Through the eyes of those who shaped early Britpop

Blur's formative years documented in Dave Rowntree's photobook

- Julius Miller

DAVE ROWNTREE BLUR MEMBERS David Rowntree, left, and Graham Coxon are captured in "No One You Know," a book documenting moments before the rock band's rise to fame. "They're unremarkable times," Rowntree says.

If you asked the average listener who Blur is, you'd be lucky to get an answer that didn’t mention “Song 2,” the British band’s smash-hit-turned-stadium-anthem that launched them to transatlantic fame.

But the Britpop quartet — featuring Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Dave Rowntree and Alex James — saw their path to glory paved long before the song’s release in 1997. In fact, their first album, “Leisure,” released in 1991, may not have had the chart-smashingsuccess of later projects like “Parklife” in 94, but it did result in their first steps onto international soil and perhaps the establishment of the Britpop genre.

Not much is known about those early Britpop days, before Pulp set the world ablaze with “Common People” and Sleeper released “The It Girl,” an often-underrated album that captured the essence of the era to a T.

No, this is before Oasis and Blur duked it out in the infamous Battle of Britpop, before “Roll With It” versus “Country House,” before bassist James donned the rivals’ merch during a celebratory Top of the Pops performance.

At the time, Blur was on the heels of “Leisure,” and while the band had been given a nod or two in Britain, it remained relatively underground in the States. Losing those years to the moving hands of history could have been easy, but Rowntree decided to pick up an Olympus OM-10 to “record their daily lives.”

“They're unremarkable times. That’s why I took them, really,” Rowntree tells The Times. “They're the times in between the big events in the Blur story, and those times are quite similar; there’s the traveling, hanging around in dressing rooms and all of that.”