Blur: To The End

I'd love to say that music is my radar for determining someone's artistic sensibilities but given where you're reading this you don't need me to explain that it's film. Here I am, I broadcast, but as Blur themselves sang in For Tomorrow I'm a "twentieth century boy". When Britpop was in its initial ascendency I was elsewhere, my exposure to new music was through the lens of American MOR radio. A pleasant education, to be sure, but people in Europe got better exposure to pap, pop, and everything else that appeared on youth programming on a Saturday morning. That continental presence meant I got to go to St Louis, and though I experienced more than one sub-species of an American day it put me at a disadvantage.

By the time I was of an age to be buying records it was already on the way out, the puritan impulse to righteously acquire subject to the horrors of file-sharing. Now we've ubiquitous streaming, but I'm still at heart a radio guy. Oh, sure, I acquired the Japanese import of Bustin' + Dronin' but that's the only Blur album I own. I think an aunt or uncle got me a copy of Definitely Maybe, but I'm as unsure of its provenance as its title. I listened to late night BBC radio because I cannot stand a commercial break, and when I heard The Fall's Repetition it wasn't just that it was a good song, it was strange news from another star. An indicator towards musical tastes that if given the AV cable would make me the death of a party, until moving on I found the right kind of parties. Not for me the mellow jam, for me white noise, the mirrorball, Morricone. On the way to the club the singular charm of art for audiences older than me, still young and lovely, was there to entertain me.

A lack of knowledge won't help audiences for To The End. There's reference to massive hits and that all the members now own a country house, but while referencing how well documented Blur's past is we don't get any archive footage. There's concert film, from venues that span from arts centre dancehall to the vast beached whale of Wembley. There's behind the scenes as the band come together for a tour, but it becomes clear that for more than one they've had trouble coping.

I did wonder if there's an adage that older musicians don't go to therapy, they go on tour. In some cases, like Metallica they do both. The closest we get to personal lives is that Damon Albarn now lives alone, a hillside pile that's more studio than caravan and in the garden central a chicken coop. Clover over dover is not as sweet, song or two nothwithstanding, as some of the moments between him and his bandmates, but we've a group who have apparently not spoken in years. In some cases the self-examination replaces any editorial criticality, the stereotypes of rock and roll excess replace the actual stories, and while massive success made them starshaped they were still young underneath. Was it that the band broke up? Given how much of it was Albarn's songwriting, was he the man who left himself?

We get Alex James, bassist, cheesemonger, talking about a conversation with his children about a line in an interview that he'd spent a million quid on drink and drugs. That's the extent of the discussion, another moment where something is said quietly, once, when you'd want those behind the camera to turn it up and look inside. America never warmed to the band until Song 2, but their disastrous first tour is only loosely mentioned. A sold-out Wembley show with some half dozen support acts makes it clear that London loves them, but too often To The End leaves things it could make luminous in the shadows.

There are some choices that seem stark, a bit of editing that brings Graham Coxon on screen during a discussion of substance abuse feels a little on the nose. Alcohol played a greater part of Blur's fuzziness than anything else, though the bands songwriting range includes calliope intermissions and a heroin era. Director Toby L was also behind Liam Gallagher: Knebworth 22. While there's discussion of the rivalry with Oasis, also celebrating anniversaries and with a new BBC Sounds podcast charting their rise and fall, there's much less context for Britpop. No mention of the NME, of Melody Maker, of what was going on between Blur, EMI, the rest of the music industry at the time.

In the few clips Dave Rowntree still looks like a calm and solid presence at the back, a comparison that sometimes struggles to find a leg to stand on. Alex and Damon fey and ethereal, Graham's attempts to find space other than as the 'baby' of the band troubled by, amongst other things, the use of a diet coke can. The secret currency of film is luck, and there's very nearly a car crash at the start of this. The lexicon of drone cinematography now very much includes the 'tracking from above' shot, some combination of station-keeping that means we can see the numbers painted on the road encouraging folk to slow down. To go with luck we've its obscene rhyming friend, and To The End is peppered with it and others. Admittedly it's vanishingly unlikely younger audiences will be going to see this, there are young people in the crowds but they're probably old enough to drink themselves. That it's rated 15 is I think almost entirely down to context: the c-word is used and not by an English character actor which is usually the get out.

Of cities we have some mention. London of course, a trip to a Spanish festival, some misadventure between. There's no exploration of a perceived class divide between Blur and Oasis, North (London) and South (Manchester). That Albarn was born in Whitechapel and raised in Colchester is obfuscated by an artistic sensibility that allowed experimentation. That art school ambition had been allowed to become something traitorous to working class authenticity is to the detriment of all involved. One is left scavenging for any criticality in this though, a hungry coyote that's got nothing to nourish it, left to fade away, dizzy with hunger. Editor Danny Abel also worked on that Liam Gallagher concert film but that I think had a more definite goal.

While it does get to the end, it is a meander, and there are some odd choices. The Eastbourne Brass Band playing A Whiter Shade Of Pale isn't one of them. There's some scoring done by frequent Albarn collaborator Mike Smith, who scored pint-sized Arthurian homage The Kid Who Would Be King. That's perhaps unnecessary. A section talking about psychodrama and wanting to be on Top of the Pops is well soundtracked by Popscene, and the chaos of Intermission has been in film before, used to great effect in Baby Driver. It fits well there. Indeed it wasn't until later that I discovered it wasn't a bit of Sixties psychedelic experimentation but from Modern Life Is Rubbish.

They talk about the desire to produce a new album, which "stops it being a nostalgia tour". I did some arithmetic, and when Leisure came out in 1991 the musicians who were the age that Blur are now are folk like Link Wray and Ray Charles. Instrumentals and piano there, and across Blur's catalogue too. Mick and Keith and The Rolling Stones were on hiatus between the Steel Wheels and Voodoo Lounge tour. I won't give you the satisfaction of naming anything from those two albums. Plenty of hard work, but so perhaps is the film. Four men in their fifties, variously given to oblivion, but driven too by a "hunger for the sublime."

There are some compelling phrases. "The 148,000 legged beast," "I haven't got many friends," at what time does that space become distance?" Blur's career arc meant they never did a Bond theme, but the melancholy bombast that runs from Goldfingerto Goldeneye and Skyfall and beyond was well within their means. As a film tribute to the act it is perhaps less original than any of 007's adventures. It's entertaining enough if you're familiar, but without better knowledge of the band themselves it'll feel a bit of a blur, and those who know the history well would want to see more.