Focus: Woohoo! Blur's great escape

Yes, they've drunk a few, had their hairy moments and their artistic differences, but the story of Blur is one of rock 'n' roll's good luck stories, about a band of Britpoppers who grew up but held on to their charm, looks and talent. John Harris pays tribute

Tomorrow, an album entitled Think Tank will go on sale in the UK's record shops. Sent on its way by a run of droolsome reviews, it will doubtless shift sufficient quantities to arrive at the top of next week's charts. To cap the sense of triumph, the group responsible is also about to commence a five-night residency at the Astoria in London, where it will entertain about 10,000 people. The scenario might suggest the feverish manoeuvres of a music-press flavour of the moment. But Think Tank is the seventh studio album by Blur, the battle-scarred British band which played its first gig 15 years ago this summer. Yet more incredibly, the abiding sense of commercial and creative victory belies the fact that they have just come through one of the biggest ruptures of their career: the departure of guitarist and founder member Graham Coxon. When news first broke of his exit, there was much speculation as to whether the group would carry on.

Think Tank's opening song is called "Ambulance". Its refrain, sung by the band's leader Damon Albarn in a tremulous falsetto, is "I ain't got nothing to be scared of". The double negative apart, it's a fairly neat summation of the new Blur's current aura of strength. Albarn is a family man of 35; bassist Alex James is a freshly married 34-year-old; drummer Dave Rowntree, 38, is a pilot who also owns a computer animation company. Listening to the album and watching the promotional activity, it's obvious that the quiet confidence that often arrives in one's 30s suits them. It has not always been thus. Indeed, Blur's 12-year stint as musical celebrities has been peppered with the kind of crises that often returns bands to the margins. The problems caused by reckless drinking once formed a subtext to almost everything they did. On at least two occasions, they have hovered close to absolute disaster: being dropped by their record label on account of slim financial pickings, and, later on, almost imploding in the face of huge commercial success. Give or take a few ill-advised moves, the adventurousness and intellectual fecundity of their music has been a constant. Their internal well-being, until recently, was anything but.

Blur's roots lie in Colchester, the home town of Graham Coxon and Dave Rowntree, and the adopted base of the Albarn family. When Damon Albarn was nine, his father Keith moved his family there from east London. The Albarns were archetypal 1960s bohemians, and they raised their two children – Damon and his elder sister Jessica – in a household characterised by the hubbub of cultural chatter. "I always thought my parents were absolutely dead right," Albarn later reflected. "I went against the grain in a weird way, by continually following them."

Contrary to sporadic accusations that he was a public schoolboy, Albarn was educated at a Colchester comprehensive, where he befriended Coxon and moved through a succession of school bands. The pair made the acquaintance of Dave Rowntree while in their late teens, but it was not until their universe extended to London that their musical prospects decisively took shape. In 1988, Coxon became an art student at Goldsmiths College, where Alex James was studying French. The pair became close friends, and James was eventually inducted into one of Coxon and Albarn's on-off musical enterprises. In retrospect, the link with Goldsmiths connected Blur with the now-defunct tradition of the best British rock being made by wide-eyed art students: Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, John Lennon. "Graham would get up in the morning and put a telephone in a washing-up bowl, then go to the students' union bar," James later said. "I'd go and listen to Voltaire's ideas on optimism and go to the bar. We always used to take the piss and say, 'There's a lot of geniuses walking around here.' But a lot of them were."

It took a little time for any intellectual substance to arrive in Blur's music. Their 1991 debut album Leisure was largely a disappointment, let down by its lyrical vacuity. In its wake, however, Blur released a single called "Popscene", which minted the mixture of commercial appeal and Anglo-centric aesthetics that would later give rise to the dreaded term Britpop. Unfortunately, the UK was not quite ready: it flopped, and Blur plunged into crisis.

Two years later, however, they were walking on water. Their 1993 album Modern Life Is Rubbish developed "Popscene"'s Britpop blueprint, but it was most spectacularly realised on 1994's Parklife. The UK was in the mood for a revival of its artful musical traditions, and Parklife chimed perfectly with so-called lad culture. By the summer of 1995, Blur had been handed four Brit awards; Alex James, meanwhile, claimed to be drinking two bottles of champagne a day.

The fun did not last. Blur proved victorious in the spurious 1995 singles battle against Oasis, but their triumph proved damaging: the pathologically iconoclastic Graham Coxon was repulsed by their entry into the mainstream, and – after a fractious six months spent promoting The Great Escape – demanded an artistic left-turn. He stayed for a further two albums, but one can trace his recent ejection from the group to exactly these tensions.

Blur wisely jettisoned Britpop with the 1997 album Blur, whose experimental leanings were taken even further by 1999's 13. Albarn seemed an altogether more pacified operator – although in the wake of Blur, he achieved his biggest success with Gorillaz, the hip hop-influenced project that earned him a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Performance. His horizons were extended further by last year's Mali Music, a quietly impressive album recorded with musicians from West Africa.

Think Tankunderlines the idea that Albarn is probably the UK's most adventurous, inquisitive rock musician. Moreover, it is some token of his and his group's talents that they have made a virtue of their new, trimmed-down line-up. Most notably, however, Think Tank is, to quote Mojo, the sound of "a band playing looser and more in harmony with themselves than ever before". Given their new laid-back mindset, Blur might not recognise it, but their world is surely now laden with the sweet scent of vindication.

Blur play London's Astoria on 8, 9, 10, 12 and 13 May. John Harris's book, 'The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock', is published by Fourth Estate tomorrow