blur: To the End: undercurrents of loss, legacy and mortality swim through Blur’s reunion doc

“The less we do, the bigger we seem to get,” says Blur’s drummer Dave Rowntree at one point in this documentary. And it’s hard to argue with this Zen theory of career management in Blur’s case. While Blur’s 1995 gig at Mile End Stadium was a kind of base camp in Britpop’s surge towards the mainstream, they never played to crowds on the scale of Oasis at Knebworth in 1996. After a hiatus of nearly a decade, To the End captures the four of them – Rowntree, guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James, and singer and de facto leader Damon Albarn – reuniting to record a new album (The Ballad of Darren, which came out last summer) and rehearse for the biggest gigs they’ve ever played in the UK – 180,000 people across two nights at Wembley Stadium.

Breaking up is hard to do; getting back together for one more tour after a few years’ break from each other seems to be much easier. Blur contemporaries from Pulp to Pavement have had a similar boomerang approach to playing live after lengthy layoffs. To the End ends up hitting almost identical narrative beats to Shane Meadows’ 2013 film The Stone Roses: Made of Stone – a portrait of a dormant band reuniting to rehearse, playing smaller warm-up gigs, working through some lingering personal issues, and signing off triumphantly in front of a huge crowd. The film’s biggest risk, though, is in awkwardly retreading the ground of a different film about a band getting back together to play live after a period of estrangement: the 2010 film No Distance Left to Run – which was also about Blur. 

Despite this sense of history repeating, To the End works, not least because the stakes feel higher. The scale of Wembley is new to the band, creating a palpable sense of stage fright even in such veteran performers. “It needs to be as good as possible,” Albarn mutters, “otherwise it’s just some old cunts trying to relive their past.” A full-scale technical rehearsal in a concrete hangar pushes Coxon to new depths of hangdog. But above all the band are older, closer now to 60 than 40, and undercurrents of loss, legacy and mortality swim through the film. They have, as Rowntree ruefully acknowledges, tended to move out to a house, a very big house, in the country – early on we see Albarn clucking gruffly over his chickens at his Devon home, and narrowly avoiding crashes on country back-roads. There’s much mutual discussion of back pain, less drinking and more concern about whether cake is gluten-free, plus some very cautious sea-swimming. Rowntree injures a knee, throwing the Wembley dates into doubt as he hobbles around with leg enclosed in an alarming exoskeletal brace. 

These scenes are nicely offset with unseen video of some of Albarn and Coxon’s earliest musical theatre efforts at their Colchester secondary school; it’s a little uncanny to see the through-line to Albarn’s measured theatricality and character creation in Blur. The pair revisit the school, and are underwhelmed to find the Portakabin music room they once practised in replaced by a sparkling but sterile new Albarn & Coxon Room. 

Director Toby L takes a straightforward fly-on-the-wall approach – candid, handheld footage, with no cosy talking-head input from collaborators or commentators. The result is hardly Dogme levels of rawness, but there is the feeling of a group willing to let the director test their boundaries. During a studio playback for the rest of the band of his latest vocal takes, Damon Albarn wells up and is then racked by silent sobs, overcome by a recent break-up; in other scenes, we observe how his drill-sergeant perfectionism in rehearsal riles the band’s more laidback members. But there’s also acceptance among the four that, having been bonded prematurely by the sheer intensity of their younger experiences, they’re now stuck, like a family, with each other’s imperfections. 

The climactic Wembley sequence itself is something of an edited highlights package – full performances are presumably being held back for a concert DVD. But it’s enough of a crescendo to make you wonder whether Blur might have considered it a sign-off rather than a relaunch. Albarn’s relentless work habits clearly preclude this, though: in one rehearsal sequence he has just returned from a US tour with Gorillaz – one of his many other projects – and we see him alternately nodding off at the keyboard through sheer fatigue and compulsively testing out new melodies in the gaps between takes. “You have to keep him focused in the moment,” James says with a sigh, “or he’ll just write another opera.” 

 ► blur: To the End is in UK cinemas from Jul 19.