Unseen photos of Britpop legends Blur on the brink of success

A faded photo of Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon depicts the Blur frontman and guitarist at the pinnacle of a rollercoaster in the USA close to their iconic band’s very beginnings. Snapped by drummer Dave Rowntree, who twists round to capture them right before the ride plummets sharply from its peak, the image is emblematic of the uncertainty of that era, when Blur were perched on the brink of success, exhilarated and anxious in equal measure. It’s one of hundreds of images Rowntree has dug out of long-sealed boxes to bring new book No One You Know to life.

Across its pages, the band is captured on the London Underground, taking the train back and forth between their homes and the studio, faces only half visible beneath mod-ish bowlcut hair styles. They are mmortalised in first class cabins of transatlantic flights, the smokey air harking back to a time when smoking at 35,000FT was de rigueur, and giving the pictures a dreamlike quality. And there are tonnes of backstage shots, featuring the band with instruments and beers in-hand pre-show. The name itself comes from the sign the band’s driver stuck in the front window of their tour bus in those early days, as they drove across the States, through Japan, and beyond. “No one you know,” laughs Rowntree.” It really kept us humble, that sign.”

Though Rowntree was never without a camera in his hand in the first few years of Blur, he was careful not to piss anyone off. “So no bad behaviour or anything like that,” he says. Eventually, his dedication to documenting their early journey trailed off when life on the road became the norm – well before the band shot to fame as crowned princes of the Britpop movement of the mid 1990s. No One You Know comes to a close right before Rowntree, Coxon, Albarn, and fourth member Alex James became people just about everyone knew. But as ‘Britpop 2.0’ takes over and a new generation are going mad for guitar music and pints, it’s a timely snapshot of some of the best to do it the first time around. 

Here, Rowntree talks becoming teen pop sensations overnight, travelling the world, and the importance of never leaving your laundry unattended in Texas. 

Hi Dave! Were you always interested in taking photos? 

Dave Rowntree: Yeah, it’s something I've done since I was a kid, from being about seven or eight. But I was never particularly interested in photography. I didn’t study photographs by other photographers, or read photography books or magazines, or collect cameras or anything like that. But I was always interested in making things, and taking photos was part of that. I never saw myself as a photographer, though. 

The book brings together so many photos – way more than I was expecting. Did you feel like it was important to document everything happening to Blur from the off? 

Dave Rowntree: I think I got so into taking photos from the start because it was that fascinating, kind of mad new life for me – for all of us, really. I started before we’d even been signed, the really, really early days of the band. I was still a computer programmer, Damon was doing various bits and bobs, Alex and Graham were still students. And all of a sudden we were catapulted into this very different world where we were traveling the globe, and had all these fans interested in what we were doing. We went all over the place: Japan, America, South America, all over Europe to all these places we’d never been before. The British music press reigned supreme in those days. You’d be on the cover of Melody Maker but you’d still be playing some grotty venue to 200 people at home, but outside of the UK, being on the cover suggested you were this enormous band, so people took note. We were a tiny band, and our music was quite unfashionable. It wasn’t clear at first that we were going to be the kind of sized band that we ended up being. But I snapped away anyway, because it was all new and exciting to us.

Did the other boys get annoyed with you always having the camera out?

Dave Rowntree: Sometimes, yeah! Damon was a bit annoyed by it now and then, but Graham really played up to it. Alex was okay with it most of the time. I was quite careful not to piss people off where possible, because I didn’t want anyone to say ‘Will you put that bloody camera away?’So no photos of anyone getting up to anything they shouldn’t be, and no intimate photos or anything. 

“I was quite careful not to piss people off where possible, because I didn’t want anyone to say ‘Will you put that bloody camera away?’ So no photos of anyone getting up to anything they shouldn’t be, and no intimate photos or anything” – Dave Rowntree

I’ve got a bunch of undeveloped films in a box somewhere that I’ve had for, like, close to 20 years. Do you still have any more to get developed? Can we expect a second book? 

Dave Rowntree: No, but there were a lot of rolls of film that I sent off to get developed and never got back – in the 80s and 90s, you’d get an envelope from the developer, stick your film in it, send it off, and then a couple of weeks later you’d get the photos back, but sometimes things would go missing and they wouldn’t arrive. I probably would have got them done at some more reputable places, if I’d known they were going to be important! But I guess in those days it always felt kind of throwaway, so what can you do?

Maybe someone has them!

Dave Rowntree: It's possible! But I can't say I'm optimistic, because I'm not. I don't sit by the post box every year, every morning, in hope, kneeling by the front door, waiting for the postman to come, just in case [laughs].

One of my favourite photos from the book is the one where you’re on a Virgin flight to Japan, in first class, smoking. It’s wild that you used to be able to smoke on flights! But you said this marked one of your earliest times travelling so far away. Where is your favourite place to visit?

Dave Rowntree: Oh yeah, it was all bright and shiny and new in those days – everywhere was a new adventure. I really, really love Japan to this day, but in those days, because it was so futuristic, it really felt like you’d gotten into a time machine and travelled 100 years into the future. Now, a lot of these sky-rise cities look more and more similar. But in the 90s, Tokyo had a look all its own. It still does, to some extent of course. 

I also loved the States. None of us had been before, but we’d seen it in films and on TV, like everyone else. So the ordinary, everyday things that Americans took for granted had this kind of mythical feel to us. When we arrived, it felt like Disneyland. What was put on for the tourists, and what was real? You were never really sure. And we saw loads of Europe – I’d never even been to Spain before, and we found that Sweden particularly was very supportive of us. All the travelling in those early days was a dream. 

You mention in the foreword your memory from the beginnings of Blur is pretty hazy. Do you have a favourite photo that helped jog your memory and remember a really amazing moment you’d forgotten?

Dave Rowntree: In some cases it was like ‘Oh yeah, I remember that’ but in others I went ‘Well, who are those people in the picture? Where even is that?’ So it was a mix. But my favourite photos are one of Damon and Graham sitting on the underground in London. They’re both dressed in the clothes we were wearing in the super early days of the band, I think even before the first album was out. We’re probably on the way to the studio or on the way home from it. They’ve both got the haircuts we were signed with, these sort of Mancunian bowl cuts that were really fashionable at the time. They both look great – it’s kind of how I still see them really.

The other one is of Damon and Graham again, and we’re all on a fairground ride in the States. We’re up at the top, teetering over the drop right before you lose your stomach when the carriage hurtles down the hill. There’s the excitement and the terror, and you can see it all in their faces. That was what it felt like being in the band in those days. We definitely felt like we were being launched upwards, but we didn’t quite know what was going to happen. We didn’t know if this moment was as good as it was ever going to get, or if we were going to be superstars, and, to be honest, the former seemed more likely. Indie bands weren’t getting into the charts back then – our first album peaked at number 41. That was one of the reasons I called the book ‘No One You Know’, which our driver put on the front of our bus. 

So what was it like when you suddenly exploded, in the mid 90s, suddenly scoring all these headlines and going to number one? Did you feel prepared for it? 

Dave Rowntree: Not really, even though we definitely wanted to be a big band right from the start. We wanted to be world famous. That was what it was all about – we didn’t want to be a little band playing tiny gigs. It’s amazing how justified success feels, a result of all your hard work, while failure always seems bitter and unfair, isn’t it? But a lot of it came down to being in the right place at the right time, when ‘fashionable’ music had run its course. Most of the bands that followed in Nirvana’s wake were pretty poor, and the scene kind of died both there and in the UK. 

People were looking around for something else, and us, and Oasis, and a few other bands were doing something that sounded a bit more English, a bit fresh, moving away from the Americanisation of British pop music. And as they did in those days, the music press created a scene out of it and gave it some snappy-sounding names, like ‘Britpop’, and we were off. Then our album Parklife did incredibly well and got us awards and loads of international attention. Plus there was the very public feud with Oasis, which put us into the “Country House” chart battle, and subsequently all over the front pages of the tabloids and the headlines of the news. We were catapulted from the bottom rung to the top of an incredibly long ladder, as it turned out. But whether we were ready for it… I don’t think so. Basically overnight, Graham became a teen pop sensation, with all these screaming girls surrounding him, and he found that quite hard I think. Whereas Alex lapped it up. But all that didn’t last. Our music evolved and became a bit too cerebral, really.

“It was all bright and shiny and new in those days – everywhere was a new adventure. I really, really love Japan to this day, but in those days, because it was so futuristic, it really felt like you’d gotten into a time machine and travelled 100 years into the future” – Dave Rowntree

What do you make of Britpop 2.0 and this resurgence it’s having right now?

Dave Rowntree: That’s the first time I’ve heard of it called Britpop 2.0 (laughs). It’s inevitable that people are going to look back and romanticise the past. When I was younger, we did something similar with the 60s, you know? But we filtered out all the shit music that was made in the 60s, and all the rubbish things happening. I made a mental note in the 90s not to fall into the trap of thinking music was great years from then, because there was an awful lot of trash, so much music made for kids. Which there’s nothing wrong with, there’s no reason why kids shouldn’t have music made for them. But are they the songs that are still going to be played 20, 30 years from now? Probably not.

Blur is plastered all over Instagram style accounts and Pinterest boards as fashion icons of the era to take inspiration from now. What do you make of this?

Dave Rowntree: My girlfriend would laugh out loud. I don’t know, really. I always think it’s a shame none of us kept the clothes we were wearing in the old days, because I guess they would have been quite iconic now. What we were wearing helped shape the pop culture of the time, which was largely down to Graham, who was the one who was most interested in clothes. Actually, to be fair, all my old clothes were stolen in Texas, though. We used to have to wash them in launderettes on tour. So I dropped mine in, went to get something to eat, and came back and they were gone.

Even beyond clothes, we don’t have much left – we’ve thrown away all of our stage sets, the early instruments, all this stuff. At one point we were paying through the nose to house a lot of stuff in a storage warehouse, and we met up and were like ‘It’s costing us a fortune, shall we just bin it? No one is interested in it, we’re never going to need it.’ So we chucked it. And then we found out Pink Floyd’s exhibition made more than their tour (laughs).

Do you still take photos when you go on tour now?

Dave Rowntree: No. I stopped a few years into the band. I just got fed up doing it. Life stopped being as new and exciting and dazzling, and the reality of doing it day-in, day-out took over. I just couldn’t be arsed to do it any more. Just like throwing away all the Blur memorabilia. Worst decision ever, really.

What advice would you go back and give yourself or someone else starting out in a band now?

Dave Rowntree: Don’t leave your laundry unattended. Keep taking photos. And try to take care of yourself. Back then it was unfathomable to talk about mental health as a musician, and it was something that went on to feature in my life later on. I should have started earlier. I wouldn’t have listened, of course, but yeah. Look after yourself.