‘13’: The Story Behind Blur’s End-Of-A-Century Masterpiece

“It was the best thing we’d ever done”

Titled Tender, the finished version of the song would be as startling an album opener to 13 as Beetlebum had been to Blur: Coxon’s opening lo-fi guitar melody sounded all the more fragile for having been recorded through a Dictaphone, while the band created a beat by dropping planks of wood on the floor. Realising he needed to bring something entirely new, bassist Alex James swapped his patented pop bounce for a more sensitive bassline played on a double bass, while Albarn – having reportedly immersed himself in Otis Redding’s music – delivered a devastating vocal. Bringing the song’s soulful undertones to the fore, the group topped it off with a guest turn from the London Community Choir, whose repeated encouragement, “Come on, come on, come on/Get through it,” added to the fervour of a song Albarn described as “a celebration of love found and lost but not forgotten”.

“As soon as they started singing, it was instantly and obviously a No.1 record,” James wrote in his memoir, Bit Of A Blur, rightly clocking Tender as one of the best Blur songs of all time. “I’d never been so certain of anything.”

Released as 13’s lead single in February 1999, just three weeks ahead of its parent album, Tender was kept off the top spot by Britney Spears’ … Baby One More Time. But, having nailed the song early in the album sessions, it gave Blur the confidence to keep pushing forward.

“Everyone encouraged the emotional blood-letting”

Further encouragement came from their new producer, William Orbit. Fresh off the back of his work with Madonna on the all-conquering Ray Of Light album, and delivering what Blur felt were the standout moments on their then recent remix collection, Bustin’ + Dronin’, Orbit’s background in electronica helped take the group’s new material far beyond anything they had released before.

Though there was some trepidation about leaving their longtime producer Stephen Street (The Smiths, Morrissey) after a career-defining five-album run together, Blur also knew their new material needed an outsider’s ear. “It was such a personal thing going on, we needed to have someone who didn’t really know us,” Albarn said at the time. “William was a bit like a psychiatrist through all of this. Everyone encouraged the emotional blood-letting.”

If 13’s penultimate song, No Distance Left To Run, distilled those emotions into the most fragile-sounding Blur song to date, the album’s more uncompromising moments came out of hours’ worth of lengthy jams worked up in a drab warehouse in West London (the specific room they’d hired, Unit 13, gave the record its name) and the group’s adopted safe haven of Reykjavík, in Iceland. With Orbit then editing the recordings into something more closely resembling structured songs, the band were, Coxon realised, hearing their music “as someone else would hear it”. The experience was “a revelation”.

“The way we were able to instantly conjure an arrangement knocked him out”

Under the strain of such emotional intensity and the demands of trying to keep their music unified amid an increasing number of new influences, experimental recording techniques and disparate individual interests all jostling for space on one record, Blur’s interpersonal relationships began to suffer. But while all involved have agreed that 13 was a challenge to complete, a decade together as a band had honed their musicianship to near-perfection. When they all plugged in, they managed a unity rare in even the most road-hardened of groups. Alex James recalled Orbit’s later admission that “the way we were able instantly to conjure an arrangement without talking about it had completely knocked him out. It had taken us a long time to be able to do that.”

One of a clutch of songs to look to faraway horizons, Battle sounds like a missive from an interplanetary craft, circling around a looped drum beat, mumbled lyrics and Coxon seemingly running a one-man insurgency with an array of combative guitar noises. Floating up from the melee, Albarn repeats the title word in falsetto, giving way to the suggestion – or perhaps decision, or capitulation – “Battle someone, ooh.” Elsewhere, Caramel takes Battle’s space-rock into zero gravity and Trimm Trabb lays these excursions on top of a mournful melody in which Albarn, though namechecking a pair of “flash boys” vintage Adidas trainers in the title, concludes, with bereft lethargy, “I’ve got no style/I’ll take my time/All those losers on the piss again/I doze, doze away/That’s just the way it is.”

“I wasn’t even looking at the guitar, I was just stomping on pedals”

Admitting to displaying erratic behaviour during the 13 sessions, Coxon later recalled, in the documentary No Distance Left To Run, “I was really out there around 13, which made for some pretty great noise, but I was probably a bit of a crap to be around.” But while the guitarist thrashed it out on the Blur-patented pop-punk of Bugman and B.L.U.R.E.M.I., he also delivered a slice of perfect pop balladry with Coffee & TV.

With lyrics that found the guitarist seeking a quieter life far from the damaging circus of fame – “Take me away from this big, bad world/And agree to marry me/So we can start over again” – Coffee & TV nestled just outside the UK Top 10 when it was released as the second single from 13. Its promo video, in which an anthropomorphised milk carton struck out in search of a “missing” Coxon, became an instant hit, winning Best Video at both the MTV Europe and the NME awards. Perhaps wary of making the song sound too sentimental, Coxon deployed a freewheeling guitar solo that hit like a caffeine rush, and which was later praised by NME for being “a string of discordant notes, building to a storm of haywire string-bending”.

The guitarist himself had a more nonchalant appraisal: “I just put something there because we wanted to fill a gap, and said, ‘We’ll come back to it,’ and the song developed, so we kept it… I wasn’t even looking at the guitar, I was just stomping on pedals.”

“Blur have finally found a sound to match their name”

Released on 15 March 1999, 13 was, in Alex James’ words, “as highly acclaimed as it was difficult to make”. Topping the charts in the UK, the album’s success also suggested that Blur’s fanbase – having gleefully accepted the earlier challenge of the Blur album – were willing to follow the group wherever they wished to go. With brief instrumental interludes providing handbrake turns at the end of songs – such as the 30 seconds of mangled funk-rock that snuck up at the end of Caramel, or the extended organ loop of the album’s closing track, Optigan 1 – clearly, there was even more in the can. Meanwhile, Albarn, who had obliquely namechecked Sun Ra’s free-jazz classic Space Is The Place during Bugman’s coda, gave a hint of the altogether new direction he’d be going in the following year, delivering Trailerpark in a narcotic half-rap that would be further developed for Gorillaz’s 2-D character.

With just months left until the dawn of a new age, 13 was as much a manifestation of pre-millennium jitters as it was a glimpse of a world to come: fragmentary, built upon a collision of sounds, data, images and yowls from the void. As timely as anything Blur had released during their breakthrough years, it also, as Pitchfork observed, “kept one step ahead of expectations” as the group “finally found a sound to match their name”.

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