Erstwhile Blur frontman Damon Albarn has opened up about the band's decision to pull out of the Big Day Out.
Speaking to the New Zealand Herald to promote his new solo album, 'Everyday Robots', Albarn figured it was time to clear the air. "This is as frank as I'm prepared to be about what happened," he told the paper.
"That was going to be the last Blur show – the end of playing together – and I didn’t want it to finish on anything other than a very positive note, because Blur is incredibly precious to all of us," he explained. "But I was genuinely concerned that the whole [Big Day Out] thing wouldn’t be quite as spiritually conclusive as we hoped it would be, because we weren’t sure if the organisation was quite right, or supportive of our ambitions.
"They [the organisers] weren’t being straight with me about things, which they needed to be, and at that point I became disillusioned because I didn’t want what we’d done throughout the year, with Blur, to be undermined or tarnished in any way, by a show that wasn’t going to be what we wanted to do.
"We’d been playing for six months solidly, around the world, so I knew that we would deliver a fantastic show, a great performance and a communal event, which everyone would have enjoyed.All I asked was that the organisation recognised that and I didn’t feel they did. So, that’s why, unfortunately, we couldn’t come."
Albarn stressed that the decision to pull out of the festival a month before it began wasn't made lightly. "I am truly, terribly sorry to everyone that we let down, but we just didn’t want to be anything other than what I felt we deserved to be — our best. If we’d played — and not been that — it would have let people down even more."
Albarn added that he's keen to return to Australia in some capacity in the future. "Don’t anyone forget that I had an absolutely brilliant time with Gorillaz only two years earlier in that part of the world — it was a fantastic experience — and I fully intend to come back and play there again, if I’m allowed. Until then, I understand I have to wait."
Albarn then reportedly let out a "heavy, audible sigh", which, yeah, seems like something he would do.
