Last year’s Blur reunion left many a grown man in tears; and wondering whether we’d ever again hear from the best Britain’s had to offer in a long time. Since then, as he gears up for his own release, Gorillaz’s Murdoc Niccals has claimed to have stolen recordings for what would have been a new Blur album from Damon Albarn’s London studio. Add that to this documentary’s title and we can only conclude that Blur have, indeed, called it a day.
Given the confused, acrimonious split around 2003’s Think Tank and Damon’s subsequent extra curricular projects, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Blur’s reunion was a for-the-money cash-in. Indeed, just before getting back together, drummer Dave Rowntree took no solace from The Police’s Stuart Copeland, who claimed that any such reunion is like a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces don’t fit properly.
The tender break-up is dispensed with almost immediately, No Distance Left To Run’s narrative bringing us the happy friends reunited from the beginning, before reminding us why Blur were – and remain – so important to British pop. Things inevitably get a bit weird (Damon hanging out with the “artistes”; Graham Coxon’s booze problems and hatred for his teenage audience) but, ultimately, this is more a story of redemption, rather than a pop band’s explosion-toimplosion. With plenty of archive footage going back to Damon’s school productions, candid interviews and seminal live reuinion footage, Blur finally get the send-off they were denied seven years ago.
