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New Blur Side Project Announced
While Damon busies himself with Gorillaz, Alex James has spoken about his current side project Wigwam. However, bass player Alex James has confirmed Blur will be in the studio this month to continue work on their next album.
Speaking to the BBC, James explained he’s currently working on what he calls "the perfect pop product" with singer-turned-pop impresario Betty Boo, aka Alison Clarkson, on a project called Wigwam.
However, he confirmed that while Blur will be back in the studio this month, he admitted that getting back together with his Blur bandmates isn’t always a walk in the park…
"It's like a family and you all get together before Christmas and it's great to see everybody, and then after Christmas - Christmas being an album and the album making process - you're like 'see you next time!' through gritted teeth."
He also revealed that he has his eye on another extra-curricular project.
"I've been talking to Steven Berkoff about turning one of his plays East into a rock musical. It's a fantastic piece of work. He wrote it 25 years ago and it's just so bright and fresh still. I'd love to get involved with that."
Following reports that the new Blur material will be more lo-fi and stripped down than their previous work, James' bandmate Damon Albarn spoke to Xfm recently and explained that fans will probably be able to hear new material from the band pretty soon (if they can find it).
“I think we’re gonna do an EP first, sometime by the end of this year,” he confessed, “But you probably won’t know about it. It’ll just ‘come out’. It’ll be so, sort of, underplayed. It’ll come out but you won’t know it’s us as it’ll be so, well, not us.”
“We’ve got the songs but we’re gonna record them in a few hours and just be very laid back about it. But not musically laid back. It’ll be aggressive. Aggressively laid back. It’s the total opposite of Gorillaz.
"I can’t really make another Blur record that’s a big landscape sort of thing, due to my very basic guitar ability. Cos I want to sing and play so it has to be three chords. I can only do three chords and not look at the guitar.”
Albarn also kyboshed the idea of getting a new guitarist to replace the long departed Graham Coxon saying, “What’s the point? We’d never be able to get one as good as Graham.”
He also admitted that Blur would be playing some live dates towards the end of the year, saying they’d, “Probably do a couple of pubs round Christmas, to be honest with you. It’ll be nice.”
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