"I made a point of drinking two bottles of champagne a day for eighteen months. England only imports something like 100,000 bottles a year so I reckon I drank 1 percent of England's total champagne import." - Alex.
"We rarely actually finished a gig, completely. There was always a point where everything... I either got trashed, I'd be sick, or somone'd get hit over the head, or the electricity would go. It was almost a sort of failure if we got to the end of a gig, really." - Damon on the early days.
"Pop stars shouldn't act, just like actors shouldn't sing." - Robert Carlyle, leading actor in Damon's film debut "Face".
"We were totally convinced of our genius, but are getting less and less so as the years go by." - Alex.
"We're bigger than the holes in Swiss cheese." - Graham.
"Alex is God with a fringe." - Adam Benzine, member of Blur fan club.
"Irony is just saying things that aren't true for comic effect. But people then assumed that everything we were saying A) wasn't true and B) we were just saying to be funny." - Dave.
"There's always been a bit of a hip-hop element to my trousers." - Damon.
"Graham Coxon is a total wanker [because he didn't kiss her on the cheek when they met]. He has a confused mind and he can stick it up his tiny arse". - Justine Frischmann, to which Graham responded: "Kissing people on the cheek is so last century."
"It was more Levis than the other chart stuff which was kind of cyber wear." - Graham on "Tender".
"["Tender" is] a tribute to how important something was in my life. It's a celebration of love found and lost but not forgotten." - Damon.
"I saw these four lunatics jumping all over the place, falling over, and thought: 'Don't know why, but this is good!'! - Andy Ross, Food records, on first seeing Seymour.
"The best thing about being in a band is that you can allow your insanities to develop. And get paid for it." - Alex.
On the time at Goldsmiths with Damien Hirst and Sam Taylor-Wood- "We spent two years staying up all night, doing performance art and talking about Willem de Kooning. We used to say in a snidey way "there's a lot of genius wandering round here", and in a way, it turned out there was." - Alex.
"...Iggy Pop fronting the Monkees..." - "What's on" magazine describing Blur in 1990.
"I'm very sexy in the morning." - Damon.
"When you're young you don't mind being pretentious, but it gets a little bit embarassing as you get older." - Graham.
"I'm really enjoying my thirties. I spent my whole twenties going nuts, but being completely pissed isn't such a good look when you're 32 as when you're 22. Wait til you're my age and you'll be running round the park." - Alex.
"What do i think of the new Blur album? It's brilliantly patchy. I think 'Trimm trabb' is amazing. 'Coffee and tv' is my kind of song. And I think 'Caramel' is amazing. Even with my naive knowledge of drugs, Caramel must stand for drugs. It's a good career move - distancing themelves from the rat race. They seem a bit more mythical for doing it." - Nicky Wire, Manic Street Preachers.
"In our minds we were making reasonably left-field, arty pop music. And yet we were getting screamed at as if we were a bunch of tough guys singing ballads with a dance routine. Graham got upset. Alex liked it. I just thought it was really inappropriate." - Dave on the "Parklife" hysteria.
"We're contemptible show-offs. We change with the wind. We're good-looking and we say we are. We're clever and we say we are. We're not clever and we say we are." - Alex.
"Great company is the most precious thing there is." - Alex.
"Graham is a real fan. He hardly dared talk to me. But the French magazines sitll managed to make up some story about us. And Damon is so cute, he looks just like my son." - Francoise Hardy.
"Be careful doing that floatie thing!" - Graham.
"...when Kurt Cobain died, one of the things that surprised me was how upset everyone was - whatever their background. It showed me how fragmented the world is all the rest of the time, and if there's a key to the Nineties I think it's that perpetual insecurity. Never have people thought so hard about their lives and come to such indecision, or felt further apart. We're powerless and confused - by politics and work and sex and even things like morality. It there's going to be an epitaph for the Nineties, it will be 'By the end, we all felt like victims'." - Damon.
"Working with Graham Coxon, it began to dawn that I had met the best guitarist I'd worked with since Johnny Marr. I rate him as the best guitarist around. He plays things Johnny wouldn't even think of." - Stephen Street, Blur's (ex-)producer.
"It's got more to do with working hard than being a genius, that's the thing that gets to me. I thought you just had to be a genius." - Alex.
"We couldn't really play that well when we were signed. We could hardly get through a full show without Damon being sick or things getting unplugged and ruined. God knows why we were signed on the strength of that." - Graham.
On Damon and Graham's daughters - "For every baby song, I'm gaving an aeroplane song. - Alex.
"In their bass player Alex they have a dickhead of such magnitude that even Gazza seems bearable." - some Scottish magazine in 1990 (see "3862 days").
"Women are f**king amazing creatures." - Damon.
"I think all music is good really." - Alex.
"Blur are really pretty good. But it ain't the future. Blur are merely the present of rock and roll." - Andrew Collins, NME reviews "Leisure".
"We just can't resist being silly." - Graham.
"I've always known I'm incredible special and if I didn't think we were the best band in the universe I wouldn't bother." - Damon
"I don't mind Blur, they're a good pop group. I know they beat us to Best Indie Band in the Smash Hits poll, I'm glad they did. We're not a bloody indie band - we're a rock group. And anyway, we've only been at it a few months, whereas Blur have been going for four years, and they've only just got Indie band of the year this year. That's sad. They beat us to Best Album as well? Aw, we'll come back and get 'em next year." - Liam Gallagher to Smash Hits in 1994.
"What is 40 ft long, has no pubes, and screams dead loud? The front row of a Blur concert!" - Alex.
"When I'm 60, I want to be a cool old man." - Graham.
"Blur did great. I was looking at them thinking, 'Look how drunk they are!' Good luck, Blur, man. Excellent. Nice one." - Marti Pellow of Wet Wet Wet on the Brit Awards 1994.
"The first time I stayed at Damon's, he took me for a drive and crashed, and then told me he didn't have a driving license - so I had to tell his mum I did it." - Alex.
"[on William Orbit] I didn't get told to f***ing grow up, which I have done in the past. So I liked him." - Graham.
"They're a great pop band. "Girls and boys" was a good pop song, you know? But they're not as good as us." - Liam Gallagher.
"Once you've mastered the basics of one instrument, you discover that they all speak the same language. It would be great to go on the road with them all, but it's not exactly rock. Plus, you can't smoke while you are playing them." - Alex.
"I don't think anyone who has ever counted drinking amongst their hobbies has never kissed a man." - Dave.
"Damon's such a pop tart!" - Justine Frischmann.
"Being in a band is rubbish." - Damon.
"The thing I really like about this band is that every time I walk out of my door I bump into Graham, no matter where I am! That always reassures me." - Alex.
"He's so attractive, oh really he is... Ahhhh... How nice-looking is he!" - Francoise Hardy on Damon.
"When our third album comes out our position as the quintessential English band of the 90's will be assured." - Damon in 1990 (and how right he was!)
"Being in a band is like being a matador. You go out there and if you pull it off the glory is quite spectacular. But at the same time noone's going to feel sorry for you if you get gorged in the stomach." - Damon.
" "I go to sleep" features a piano accompaniment by Damon. Isn't he good?" - Chrissie Hynde, The Pretenders.
"Mr [Bernard "Suede"] Butler was Blur's guitar roadie for two years... he spent hours crying on my doorstep for us to take him on tour." - Graham.
"We're just boozers, really." - Damon.
"Blur are genetically incapable of being crap" MelodyMaker (?).
"Up until Parklife we were bunking the tube." - Alex on Blur's poorer days.
"I never got along well with the lads at school, I was always called gay." - Damon.
"I hate Blur and Stereolab and all those art school knobheads." - Mani of the Stone Roses.
"Rick Astley was quite affable." - Alex.
"We've always seen ourselves as putting on white coats and going into the lab." - Damon.
"Their great strength is they are a band. They hang out together naturally and whatever they do together works." - Stephen Street, Blur's (ex-)producer.
"I don't mind kissing men at all." - Damon.
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