Blur drummer reveals that some of his bandmates loved them becoming a “boyband”: “We’d gone from indie kids to screaming girls”
While 1994’s Parklife served as Blur’s breakout record, the band only began to understand the gravity of their newfound fame the following year. Thirty years on from The Great Escape, drummer Dave Rowntree recalls how 1995 marked Blur’s shift from a humble indie group to a chart-topping “boyband”.
In a new interview with Classic Pop, Rowntree notes how The Great Escape saw the band’s main demographic of fans totally change. “We’d gone from indie kids to screaming girls,” he recalls. “Some members of the band found that wonderful, others regretted it.”
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While Blur have never been a boyband – they play their own instruments, for a start – they were a group of charming young lads in their 20s. Once their Britpop and indie tunes hit the mainstream, girls quickly took a shine to them, covering their walls with posters and dreamily obsessing over Damon Albarn.
“It had never occurred to me that we could fit into the boyband mould,” Rowntree laughs. “We knew Take That reasonably well, and of course they consciously played up to it, [but] we never had. To have it suddenly coming our way was interesting.”
While Rowntree notes that the hysteria “didn’t last” for too long, the group experienced their own mini version of Beatles-mania. One such incident happened in Spain, when the lads were escorted from a radio station, while another saw bassist Alex James and frontman Albarn being locked inside of a shop in Florence while police sent away crowds of rabid fans.
“It was very exciting, as every band wants to be The Beatles,” Rowntree notes. “We weren’t the first or the last band that happened to, but those were hairy, crazy times.”
Regardless of the new mania that surrounded them, the band were more excited about the doors that the fandom was opening for them. More fans meant selling more tickets, which meant bigger, more ambitious shows. “We worried if we could fill these stages just by being ourselves,” Rowntree admits as he reflects. “[But] we loved building stage sets that Damon could interact with in interesting ways.”
Rowntree picks out one of the band’s more ambitious ideas, which took place during Dan Abnormal. “We came up with some pretty berserk ideas,” he explains. “For example, ‘McNormal burgers’ were hid in the rafters, before they were lowered over audiences… We wanted everything as big and bold as possible!”
The Great Escape (30th Anniversary Edition) is out now.
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