LAST OF THE SUMMER WHINE

I'm a professional cynic but my heart's not in it
I'm paying the price of living life at the limit
Caught up in the century's anxiety

Robbie Williams once sang, "I hope I'm old before I die," and watching the 2024 documentary To The End about Brit rockers Blur, it feels like these guys have been waiting their entire lives to get old—perhaps so they can slope off this mortal coil in a perfected state of fossilised misery. There's something effortlessly comfortable for these curmudgeonly grumps about being stiff and cranky, as if they've finally grown into their optimum form as indie misanthropes—fully justified now in their depressive angst about the state of the failed nation they were all born into.

That is, in many ways, their true legacy: a vindication (post-Brexit) of the art school sardonic sneering toward the country that became their trademark—a sort of '90s version of The Kinks, without the sincerity. If Ray Davies (The Kinks' frontman) was the introverted Village Green preservationist, then Damon Albarn (Blur's frontman) has been the extroverted 'Nowhere Man' internationalist—no doubt desperately upset he wasn't born a musical medicine man in Mali, where he could be free of the burden of his English identity, which he appears perpetually conflicted about.

It also makes perfect sense, then, that drummer Dave Rowntree stood as a Labour candidate for Mid Sussex in 2024—a party that, for the most part, has now become synonymous with a disdain for the white working class of Britain. The overtly middle-class Blur have always been a product of the post-Thatcher/New Labour zeitgeist: political students masquerading as a pop band, with allusions to love and other subjects merely a by-product of their main currency—social commentary.

Of course, back in the day, it was all shit and giggles, and Blur's 'mockney' social commentary seemed more like an affectation from watching too many Mike Leigh films. But now they're past middle age, they have to contend with the fact that they've become far more than the stereotypes they mocked in the songs of their youth. They're now tragic ghosts of a time that was itself an illusion of cultural importance—Britpop. The comic pop melancholy they traded in was emblematic of a cartoonish worldview, which explains so well why Albarn later created an actual cartoon band—Gorillaz.

Watching this hilariously navel-gazing documentary feels like the rock 'n' roll equivalent of Last of the Summer Wine. In hindsight, it was probably a mistake to watch it right after Oliver Stone’s The Doors over the weekend—where I suddenly found myself admiring the pretentious hedonism of the Lizard King, Jim Morrison, and appreciating why the “live fast, die young” modus operandi works so much better for rock icons than “live slow(ish) and die old.”

To paraphrase Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight: “You either die a rock 'n' roll legend, or you live long enough to see yourself become an aging parody of your former self.”