January 30, 2012

Blur's eighth album "Mirror Press" track list announced - 2012

BREAKING NEWS: The tracklist for britpop superstars Blur's new album "Mirror Press" is released on Wikipedia :

mirrorpress, blur mirror press, blur wiki, blur album new

So this is either the real-deal here, or it is someone messing around with information. Blur is supposedly set to produce new material this year, working with William Orbit in January to record and remix some new tracks, but Blur's Wikipedia page has been edited on and off these two days. 

Yesterday, the page for Blur's 2012 album, supposedly called "Mirror Press" has been put up, removed, added back and removed AGAIN from their discography. Now the tracklist for the album has been revealed and the song names are:
  1. Dog Years
  2. Mirror Press
  3. Just Look Around
  4. Nostalgic Song
  5. From a Silent Film
  6. Secret Den
  7. Insomnia
  8. Caster Song
  9. Fable
  10. Growing Nails
  11. On The Road Tonight
  12. Faster Life
  13. Room 101
It seems that some song names are quite unusual (Growing Nails ! ) but this COULD be true. There still hasn't been any confirmation or leakage from the band and their management, and there's no news from William Orbit himself. 

Visit their wikipedia site yourself to see (Click here).  (Edit: It has been removed again. This may just be someone's edit for fun).  

We are just as puzzled as you are - and we're on the watch out for any breaking news right now, this week, about Blur's potential new release. This year is going to be a great year for Blur and us fans and you're very welcome to contact us if anything crops up.

You heard it first on BlurBalls - keep watching this space for the latest updates and anything about their upcoming release (and any Brit Award news - yes Blur are playing!)

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January 22, 2012

Blur to produce new record with William Orbit - 2012

This is possibly the most exciting news of January 2012 - Blur is possibly going to collaborate with William Orbit, another English electronic/ alternative record producer who produced Blur's sixth album "13" in 1999, possibly for a new track / record in the making.


On William Orbit's twitter (click to visit) he tweeted the following messages, one to Graham Coxon and one to World Circuit.


The tweet to Graham Coxon seems to suggest that Orbit is meeting with Graham on March 3rd 2012, for a "vocal session".


Then his second tweet clearly says that he will be in the studio with Damon Albarn from Wednesday.


Blur will be performing at the Brit Awards in 2012, and there has been some speculation about whether there will be a practice gig or some warm-up event, and Damon and the gang has been dropping many hints about possibly making records or even an album !


Something's brewing in the Blur-sphere and us fans are getting hints and leads!


You heard it first on BlurBalls.com - we do find out the latest, most up to date news about Blur and Damon's happenings. Don't forget to share the news and drop us a line about what you think of all these "clues" ?


UPDATE: ITS TRUE - William Orbit is IN THE STUDIO with Blur currently, as of Jan 2012 and producing something new! You heard it first on BlurBalls.com! 


On his facebook page dated 13th January:




He updated his facebook page on 22nd January:


Although this Facebook message could refer to the new Madonna album, he revealed in his earlier tweets (above) that he will be in the studio with Damon Albarn from Monday (January 16th 2012).

Orbit won the Q Awards for BEST PRODUCER for Blur's "13" album in November 1999. He is also best known for producing Madonna's album Ray of Light.

UPDATE 23rd Jan: Dave Rowntree tweeted about meeting up with Graham Coxon and the band on 12th Jan:




Its seems there will definitely be new material on the way! 

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August 29, 2011

Damon Albarn to make first solo album for 2012


Damon's going to make a solo album! Exciting news everyone! 


DAMON Albarn's done a lot in his 20-year career in music but he's still missing one thing from his lengthy CV – a proper solo recording (The Sun)
Now the Blur and Gorillaz man has pledged to follow fellow Britpop hero Noel Gallagher and spend most of next year recording an album of his own.
But Damon has three albums to get out first.
One is a project by Africa Express – a collective of Western and African musicians – recorded in the Congo.
Another is a collaboration with Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers and drumming legend Tony Allen.
The third is a recording of his Elizabethan opera.
After that he'll get to work on his first solo disc so it's ready for release some time in 2012.
A source said: "Damon's finally ready to make a solo album after years of hiding behind cartoon band Gorillaz and working with collectives of musicians.
"He's looking forward to it and his label bosses at EMI are pleased as it's sure to sell by the bucketload."
Although it's bad news for fans holding out on a full Blur reunion – a Damon solo disc is still an exciting prospect.


July 2, 2011

Dave Rowntree - "There are always plans for Blur" - July 2011


Beyond Britpop: Whatever happened to the class of '95?

Pulp are just the latest Britpop band to re-form. What happened to the other musicians who defined the Nineties? Alice Jones from The Independent meets the retired rock stars
DAVE ROWNTREE
Then: Drummer, Blur. Blur have released seven studio albums, including the Britpop-defining No 1 albums Parklife and The Great Escape which sold 2.15 million copies worldwide. Having effectively split up in 2003, they reunited in 2009 for a run of successful gigs, headlining Glastonbury and playing to 100,000 emotional fans over two nights in Hyde Park.
Defining Britpop Moment: Winning the 'Battle of Britpop', beating Oasis to No 1 in August 1995 with "Country House".
Now: Trainee Solicitor. Having worked as an animator for several years, setting up his own company, Nanomation, and producing two series of Empire Square, Rowntree enrolled at law school and is halfway through his training contract at Kingsley Napley, a London firm.
Lives: East London with his girlfriend, a music publisher. He is 47 years old.
'Around five years ago, I was having a mid-life crisis. I lay awake at night thinking, 'Haven't I wasted my life? Hasn't it all been rather trivial? Hitting things for a living, isn't that rather stupid?'.
Then I talked to a friend who was a lawyer. He said his grandfather had sent him to the Old Bailey, saying 'Go and sit there for two weeks and, at the end of it, you'll know if you like law or not'. So I did that and it was brilliant. Everything that my mid-life crisis was telling me I needed, I found in that courtroom.
The space between things with Blur was growing quite wide so I went to one of the leading legal aid criminal firms in east London and did a bit of work experience. I fell in love with it. It was everything I was looking for – genuine hands-on helping of people with serious crises. I went to law school, passed all my exams and in a year I'll be a qualified solicitor. Now I work five days a week. Crime is what I love but I'm unusual in that I quite like tax law, too.
Around the same time I started to get more involved in the Labour party. I'm a local activist and helped David Miliband on his leadership campaign, which was very exciting. I also stood for parliament in Westminster at the last election, though I had no hope at all of winning. It's all part of trying to bring some kind of meaning to my life, arranging it so I'm a giver rather than a taker. What stuck in my craw was the feeling that my life was selfish. I was turning into somebody that I despised.


The band wound down without my permission, because of Graham and Damon falling out. It wasn't being in the band that I hated. I still love doing that and I'm pretty sure that if I could still do it full time, that's what I would be doing. It's all speculative, because to be able to do it full time you have to be a bit younger.
At the time, it was very hard to gauge the scale of what was going on. First we were a tiny indie band and suddenly we were the mainstream, at number one. We became pop stars which wasn't in the plan. Some of us accommodated that better than others. At the height of our success, I used to fly the band around on tour in my plane. It was brilliant – proper rock-star behaviour. These days I share a plane with a few friends. It's an incredible luxury, really, my one nod to stardom.
Otherwise, I felt about a mile from being involved in any kind of movement, even Britpop. The idea that we were involved in a movement, especially one with such a terrible name, definitely wouldn't have appealed to us.
The Hyde Park reunion [in 2009] could have been a disaster. When Graham and Damon put their differences to one side we decided to go into the rehearsal studio and see if the old magic was there. It was clear immediately that it was. But we all had misgivings. I was very surprised at how quickly the first show sold out. It was really nice that people still felt that way about us.
We keep in touch with each other and there are always plans for Blur. But it's quite fragile. We're grown men now and we don't want to ruin anything. If we do anything else, it's got to be interesting. There has to be a good reason."

******

Interesting read, and in particular the part that caught my attention was the bolded red paragraph. At least that's nice to hear, good news for us fans! But we still don't know anything about their plans. 
Here's Justine Frischmann's part in the article. For those who don't know, Justine was the ex-girlfriend of Damon Albarn and frontwoman of Britpop band Elastica. Read below to know what's going on with her.
******

JUSTINE FRISCHMANN
Then: Lead singer and guitarist, Elastica. Britpop's cool head girl who dated Brett Anderson and Damon Albarn. Elastica's eponymous first album entered the charts at No 1 in 1995, then the fastest-selling British debut in history. They split up in 2001.
Defining Britpop moment: Starring on an NME cover alongside Thom Yorke and Brett Anderson in 1994, before Elastica had released an album.
Now: Artist. A graduate of the Bartlett School of Architecture, Frischmann co-presented a BBC series called Dreamspaces. She also collaborated with her old flatmate MIA, co-writing songs on her first album Arular. Last year, Frischmann had her first solo exhibition at the Michelle O'Connor Gallery in San Francisco and this year showed her work at New York's Sloan Fine Art.
Lives: North Bay, San Francisco with her husband, a climate scientist and professor at the University of California-Davis. She is 41 years old.
'Music never felt like a sustainable career to me in the emotional and physical sense. I was never that comfortable in the spotlight. I'm actually a pretty quiet kind of person who needs a lot of peace, calm and stability around me.
When I think of Britpop, I remember how exciting it was to see friends breaking through in such a short time. At first the media's attempts to pigeonhole us all together seemed forced. But the concept of 'Britpop' soon gained momentum and it became clear that it had become an entity in its own right. That redefinition of English music and identity felt important at a time when so much of the popular culture seemed to be coming from America. There was a desire to make work that celebrated where we were living, using our own imagery, vernacular and humour. There was also a softening of boundaries during that era – in a way, Damon working with Phil Daniels had some parallels with Tony Blair representing the Labour party... a reappropriation of traditionally working-class iconography by middle-class intelligentsia.

I left the UK in 2005 to study Fine Art at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. I was ready for a total change, I wanted to leave the UK and go back to school. When we were touring I loved the land in the American West and felt drawn to come back. Naropa is the only Buddhist university in the US. I thought it would be interesting to look at the creative process from a contemplative point of view.
I have a parent who is a Holocaust survivor and the Holocaust is something that, I think, has driven me all of my life. My love of Modern design and aesthetics also comes from my parents, who were influenced by the Modern movement, partly, I believe, because we had lost our family history on both sides.
The only Elastica member with whom I'm in touch is Donna. Last time we spoke she was working as a music therapist. Brett [Anderson] is still a good friend. In terms of the music scene today, I still think that Maya's work [MIA] is interesting. But I'm the wrong person to ask. I live in rural northern California where there are coyotes wandering in the streets. And I don't own a TV."


June 24, 2011

Blur possibly to play in the USA - 2011

American fans watch out - for Blur may play in the USA very soon. 

A featured piece about Dr.Dee has just been published on the Guardian website here

'I'm not a monarchist. But I'm English. And I have an irrational emotion for my country' ... Damon Albarn at a rehearsal for his opera, Doctor Dee. Photograph: Jonny Donovan
As well as new information, Damon talks about Blur, his Flea + Tony Allen album (a bit of work still to do; it's 'largely instrumental') and plans to make an album in a week in the Congo this summer. 

The part that interests us most is of course, the BLUR part. Blur, Albarn says, may reunite again, to play their old songs in the US, though when asked about the possibility of new Blur songs, the reply was  a mumbled "don't know". There is also final work to be done on a largely instrumental album made by Albarn, Allen and the Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist 
Michael "Flea" Balzary.

The whole article is found below. Do read it all.. it's an interesting read and Damon is giving better and better interviews as he progresses. 

----------------------------------------------------------------

It's Tuesday morning in the mess of glass, metal and international retail brands that is modern Manchester, though Damon Albarn has arranged to meet me somewhere very different. Just across the road from the city's Victoria station is Chetham's Library – the oldest public library in the English-speaking world, and a place once frequented by Karl Marx. Inside its reading rooms, there is a beautiful hush.
Albarn, currently sporting a thick beard, is here in connection with someone currently much on his mind: John Dee, the confidante of Elizabeth I, mathematician, navigational pioneer, alchemist and supposed magician who served as the building's warden for 10 years at the end of the 1500s, when it was an adjunct of the nearby cathedral. By this time, having blazed an intellectual trail across Britain and Europe, Dee was at the end of his life, with plenty of controversy and emotional wreckage behind him. One biography sums up his presence in Manchester as a matter of "virtual exile, placing him far outside the orbit of the Queen and her court". His existence here seems to have been forlorn and unproductive, and made yet more wretched by the death of Elizabeth in 1603. He returned to London two years later, but lived for only another three years – though at 82 he hardly died young.
Now, Dee's ghost has returned to Manchester in rather more favourable circumstances. Albarn and the director Rufus Norris have built an "English Opera" entitled Doctor Dee around his story, which will be premiered as part of the Manchester International festival on 1 July. On the other side of town, a company of actors and dancers is deep in rehearsal, while elsewhere the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra is perfecting the score – any time now, they will be joined by a core of musicians, including Tony Allen, the 70-year-old Nigerian drummer whom Albarn credits with a "cosmic pulse". Albarn himself will take an onstage role – delivering, he says, songs that draw lines between Dee's time and our own, centred on "relationships, religion, hedonism, the reinvention of ritual . . . and politics, a little bit. There's a lot going on."
To make things even more interesting, the production is intended to evolve as it's rehearsed and performed, which partly explains Albarn's visit to Chetham's library: when the chief librarian appears with a handful of books once owned by Dee and strewn with his annotations, Albarn reaches for an A4 notebook, and scribbles down at least one line he seems to think might help him with a lyric. "This isn't like making a record," he says. "It changes. And when we present it on that first night, it'll still be in a state of flux."
Alchemy and court intrigue, the linking of two Elizabethan ages, and music that fuses no end of influences: as the Guardian's music critic Alexis Petridis put it in 2007, "to think Albarn was once compared unfavourably to Liam Gallagher . . . These days, that seems a bit like comparing David Bowie to Les Gray of Mud."
The range of his recent(ish) work is dazzling. In January 2007, Albarn released The Good, The Bad and The Queen, created by a band including Tony Allen and the former Clash bassist Paul Simonon, and sprinkled with the same English mysticism that the music from Doctor Dee evokes. Later the same year, there was the premiere of Monkey: Journey to the West, the work of Albarn, the artist Jamie Hewlett and the Chinese actor and director Chen Shi-Zheng. In 2009, Blur temporarily reformed, crowning their return with a performance at Glastonbury; and in 2010, Albarn released the third album by his ongoing pop projectGorillaz, featuring, as always, Hewlett's artwork. And now there is this – his bravest step yet away from the musical mainstream.
The genesis of Doctor Dee dates back at least two years. Alex Poots, the Manchester festival's director, had approached the writer and graphic novelist Alan Moore with a view to involving him in a stage production, and Moore's passionate interest in Dee led to a meeting with Albarn and Hewlett. Albarn had already begun to think about working on an unspecified "heartfelt English piece", and learning about Dee's story hardened his resolve – but Moore and Hewlett then dropped out, leaving Albarn in charge of the project.
"I knew I had a fascination with aspects of history that were slightly more esoteric," he tells me. "I enjoyed history at school. I'd always had a sense of Pagan England. I have very clear memories of getting caught up in a TV series about Robin Hood when I was a kid. And I can remember having a strong sense of imagery from an old monastery in Sussex, near a house we were living in for the summer. This is all a personal thing: my relationship with these aspects of being English. But this story had so many catalysts: it didn't seem like it would be too mad an idea to start thinking in musical terms."
"I do harbour this feeling about my country, and it doesn't come out that often, because I'm off doing other things," he goes on. "Which is great, because that way, it gets stronger, and it's nice to wait till it really needs to come out. So this is more than something I'm doing for a festival. It's been brewing for ages, trying to find its essence."
Albarn's first source of information was The Queen's Conjuror, a much-praised biography of Dee by Benjamin Woolley, published in 2001. "That showed me how little I knew," he says. "The references go all over the place. So I began to say, 'Well, this month I'm going to be reading up on hermetic tradition. Then cabalism, and then Celtic pagan tradition, then the origins of Christianity.'" He says he's still ploughing through a mound of reading that may take five years to complete; the latest book is The Night Battles, an account of witch-hunts in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg.
Drawing one central storyline from Dee's incredible story looks almost too challenging. His life moved from London, to Cambridge, to Belgium, on to the Elizabethan Court, and in turn to Central Europe. His range of expertise was extraordinary, in an era just before science and the occult began to be disentangled. Dee has been credited with the first use of the term "British Empire"; he certainly insisted that England had a legitimate claim to North America, and argued that territorial expansion had to be led by a navy. His story intersects with those of such major Elizabethan figures as Francis Walsingham and Walter Raleigh; he is also believed to have been the inspiration for Prospero in The Tempest, and possibly for Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.
So where to start? Two weeks before my visit to Manchester, as various rehearsals take place around Albarn's HQ in west London, I talk toDoctor Dee's director, Rufus Norris. Part of the plot, he explains, turns on Dee's meeting with Edward Kelley, a mysterious figure said to be one of the Elizabethan period's itinerant "skryers" – self-styled seers and psychics. The pair began supposedly communicating with spirits, and then angels – who, Dee claimed, dictated no end of material to him in their own "Enochian" language, which he transcribed using odd symbols somewhere between runes and Greek letters. Unfortunately, Kelley's chief impact on his life was not nearly so other-worldly.
"It could be argued that in Britain, if not in Europe, Dee knew more than anyone else," Norris says. "And yet he screwed up when it came to the most simple imperative – to look after the thing that's closest to you. In their last consultation with spirits, Kelley gave him the message from God that they should share their wives. And everything fell apart from there. So in terms of how you find a narrative . . . well, the man learned a huge amount, he searched for more, and that search took him out on a precipice, and he fell off the end. It's a tragedy."
The songs that tell the story draw subtly on Elizabethan music, but also, thanks to Allen, on more unorthodox elements. Doctor Dee's core arrangements are built around organ, harmonium, drums, acoustic guitar, a harp-like Malian instrument called the kora – and such European instruments as the viol and theorbo, the latter a lute-like instrument with a long neck. The music is elegant and full of a sense of warmth and intimacy. In west London I watch a piece called "Godfire" taking shape, intended to suggest both the coronation of Elizabeth I and the recent royal wedding – a reference that might make at least some of Albarn's admirers a little uneasy (in 1997, he turned down an invitation to one of Tony Blair's Downing Street soirees, claiming he was "now a communist"). Alluding to the wedding's ceremonial fly-past, its opening line runs thus: "Hurricanes, spit and Tornado, growled over London today." In Albarn's telling, the song reflects the almost subconscious sense of nationhood that sits at Doctor Dee's heart.
"It was strange," he says. "That day, I was up at the top of my studio. My daughter and her mates wanted to watch the wedding there, because the studio has a big TV. So we were watching it, and I was also watching the fly-past happen outside. I'd just heard 'Jerusalem', and there were trees in the Abbey . . . I was moved."
I say that he doesn't strike me as a monarchist. "I'm not a monarchist. But I'm English. And I have an irrational emotion for my country."
Next year, Doctor Dee will play at the London Coliseum, as part of the Cultural Olympiad. Once its Manchester run ends, Albarn is travelling to Congo, to play his part in a project in which DJs and producers will record and sample Congolese music, and aim to complete a record in not much more than a week. Blur, he says, may reunite again, to play their old songs in the US, though when I ask him about the possibility of new Blur songs, I get a mumbled "don't know". There is also final work to be done on a largely instrumental album made by Albarn, Allen and the Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Michael "Flea" Balzary.
And then? I ask him the question in west London, just after he and the musicians have run through another song. Albarn's face breaks into a smirk. "Oh, something that's the opposite of this. The most cheesy pop record ever."
The world premiere of Doctor Dee: An English Opera is at the Palace Theatre, Manchester International festival, 1-9 July 2011. For more details visit mif.co.uk

How exciting! Blur for the USA! 

So stay tuned for more news and subscribe to BlurBalls to get the latest news wherever, whenever you are. 


March 10, 2011

A new Blur album "in progress" ?

Hooligan from the Blur Forums sends news that:

"I was out drinking with a friend who was accompanied by someone who was intimately involved in the making of NDLTR. We were talking about Fool's Day & its relative merits & he let slip that 'it doesn't sound like anything on the new album.' Obviously we pounced on him for more info to which he furiously back-pedalled but the cat was out the bag. So there is a new album on the way, people. Rejoice."


The other forumers and myself included reacted accordingly.



As damon4president puts it, now all we need is for Alex to say something along the lines of, oh, I dunno, 'it was like putting the A Team back together for one last job. We had to bust Rowntree out of law school' for me to consider it confirmed...


Plus, the Summersonic lineup of 2011 features a special secret guest. Could it be Blur ? Would Blur play a few songs at this year's music festival?




Exciting times! I'm impatient and thirsty for more solid news. How about you ? 


March 1, 2011

Gorillaz news - The Fall to be released in physical CD

Several online retailers, including Amazon.co.uk here and Amazon.com here are now listing a release of The Fall on CD, due out 18th April in the UK, on Parlophone, and 19th April in the USA, on Virgin Records. 


No news on the track listing or any packaging details yet, but I'm looking forward to it! 




Rumors of a vinyl record being released to coincide with Record Store Day is also hot on the news. More on this as more news are out! 


Speaking of which, I still haven't completed my The Fall review (BlurBalls style!)... Will do, I promise. Keep reading! 


Would you buy The Fall when it's out? 


February 17, 2011

Blur are back in the studio and recording new material - Feb 2011

Exciting news for you all.


Graham Coxon has explained that Blur are currently jamming in the studio regularly and is very likely to record new material in the year 2011. Earlier this month the guitarist revealed that Blur were reconvening and could "switch a tape recorder on, and even tweeted about Blur meet-ups with the boys

Now he has told NME Magazine about the recording process. Graham explained that the meet-up was one of many the band regularly undertake (a bonding thing!) and was not really for any specific new release. 

"Every now and then we like to meet up and record a few things," he said. "We just do stuff when we feel like it."

Graham - bringer of good news
He added that the band will "definitely" continue to meet up and play music together in this way, but fans shouldn't hold out for new music being released anytime soon. 

Also, as usual, Graham cracked a line to tease us fans. 

"I suppose it might turn into an LP in six years or something," he said. "Meeting up every now and then… maybe turning the tape recorder on and jamming around a few ideas."

Coxon said that even though Blur hasn't planned any releases yet, he had two solo albums to be released in mind. He also mentioned that these are probably going to be the last 2 solo albums released and that they're more "youth" sounding. 


One of the album is also called "A&E"... I wonder what that stands for ? 

Graham met up with the Boys for sugary tea, coffee and TV )
He's also releasing 'Desire', a collaboration song with Paloma Faith and The Coral's ex-guitarist Bill Ryder-Jones, for the promotional music campaign for shoe company Converse in April 2011. 

Exciting times! I am positive we will hear something from Blur in 2011. Perhaps a surprise single or even a complete album will spring up, but one thing's for sure: Blur are back, older, wiser, better and with much more surprises in line.

Who knows what will happen? 

Read the full article on NME and check out my early coverage of this speculation-turned-truth

What's your reaction to this piece of news? Mine's:


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