When he started work on Blur: To The End, director Toby L was determined to avoid the clichés of all those rock band documentaries that turn into slick, stylised extensions of their own press releases. He wanted his film to be gritty, handheld, frank and intense. It tells the story of Blur’s first album in eight years (The Ballad of Darren) and of how the band went back on the road, giving a series of concerts culminating in the biggest gig of their career at Wembley Stadium.
“From my perspective, creativity works quite well when you’ve got really rigid parameters…for it to be an honest documentary, it has got to be naturalistic and not too tampered with,” the director explains the constraints under which he deliberately agreed to work.
Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree, the four members of the band, had worked with filmmakers many times before. They knew all the tricks. This, though, wasn’t a promo or a glossy photoshoot. The director’s intention was to show them rough and close up, “in their natural habitat.”
“If you are speaking to camera, it’s because we’ve found somewhere to sit in the location [where the documentary was already filming] and we are just going to chat. We just didn’t want to have lots of studio-lit, shiny floor, glossy chats on camera. We said let’s make this more about actuality and events as they unfurl. Also, life’s a bit messy isn’t it…”
Up the Game, the production company Toby L co-founded, financed the documentary (which is released by Altitude on Friday July 19).
“The industry has gone through a pretty tumultuous time and so it is quite a bold time to be self-funding a documentar,” he says.
The upside was that no commissioners or executive producers were interfering. This was (as the director puts it) “an uncompromising and truly independent film…everything you see on the screen is as untampered with as you could hope it to be.”
The film begins with Damon Albarn feeding his hens in the Devon countryside and ends with the massive show at Wembley Stadium, filmed with 20 cameras. The project was conceived with a cinema release in mind.
“One of my pet grievances with music docs is that they feel a bit detached. They don’t emotionally tune you into the vibrancy of the performance. For me, I obsess over those details. To put people in a dark room with a big screen, that is definitely my desire.”
Toby L has known Albarn and Coxon for several years now. His record company Transgressive released Coxon’s album ‘The Spinning Top’ in 2009. He worked with Albarn on the 2013 ‘Maison des Jeunes’ album with Africa Express that was recorded in Mali, bringing African and western musicians together. Transgressive also released Albarn’s 2021 solo album, ‘The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows.’
When Toby heard about Blur’s plans for the Wembley show, he told Albarn that he’d “love to throw my hat in the ring” as a potential director of an accompanying documentary.
“He [Albarn] was open-minded but I think at that early juncture when I first suggested it, they hadn’t worked out if it was going to be filmed, if they wanted it to be filmed.”
A few months passed. “A lot of people, as you can imagine, got in touch with the band directly with ideas and treatments, wanting to do it. It wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination ‘oh, let’s gift it to Toby.’ I had to compete…I felt I had something to prove, that I was the right person for the job before they awarded it to me. I spent a long time theorising what the themes of the documentary would be and how it would be made. I put that into an extensive treatment.”
The director was delighted but also daunted when he finally won the commission. “Damon put his hand on my shoulder. He said ‘you’ve got it, you’re going to be doing it. There’s quite a rich legacy to this band and you’re going to be adding to that.’ It was a ‘well done but don’t fuck it up’ sort of a vibe!”
Toby remembers leaving the studio delighted but also terrified. He realised he wasn’t just telling a story about the band but that he was dealing with the personalities of the band members and the expectations of fans. The film was also touching on deeper themes involving friendship, loyalty, nostalgia and even mortality.
The film was shot over a period of six or so months with some interruptions, for example when the drummer Dave injured his leg in a freak accident.
The filmmakers did some of the editing as they went along. By the end of the shoot, they had “this blob of four hours which was the essence of the film. Then we just had to hone it and craft it into a final feature. It’s hard work but it’s extremely rewarding work.”
Eventually, everything fell into place, “like a beautiful jigsaw.”
Blur came to prominence in the Britpop era of the 1990s but what is very noticeable at the most of the gigs that Toby L and his team filmed last year is that there are plenty of young fans.
“You can’t fake that. We weren’t getting extras or anything,” the director reflects. “I think everyone was surprised, the band included, that it was so cross-generational. I think [we thought] maybe there would be some late 20s and early 30-somethings but there were also kids and teenagers.”
Toby L suggests that the band’s popularity with these younger fans testifies to the power of streaming. “It’s an open playing field for any artist. Whether you released a song three minutes ago or 35 years ago [as in Blur’s case], there’s a sort of equality in using the platform. A song might pop up in your recommendations…”
During the 90s, the intense rivalry between Blur and Oasis was the stuff of music biz legend. Toby, who has also worked with Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher on the Knebworth 22 film, believes that in certain respect the two bands weren’t that different.
“I don’t think either were difficult to work with at all,” the director reflects. “There’s a collaborative hard-working spirit that unites those artists. When you’re filming with them, there’s a directness and an appreciation of what is required. There’s isn’t a preciousness. On a personal level, I found them all fucking entertaining company. You only have to spend five minutes with any of Blur or Liam Gallagher to realise ‘I know exactly why you are a superstar.’ They are charismatic, warm, entertaining, full of banter and one-liners…there was a lot of laughter.”
The film is out in UK and Irish cinemas this week. Altitude has also sold it to “A-list distributors” around the world.
Toby L himself isn’t done with the band quite yet. He is hard at working finishing the accompanying two-hour “epic 3000-shot” ‘Blur: Live at Wembley Stadium’ concert film, due out in September.
“I’m in Blur world for quite a bit longer, but I am delighted with both films and I just can’t wait for people finally to see them…”
