Damon Albarn says Oasis has finally beaten Blur – but he knows it’s not true
As Oasis made their long-awaited return to Manchester for the first of five live shows at the city’s Heaton Park, a very different concert, both in sound and spirit, was taking place in Barcelona. At the Parc del Forum’s Festival Cruilla, Damon Albarn – Blur frontman and former arch nemesis of the Gallagher brothers – took to the stage with his passion project Africa Express, the groundbreaking cross-cultural musical collaboration he co-founded 20 years ago.
Joining him were 50 artists from four continents, including South African musician and dancer Moonchild Sanelly, Mexican singer Luisa Almaguer and Jupiter & Okwess, a five-piece Congolese funk band led by legendary musician Jupiter Bokondji.
The same day, Africa Express celebrated the release of their new album, a fusion of Latin pop, hip hop, reggaeton and traditional African sounds recorded at last year’s Bahidora Festival in Mexico.
Friday’s performance was the final stop on a five-date tour that began on 5 July in Denmark. For Albarn, it represented a small fraction of his packed 2025 schedule, which began with him debuting a new electro-opera, The Magic Flute II: La Malediction, in Paris. Based on the sequel Goethe wrote to Mozart’s original in 1807, but which was never set to music, the endeavour was nothing if not wildly ambitious.
He has also been working on a new record from Gorillaz, the virtual band he shares with the artist Jamie Hewlett, due to be released next year. Encompassing four different languages, it will be the group’s first album since Cracker Island in 2023, the same year Blur reformed and released their ninth album, The Ballad of Darren.
Just like Oasis, Blur also performed a reunion gig at Wembley Stadium two years ago to an ecstatic audience of 90,000 who sang every word of their hits back at them. For my generation, teenagers during the Britpop era, the past few years have been a nostalgic delight, as all the “big four” – Blur and Oasis, Suede and Pulp – have played triumphant shows.
Thirty years on from the media-inflamed Battle of Britpop, which peaked with the chart war between Oasis’s single “Roll with It” and Blur’s “Country House”, the recent reunions have been a chance to reflect on the bands’ legacies, as well as what they’ve done since.
In a recent interview, Albarn made a pretty definitive statement about the Blur vs Oasis rivalry: “I think we can officially say that Oasis won the battle, the war, the campaign, everything. They are the winners. They take first place. In the face of such overwhelming evidence, I am happy to accept and concede defeat.”
But while he was magnanimous in this acceptance, noting “It’s their summer”, in reality, the gulf between their trajectory and Blur’s has never been more obvious, nor the fact that they were never really fighting the same war at all.
Liam Gallagher and Damon Albarn during a charity football match in Mile End, London, in 1996 (PA)
At the height of Britpop, the received wisdom was always that although Blur had won the battle (beating their rivals to No 1 in August 1995), it was Oasis who won the war, going on to greater commercial success while Blur explored more experimental sounds.
The frenzied scramble for tickets to Oasis’s comeback gigs, fetching up to £6,000 on sites like StubHub, proves their commercial appeal remains as strong as ever. But look a little closer at the detail and an altogether different picture emerges.
While Noel’s solo project High Flying Birds and Liam’s Beady Eye have often sounded like subpar versions of Oasis since the band split in 2009, the projects Albarn has poured his talents, energy and insatiable curiosity into have been increasingly creatively challenging.
As Blur’s guitarist Graham Coxon says: “His drive and his work ethic – he’s like a shark that doesn’t stay still. He keeps going and doing.”
And in contrast to the financial motivation many assume to be behind Oasis’s reunion, Albarn’s ventures have been underpinned by an integrity rare in showbusiness.
Blur accepting the Q award for Best Album of the Year in 1994 for ‘Parklife’ (PA)
The son of artists who grew up in Leytonstone and Colchester, Essex, Albarn’s ambitions were starkly different from the Gallaghers’ from the start. Where the latter proclaimed they wanted to be the biggest band in the world, the level of fame Blur achieved after their third album, Parklife, caused Albarn to suffer panic attacks.
“I don’t think we’ve ever really been motivated by being the biggest,” he has said, describing fame as “not a sane kind of state of mind”. Instead, “I always try to make something as good as I possibly can.”
From the late 1990s onwards, Blur’s music became increasingly interesting, as they moved away from what Noel sneeringly dismissed as “Chas & Dave chimney sweep music”, and Albarn’s growing interest in electronica and world music went on to feed into his work with Gorillaz and Africa Express, too. The former, an innovative concept made up of fictional cartoon avatars, was born in 1998 as a commentary on the slew of Svengali-created boybands emerging at that time. “We were like, well, let’s make a manufactured band, but make it interesting,” he said.
The group’s success has been extraordinary, racking up 11.2 billion streams on Spotify. Its many collaborators include Noel Gallagher, with whom Albarn is now close friends following a rapprochement in a nightclub in 2012. “I think I was getting served first, I got him a drink and it went from there,” said Albarn.
Liam Gallagher during the Oasis reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park (Big Brother Recordings)
Gallagher appeared as guest vocalist and guitarist on the 2017 Gorillaz song “We Got the Power”, as well as joining the group on tour to support its album Humanz. “I value my friendship with Noel because he is one of the only people who went through what I did in the Nineties,” Albarn said, proving how far he’s come since the days Noel said he wished he would die of Aids.
Africa Express emerged from another evening in a bar, this time in Covent Garden in 2005, where Albarn and other musicians raged at that year’s Live8 concert, which proposed to end African debt and poverty while finding room for only one African artist, Youssou N’Dour, on the bill.
Rankled by the condescension, Albarn co-founded the organisation with the journalist Ian Birrell and embarked on an open-ended series of gigs featuring collaborations between musicians of diverse cultures. “If I have a hope of being of any use to anybody, it is giving people a platform,” he gave as his reason for starting it in an interview last weekend.
Western musicians who’ve performed in Africa Express events over the years include Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Johnny Marr and Bjork, playing alongside similarly revered African musicians including Baaba Maal, Oumou Sangare and Fatoumata Diawara.
In contrast to the reductive label of “world music”, which revealed how African music was often treated as “exotic” or “other” in the Western music industry, Albarn wanted to showcase the diverse artistry in Africa on its terms.
Oasis receive their ‘Best British Newcomer’ award at the 1995 Brits from Kinks lead singer, Ray Davies (PA)
The organisation is a non-profit funded by grants, sponsorship and ticket sales, meaning every artist is compensated fairly. “It’s about creating something together – not about ‘helping’ anyone,” said Albarn. “Everyone is here as equals.”
The difference it’s made in shifting African musicians out of the margins has been genuinely meaningful. As he says, “at its very best Africa Express shows what communication between cultures can achieve”.
Never shy about voicing political opinions, he’s spoken out about issues including Brexit and Palestine, but his statements have become far more considered in recent years. He’d like Africa Express to play in both Palestine and Israel, he says, “to bring people together”, and he has condemned the punk band Bob Vylan’s inflammatory chanting of “Death, death to the IDF” as “one of the most spectacular misfires I’ve seen in my life”.
Blur’s other members are no slouches either, their diverse experiences outside the band proving that they’re four highly intelligent men, for whom success has meant the freedom to stay curious and keep exploring their passions.
Coxon, Albarn’s artistic soulmate in many respects (although the pair have had periods of falling out), has released numerous solo albums, playing every instrument and designing all the cover art himself, scored films and formed a band with his wife, Rose Elinor Dougall.
Much to fans’ amusement, drummer Dave Rowntree trained as a solicitor during a Blur hiatus in 2006, working at the City firm Kingsley Napley. He has also owned a computer animation company and been a Labour councillor, although he failed in his attempt to get elected as an MP last year.
Albarn (centre middle) with members of his Africa Express organisation (Camila Jurado)
And, of course, bassist Alex James is now a well-known cheesemaker, hosting The Big Feastival every year at his very big house in the country (where he’s been known to hobnob with neighbours including Jeremy Clarkson: a fact Albarn puts down to James being “a bit silly”.)
Even Blur’s reunion was a very different affair to Oasis’s, Wembley gigs notwithstanding. The jury’s still out on whether Liam and Noel’s relationship will really last the distance, and there are no new plans for a new Oasis album.
By contrast, Blur released The Ballad of Darren, a highly acclaimed, deeply reflective record believed to be largely informed by Albarn’s split from his partner of 25 years, artist Suzi Winstanley. Making new music together clearly meant a huge amount to a band who consider themselves a family, even if they aren’t related by blood.
“For a certain amount of time, you can just go out there and play the hits, but you can’t keep doing that,” Alex James told me when I interviewed him last year. “If it wasn’t creatively satisfying, then we wouldn’t be inclined to play together again. Making the album made it so much more rewarding.”
Even the set list had to be different for every show, he added, because “Albarn’s got such a short attention span you’ve got to keep changing it up otherwise he’s f***ing left and written another opera before the end.”
It’s this spirit of creative hunger – always chasing the next idea, never sitting still – that reminds us elements of Britpop were so much more interesting than the Cool Britannia caricature. The spotlight may be on Oasis this summer, but long after it’s faded, it’s Blur who’ll still be worth keeping an eye on.
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