No Distance Left To Run Great For Blur, Less For Fans

Blur, it appears, are all friends again. And while that may sound awesome in theory, it probably won't result in the sort of bounty — more shows, more albums, generally more Blur — long-time fans are hoping for.

The full circle of the friendship between singer Damon Albarn, guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree is laid bare in the No Distance Left To Run documentary.

On the surface, the film is meant to capture Blur's reunion concerts in England last year. To get to the reunion, though, directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace have to get through the backstory first, and so we're treated to a reasonably solid chronological journey through the history of Blur using archival clips.

The band are pretty frank throughout. Their first album, Leisure, was made with a lot of record company meddling, their "British life" trilogy of albums (Modern Life Is Rubbish, Parklife, The Great Escape) made them hate the word "Brit-pop," the Blur/Oasis feud was engineered by Albarn, the band hated the rise of alternative/grunge ("Nirvana and that whole disgusting movement... they were all just shit"), and according to Albarn, the deterioration of the band in the early '00s was very pointedly caused by one thing: "heroin."

But the documentary doesn't get any deeper into that conflict. Where Metallica's Some Kind Of Monster gets uncomfortably intimate with the metallers' psychological difficulties, or where the dynamic feud between The Dandy Warhols and Brian Jonestown Massacre unfolds dramatically in DiG!, unless you want to spend a lot of time analyzing Albarn's often too-good-to-be-here body language we're only provided that one word clip from Albarn before No Distance shifts into redemption mode.

Blur find that redemption in an interesting way. Once the exiled Coxon is back in the fold, the band revisit their past haunts, playing an intimate show in a railway yard warehouse, then another warm-up at a student union hall before their big return — two sold out shows at London, England's Hyde Park and a subsequent headlining slot at the Glastonbury festival.

The eventual payoff is a cathartic blowout of the dramatic gospel epic "Tender" that leaves Albarn a spent ball by the end. It's an absolutely magnetic moment and it'll desperately make you wish you were there. But viewers are left woefully underserved by the decision to just show a short clip of this and not the whole song as a dramatic finale.

Blur indeed find their friendship again, but having declared they've no intention to record or perform again any time soon, the result will be bittersweet for fans who'll be swept up in No Distance Left To Run's nostalgia trip. The rest of us will have to settle for mining old record collections in an attempt to find that same emotion.