Time heals all wounds: Blur’s Dave Rowntree says he’ll be “first in the queue” to see Oasis

Blur drummer Dave Rowntree has said that he will be “first in the queue” to see Oasis live next year.

In the new interview with the BBC, Rowntree said he would "definitely go and see" one of the Gallaghers’ comeback gigs next year and was complimentary about his band’s old nemesis. “Blur and Oasis combined changed what the pop music genre meant, and that doesn’t happen very often,”

The drummer, who was a Labour candidate for Mid Sussex in the July General election, said that he thought people often applied “their particular prejudice” when it came to the rivalry, which served as “helpful media hype” for both bands.

“So people wanting to see England as a North-South divided country could lay that on there, people that wanted to view it in terms of class could do that,” he added.

Blur - Country House (Official Music Video) - YouTube

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The Blur/Oasis rivalry reached a peak in August 1995 when the two bands squared up to see who would get to Number One with their respective singles Country House and Oasis’s Roll With It. 

Blur won that round, but were decisively trashed when the second Oasis album (What’s The Story) Morning Glory became a multi-platinum juggernaut, overshadowing Blur, and indeed everything else in British music for a good few years.

Relations between the two bands reached a nadir when in a September 1995 interview with Miranda Sawyer of the Observer Noel Gallagher said that he hoped Damon Albarn and Blur bassist Alex James “catch AIDS and die, cos I fuckin’’ hate them two.” He later retracted the comments, claiming that he had meant it as a ‘joke’.

Gorillaz - We Got The Power / LIVE with Noel Gallagher & Jehnny Beth on The Graham Norton Show - YouTube

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A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. Noel ended up guesting on the 2017 Gorillaz album Humanz. Albarn called the track in question, We Got The Power, “a victory lap” and “the ultimate self-congratulatory Britpop moment.”

In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2018 Damon talked about his and Noel’s unlikely friendship and how their shared experience had brought them together: “He’s like a comrade,” said Albarn. 

“It’s about that specific moment in time when you both get the carpet pulled from underneath you, and everything you’ve been abstractly dreaming about suddenly becomes a reality. I was 22, and I couldn’t walk down the street without everybody recognising me. That’s an exhilarating but terrifying moment, and we went through it together.”