Blur: 13 - a 25th anniversary retrospective
To celebrate its 25th birthday, I revisit the best album in Blur’s catalogue.
I say best rather than favourite because the sprawling, unsettling soundscapes of 13 aren’t always my preferred listen when the jaunty pessimism of Modern Life Is Rubbish or the soaring strings of The Ballad of Darren are also part of the Blur offering. Released on the 15th March 1999, 13 signified Blur’s biggest departure from their Britpop roots after 1997’s grungy self-titled record. Gone are the cheeky references to Sunday lunch, park pigeons, and dissatisfied youth; 13 is Blur at their most self-hating and introspective, Damon Albarn’s lyrics concerned with mental rather than 20th century breakdown.
Its woozy surrealism made 13 my album of choice when travelling last summer. The album has this liminal quality, an obsession with the past and a desperation impulsion towards a distant and seemingly impossible future that makes it an ideal companion for the delirium experienced on an Wizz Air plane at four in the morning. On Parklife Albarn sang of the ‘End of a Century’, but it’s only on 13 that this sense of imminent collapse is reflected in the band’s music: the record’s sonic landscape is firmly dystopian.
With longtime producer Stephen Street swapped out for the more experimental William Orbit, the mixes are characterised by oversaturated guitars and anxious drum beats, eschewing radio-friendly hooks for expansive soundscapes. Composed while Y2K loomed on the horizon and relations between the band members deteriorated as a result of alcohol and substance abuse, the resulting record is simultaneously disoriented, furious, and languid. Featuring their longest songs yet, with both ‘Tender’ and ‘Battle’ exceeding the seven-minute mark, the tracks don’t so much end as disintegrate into one another.
Due to the subject matter, 13 isn’t an easy listen. Heartbroken after his breakup with Justine Frischmann and battling a dependency on heroin, Albarn’s lyrics display a weary fragility that perfectly captures the grief experienced at the end of a longtime relationship. This is explored best on the underrated tenth track ‘Caramel’, the title referencing the colour of the drug and the lyrics exploring Albarn’s exhausted efforts to recover (‘I’ve got to get better/Will love you forever’).
However, all band members get their chance to shine on the record. Dave Rowntree’s drumming reaches a perfect frenetic pulse on ‘Trimm Trabb’, and Alex James’s bass lines stutter through the background of all the tracks like an anxious drugged heartbeat. Guitarist Graham Coxon takes the mic on a lead single for the first time on radio favourite ‘Coffee & TV’, one of the only commercially viable songs on 13. Don’t let the catchy chords and the iconic cartoon milk character in the music video fool you: even this track is about struggling with alcoholism and isolation (‘You’re empty/Holding out your heart/To people who never really/Care how you are’). It’s testament to Blur’s enduring popularity with the British public that this deceptively sad song is now a staple of commercial radio, as popular today as the more upbeat ‘Girls and Boys’ or ‘Parklife’.
But the genius of 13 lies in this commitment to exploring the human psyche at its most bleak and vulnerable. Even more high energy tracks like ‘Bugman’ and ‘Swamp Song’ are composed in sour minor keys and drowned in wails manipulated from Coxon’s guitar. ‘Trimm Trabb’ is my personal favourite of the record, a track that slowly builds to an astonishing crescendo where Coxon lets rip and Albarn’s distorted screams echo over the top.
Coxon later commented on the song, “I love the bit where he [Damon] howls, because it’s a bit like an existential fucking howl, the emotional pain of the overwhelming thing of the mundane.” By the end of the record, Albarn seems to have come to terms with this existential emotional pain after battling with it through the previous eleven tracks. In ‘No Distance Left to Run’ he accepts heartbreak and loss, expressing hope that his former lover will find ‘someone who makes you feel safe in your sleep’.
It’s a haunting conclusion that also marks the end of Blur as the world knew them at the time. Coxon’s alcoholism would become so debilitating that he would leave the band during the recording of their next album, 2003’s Think Tank, not to return until their 2009 reunion. 13 is almost a historical artefact, a literal record of the pain the band were going through in the late 90s.
Looking back on it from 2024, when a reunited Blur have produced two albums in the past ten years and played Glastonbury, Hyde Park, and Wembley to rapturous acclaim, 13 only becomes all the more poignant as a testament to human endurance in emotional strife, a reminder that no matter how dark life gets there is always light shining on the other side.