other Way (the third single, Bang, was released in July 1991). Both are classics in the Blur cannon. They are baggy and catchy; not quite as clever and layered as later Blur work, though pretty decent for early singles! In October 1990, the album’s opening track, She’s So High, was released as a single. It is weird that it only got to number forty-eight in the U.K. Maybe competition was stiff that month, though one feels that the song is good enough to crack the top twenty! Listening to it now and I feel it holds up. One of those songs from the early-1990s that remains fresh and important.
Leisure’s second single, Bang, is an excellent follow-up to She’s So High. The other single, There’s No Other Way, is my favourite track on the album. Released in April 1991, it got to eight in the U.K. and snuck into the US Billboard Hot 100. I guess Blur were slightly better-known by 1991 and had greater commercial appeal – or There’s No Other Way hit people harder and is catchier. At twelve tracks, maybe Leisure could have been trimmed slightly. There are some terrific deep cuts that one does not hear much about. Repetition and High Cool are gems. I like the entire album and think that it is the sign of an exciting band who would very soon be among the most popular in the U.K. One cannot easily compare the Britpop albums Blur produced that competed with Oasis between 1994 and, say, 1997. Although Oasis started out stronger with 1994’s Definitely Maybe, Blur were definitely a better and more popular back by 1997 – they released their eponymous album whereas Oasis released the overblown and over-long Be Here Now. Five years ago, Albuism revisited Leisure. They remark how solid it is. Whilst not classic Blur, one can hear a band finding their way with excellent results:
“Blur, Oasis, Pulp and Suede. These are arguably the most successful bands to emerge from England’s Britpop movement of the early to mid 1990s. A subgenre of alternative/pop rock that placed heavy emphasis on infusing “Britishness” within the music, Britpop was born out of the ashes of the Manchester scene and represented the antithesis of the emerging American grunge scene that was slowly making its way into the UK.
Formed in London in 1988, Blur—comprised of Damon Albarn (vocals), Graham Coxon (guitar), Alex James (bass), and Dave Rowntree (drums)—toured Britain with American punk/rockabilly legends the Cramps two years later in 1990, testing out material that would eventually appear on their debut album Leisure. After the tour was over, between October 1990 and July 1991, Blur released three singles. The first single, the trippy, quasi-psychedelic “She’s So High,” only managed to reach number 48 on the UK Singles Chart.
After adding producer Stephen Street to the mix, their second single “There’s No Other Way” became a big hit in the UK, peaking at number 8. Although the third single “Bang” did not fare as well, the band became bona fide pop stars in the UK and, according to NME, “the acceptable pretty face of a whole clump of bands that have emerged since the whole Manchester thing started to run out of steam." The band would later find out that being touted as the next big thing is not necessarily the most desirable tag for a new band with aspirations of career longevity.
Leisure peaked at number 7 on the UK Album Charts. Despite their newfound stardom, the LP received mixed reviews from the British press and was largely ignored in the States. The early release of the three singles had, in effect, rendered the album’s eventual release anti-climactic. One of the album’s chief detractors is Albarn himself, who described Leisure as “awful” back in 2007.
I could not disagree more. Heavily influenced by The Charlatans (UK) and The Stone Roses, Leisure is a great snapshot of a band trying mightily to find its voice. It does not deserve the Cousin Oliver (google it) status that has been placed upon it. What the critics—and perhaps even the band themselves—had no way of knowing at the time was that Leisure was a stepping stone for Blur. Indeed, on the strength of their subsequent releases, the foursome transformed into one of Britain’s most beloved acts of the past 25 years, while they still enjoy a very loyal, somewhat cult-like following here in the US.
Even though Leisure is very much a product of its time, it still holds up as a rather solid debut album. In the early ‘90s, the music scenes here in the states and abroad were struggling to find a definitive sound. In hindsight, Britpop was the ‘90s version of American New Wave. It was a marketing tool devised to categorize a sound derived from a genre that was either losing steam or simply not accessible to the masses. In America, it was the commercialization of punk. Record execs removed the safety pins and the gobbing, replacing them with catchy hooks and camera friendly lead singers. In England, it was much more complex. The Manchester scene had simply died out with nothing to replace it. Blur just happened to be caught in the middle of this transition.
While there are admittedly weaker, un-Blur-like tracks such as “Birthday” and “Wear Me Down,” Leisure was intriguing enough to make you wonder, at the time, what the band would do next. I had a similar feeling when I first heard U2’s debut Boy. You just knew they could do even more. You knew something special was coming down the road. You just needed to be patient. There’s something quite special about discovering a band at its genesis”.
Although some feel Leisure is a product of the early-1990s, there are songs that are relevant now. Even so, this once-young album turning thirty is very strange to me! I was at secondary school when Leisure came out. I was kind of aware of Blur in 1991, though I got a better understanding of them by the time of 1994’s Parklife.
In 2019, Classic Pop looked back at the Blur catalogue. Few articles are entirely glowing about Leisure. That said, most people have something constructive and positive to say. This is what Classic Pop observed:
“But while Damon Albarn’s versatility as a songwriter over the past three decades has often been viewed as dilettantism – he can flit effortlessly between pure pop to punk, music hall to cultured balladeering – the quality of his work has been astonishing. When the public sat up and took notice of There’s No Other Way, firing the band into the Top 10, Blur were seen as yet another addition to the current roster of dance-rock bands. But they were so much more than Mondays wannabes and head and shoulders above the likes of The Farm, Flowered Up, Inspiral Carpets and The Mock Turtles.
Leisure has at least two trump cards; Albarn’s singular ability as a songwriter and the immense talent of guitarist Graham Coxon – along with The Stone Roses’ John Squire and The Verve’s Nick McCabe, he’s the pre-eminent six-string technician of his era.
Despite four producers having a hand in Leisure, it still feels coherent; no doubt down to Albarn and Coxon’s assured hands on the sonic tiller.
The woozy psychedelia of opener She’s So High impresses and the funky Bang finds Coxon and drummer Dave Rowntree locking down a spectacular spiralling groove. Alongside classic single There’s No Other Way, Sing hinted that this quartet were capable of something rather special, head and shoulders above knocking out indie disco baggy floorfillers; the dark piano-led epic boasted an ambition that far exceeded the material around it.
There’s instrumental grit behind parts of Slow Down as Coxon cranks up the overdrive settings on his amp; Albarn’s innate melodic tendencies given a striking counterpoint with the guitarist’s predilection for throwing My Bloody Valentine-style distorted guitars into the mix – at the time Coxon would check out Syndrome, the Oxford Street basement club favoured by Creation and 4AD bands. Meanwhile, Bad Day is another blatant attempt to write in a baggy style, and Rowntree recycles a similar beat on High Cool. But Albarn’s flair for melancholy is exploited on Birthday; a gentle sting in the album’s tail”.
There is one review I want to bring in for Leisure before rounding up. In 2012, Drowned in Sound reviewed the Blur 21 edition of Leisure (as it came with bonus material):
“While the three singles off Leisure attained varying degrees of success. 'She's So High', possibly the missing link between the psychedelic haze of shoegaze and baggy's post-rave comedown, may have only hit the modest heights of number 48 on release but follow-up 'There's No Other Way' scored Blur their first top ten hit, providing the band with what remained their signature tune until the hedonistic 'Girls & Boys' arrived some three years later. 'Bang', the third and final single off Leisure could quite easily be filed under the title 'Blur's great lost 45' were it not for 1992's 'Popscene' pipping it to the post nine months on. Again, not a million miles apart from a lot of the indie/dance crossover acts of the day except for its lyrical savvy ("Bang goes another day, where it went I could not say, now I'll have to wait another week") and incessant pop hook, it's become something of a classic over the years, significantly improving with age.
It's on the less immediate parts of Leisure that a selection of real hidden gems lie in wait. 'Slow Down' takes the fast/slow/quiet/loud formula employed by Dinosaur Jr (later to be tourmates alongside The Jesus & Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine in 1992) et al for a Home Counties makeover, its riff re-appearing a couple of years later on Modern Life Is Rubbish-45 'Chemical World'. Meanwhile 'Repetition' is arguably the first composition to bear the hallmarks of Graham Coxon's soon-to-become customary guitar sound. The maudlin 'Birthday' and three-songs-in-one 'Come Together' also pour short shrift over those still dismissive of Blur's first long player, 'Fool' too demonstrating Damon Albarn's knack for being able to write a hefty chorus, even back then. Leisure's real highlight comes at its exact midpoint in the shape of 'Sing'. Perhaps best remembered for its inclusion in the soundtrack to Irvine Welsh's 'Trainspotting' and originally only a b-side on the 'She's So High' twelve-inch, even now those simple piano notes causing hairs to stand upright for the song's entire six-minute duration”.
A happy thirtieth anniversary to the underrated Leisure! The start of one of music’s greatest careers, look ahead and all the brilliance Blur delivered! Leisure is definitely not an album one can overlook or write off. Its two big/best-known singles are not the only worthy songs. There are some real diamonds in the pack. If you have not heard Leisure in a while (or at all), then do yourself a favour and spin Blur’s…
INCREDIBLE 1991 debut.