Damon Albarn, Blur's singer, has gravy on his shirt. "Fresh gravy?" asks Graham Coxon, the lead guitarist. No, yesterday's. Dave Rowntree, the drummer, scratches it with his nail. They pick at each other's clothes the way a mother picks at an only son's cardigan. They are friends, more interested in practising 360-degree spin kicks from yesterday's Tae Kwon Do class than the day of interviews that lies ahead. Alex James, the bassist, drags along behind. He has cigarette burns on his Nicole Farhi. His only concession to a healthy lifestyle is the one day he takes off the drink every week. "Alex doesn't do Tae Kwon Do" says Dave. "He does Tae GrouCho. And Lager Kwon Do." When Alex woke up this morning he remembered where he parked his car - three days ago. If Blur had stayed in exile much longer, he would have winced at the NCP bill.

Eighteen months ago, Blur had it all. They starred in their very own cartoon strip in the News of the World, sharing a page with Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers and The Flintstones. They won four Brit awards. Their album, Parklife, became a million seller and part of your actual British culture. They fought Oasis in a contrived battle of the bands - and won. But, having sound-tracked two English summers, the fame became too much and they chose to disappear. "We were trying to burrow into our armpits to get away from it all" says Coxon. Albarn went through what he now calls the young man's menopause, with panic attacks and tears for no reason. "There's a radical change that happens in your mid-20s" he says. "That's why there are a lot of suicides in men of my age." So Blur took some time out. In Iceland. Coincidentally, the only place on earth where Blur are still bigger than Oasis.

In Iceland, Damon discovered long-johns. And Eddic poetry. And inner peace. "It's on top of the world" says Damon. "So it's a good place to get a perspective on things. It's not made out of bricks and pavement. It's made out of volcanoes and glaciers. In Iceland there's sheer physical geography in your face." Each member of the band was having his own mid-life pop crisis. And after recording three albums in three years, and completing a punishing tour schedule, the friendships that had sustained the band were beginning to suffer. Even Graham and Damon, buddies since school in Colchester, were falling out. "We had become more like business associates" says Graham. "We needed to get to understand each other again. Now we've turned back into loving hippies - in a short- haired kind of way."

Call it an exercise in group therapy. But the whole Icelandic thing worked, and Britain's biggest band are back to promote their first new material in over a year. Radio One has scheduled, and heavily trailed, the world's first play of the new single. Word on the Internet is that some station in a two-moose town in northern Ontario managed a play last night, but the band aren't convinced. Coxon is living to regret that rushed can of Coke. As any recording artist will tell you, trapped wind is no joke in front of a unidirectional microphone. And he's worried about an uncontrolled outburst of live swearing. Five minutes to air and he's got just enough time to hang out of the station's kitchen window for one last cigarette.

Due to technical difficulties, Radio One DJ Steve Lamacq will only be playing vinyl this evening. Blur's record company come bearing compact disc. "Cue sound of plugger shooting himself" says the man Blur pay to promote the band's product - in this case, the new single, Beetlebum. "That's the worst news. That, or Steve puts the CD on, and the bloody thing skips." Damon is visibly agitated. He pulls at the waist of his jeans and moons the DJ. Only half-a-crack. Not the full moon he used to throw out of the tour bus window. So an engineer engineers, with solder and a screwdriver, until the CD machine is fixed. Beetlebum sounds wonderful. Damon relaxes, across three chairs, with his size 12s on the table. "18 months ago I'd have been in a panic doing this interview" he insists. "I'm not now."

Then comes German television. The crew have come from Hanover to film Blur, live, but with their hair piled under back-to-front baseball caps, look like they would have preferred Napalm Death. Damon runs over a sideburn trimmer over his chin - leaving a stubbled look for the camera - before he rehearses a few songs off the new album. The material is so new he is still forgetting his words. The chords are penned onto the back of his hands. Alex is having trouble holding up the double bass, but there's no denying it looks good. This is the man whose first band was him, in his bedroom, shouting "One, two, three, four - take it away" on top of an old Fleetwood Mac record. The whole business was taped, then presented to friends as proof that he really did have his own group. He is still big on display.

So is Damon. Dennis Hopper spins round to fire himself up before he goes on set - Albarn jumps and hit things. It works. "It's attitude plus showmanship" says James. "That rare musical thing - vibe. It only happens occasionally." Blur are known for their punk approach to live performance, and you sometimes fear for Damon's safety when he's on stage. Even when the stage is only ten-foot square. He has an Iggy Pop quality - a marked contrast to Liam Gallagher's more sedentary approach. "The majority of their fans are off their faces" says Albarn. "Oasis don't need to move about - the audience need very simple things to focus on." Damon pogos, hops, pouts and wags his finger, creating spectacle. From the moment he first treads the boards, it's pure repertory theatre. And that's no coincidence.

Damon is a frustrated actor. Thankfully, he gets it out of his system in the gangster movie Face. It's any self-respecting Essex boy's fantasy - "doing the driving, on the blag with the fellahs. And getting to fire a Colt Commander". Two terms of drama school in the 1980s didn't prepare him for the role of `getaway driver'. Skidding down alleyways and careering into cardboard boxes is strictly third-term stuff. But he's proved himself a natural. What else would you expect from a man who still hasn't passed his driving test by the age of 28? Directed by Antonia Bird (of Priest fame), Damon judges the film "a cross between The Long Good Friday and Reservoir Dogs". He has the sixth biggest part. Believe it - he has probably counted the lines.

The Germans love the new songs - darker and more experimental, they say. Damon has found his true voice at last. His accent used to change - starting down the Old Kent Road, and ending up in Bond Street by the end of the sentence. But those days are gone. He has now settled on one sound - that of a stylised Londoner. The new lyrics are sharper than ever. The fact that Albarn turns up at poetry superjams at the Albert Hall explains why he remains a master of the Eng Lit hit. Clever pieces of writing that dare to rhyme Balzac with Prozac - herpes with hairpiece. While no album has ever been sold on the back of a lyric, his words manage to create a mood. "Records are sold initially on a feeling" he says. "And my words paint that feeling."

There's no denying (not that they often bother) that Blur are learned. The whole band like their books. Later that day Alex is interviewed by MTV, offering philosophical discourse on life - not jokes that will translate well in the Low Countries. But even if the last album is "quite postmodern", and the last single does "saturate the band's story-telling paradigm", it makes no difference. It will all get cut. Alex flicks his ash on to the studio floor. Right next to where the interview will end up once the editor has done his worst. Blur have a tendency to converse about philosophy and culture. "But it's a tendency we would like to modify" says Damon. "You wake up from days of meandering discussion and realise you're just talking a lot of bollocks."

Before Blur pack up interviews for the day, Damon refuses to choose his favourite video clips for the satellite station Viva. "We don't do that on our fifth album" he says. Graham is happy to choose Ash and Prodigy. He likes their youth and exuberance. "You fancy them" says Damon, draped over a piano like Marlene Dietrich. "I was young and exuberant once. You used to fancy me." Then Alex refuses to do a station ident. Apparently Stipey [of REM] doesn't do them. Truth is, it's not going well for Viva. The band are interviewed together, on a sofa, and Graham starts making farty noises. "Describe the new album" asks the hapless German interviewer. "More red globular heart than grey, floating in stuff" answers Coxon. Pity the poor subtitler.

Blur began as Nichtkunst [`no art' in German]. "Some pseudo dadaist group founded by me and Alex and a few people who were too full energy to sleep at art school" according to Graham. Art school was Goldsmiths College in London. Alma mater to the young pickler, Damien Hirst. "Nichtkunst was about smelling tequila," says Alex, "but not having the guts to drink it." "And making up slogans" says Graham. "But the tongue was very firmly in the cheek. It was just a way of entertaining us when we didn't want to sleep. We all thought that we were very clever being at university, which we weren't really because everyone goes to university now. Comprehensive schools will be called university soon."

The Nichtkunst boys met up with Damon and Dave, and formed Seymour. With pudding bowl haircuts, flares and loose-fitting shirts, journalists labelled them as `baggy' - a musical genre forming around Manchester. Their first single, She's So High, sounded like a synthesis of the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays, and charted at number 48 (with a rocket). But Blur proved they had staying power. They became `baggy-parody' and eventually `post-baggy'. But the fame and the drinking (the band's local was credited on the second album) was starting to get out of hand. One night, playing on the same bill as arch rivals Suede, Damon told the audience to fuck off home. He cut the face of security guards with his mike stand. Only Dave the drummer was sober. And he'd been at home all day doing his laundry.

America made matters worse. "They had us marching round every record shop in town going `Hi....we're Blur. You like us'" says Alex. The same week Nirvana's seminal grunge album, Nevermind, was released. Disenchanted American kids were enlivened with the new teen spirit. "And we're going [Alex sings in mockney, like Anthony Newley] `Hello gor blimey'." "Being British in the most cliched sense goes down very well in America" says Graham. "But we weren't. If we'd been acting like Benny Hill we'd have been alright. They love a bit of a chump. A good old English chump. But we were monsters." Blur never forgave America. In an act of supreme churlishness, they set about excluding an entire continent from their music. And created something that celebrated Englishness - Britpop.

Blur discovered their ironic suburban credentials, and started singing songs about dog racing, steam engines, trarsers and bowler-hatted commuters. Then came Girls And Boys ("our gay disco song" says Alex). A damn good knees-up about sexual orientation, and the first real Britpop song. Parklife (the video, the song and the album), with its dog track/form sheet/EastEnder pretensions, took Blur from also-rans to founders of the Britpop movement. It was a label that soon became tiresome. "I met this bloke from San Francisco" says Graham. "He'd come to London to find the Britpop scene. I was in the Britpop band, in the Britpop pub, in the Britpop city, and saying I hated Britpop. He didn't know how to take it." Blur made the scene - then split.

By now Oasis, the rock `n' roll stars from Manchester, were claiming to be the biggest band in the world. A rivalry, manufactured by the bands' record labels, started to take on a momentum of its own. It became personal. When Noel Gallagher of Oasis was asked his views on Blur, his answer was he "hoped they caught Aids". Liam Gallagher spent the Mercury Music Awards trying to pull Justine Frischmann, lead singer with the band Elastica and Damon's girlfriend. Blur brought forward the release date of their single Country House to synchronise with Roll With It, and beat Oasis to Number One. Damon had something to prove. "Wanting to be the biggest is a weakness in somebody. I slowly recognised that in myself. It was a flaw in my personality that I wanted to be the most famous - the most loved. I'm on top of that now."

The battle with Oasis was presented as pitbull v poodle, squat v townhouse, armpit v roll-on and north v south. Blur were always portrayed as the nice boys. "But around the time we were being seen as the angelic little goody goodies," says Alex, "at least two members of this band were totally out of control. And probably going to bed a lot later than Oasis." "There were all these dodgy photographs, taken in dodgy places acting dodgily" says Graham. "And getting run over. I was run over coming out of a party and nobody offered to help me. The photographers just took the picture, then rushed back to the party to see if anyone else was coming out." Smoggie/the Smog Monster, one of Blur's original Wolverhampton fans, was hired as personal security. "He was really hired to look after me and Graham" says Alex. "To carry us home at the end of the night."

Damon still can't understand why Oasis are so huge. He couldn't bring himself to write a song like Wonderwall - too simple. It's no coincidence that he nicknamed Oasis `Quoasis' - a bastardisation of Status Quo, a band who never use four chords when three will do. Blur have always prided themselves on being imaginative - sometimes a little too imaginative. On the new album, Damon plays the kazoo, Graham plays the Jew's harp, and Alex plays the vacuum cleaner. And Graham taught himself the banjo just because he was feeling a little "conventional" on guitar. Blur are obsessed with moving on. And taking risks. "Paul McCartney hasn't moved on" says Damon. "Everything is static in his life". Graham agrees. "Whereas Linda has moved on, with a growing range of satisfying vegetarian meals.

" Tony Blair, the ace face Of Labour's modernist tendency, wanted to harness Blur's sense of movement to help the Party. He turned up at the Q Awards two years running (stupidly naming Oasis as one of his favourite groups) before calling Damon's office to arrange a meeting. "I went in and he said 'Make sure you're selling just as many records when the election comes and we can work together'". "What did you say to him?" asks Graham. "Make sure you get a policy then?". Damon is actually more John Prescott than Tony Blair, and fashionably sceptical about a Labour landslide victory. But he was still flattered. That was then. Eighteen months is a long time in politics - Blair is probably trying right now to change the Spice Girls' position on a single currency.

Now Blur are back. They still eat in their regular cafe, a short walk through a Notting Hill housing estate known for crack derivatives. They still order cauliflower cheese and chips for Alex, who is dealing with yet another hangover, and pecan pie - that's two slices, four forks. Then four bowls of milky coffee, and back to the two-room studio to finish off the new album. They have learnt that in a studio this small, too many cigarettes can set off a smoke detector. But that gaffer tape can desensitise it nicely. "We built a studio because the neighbours used to complain about me recording at home" says Damon. "The neighbours fucking moved, Damon" says Alex. Pause. "Well, they weren't very nice neighbours" says Damon. Blur bicker like only best friends can. For a while back there, they forget how.

"A year ago we had to decide if we wanted to go on and become a real middle-of-the-road, tabloid-friendly, cheeky mockney stadium band" says Damon. "I guess the new album is the answer." Now they have to learn to play the whole game again, and that's going to take some adjustments. Damon has just been to his first music biz party for nine months, at London's painfully hip Subterranea. "It was the birthday party of some PR company, and I was there with the guys I play football with. [Damon plays left wing for Cup Band United FC in a London music league] Baby Bird was there - all these people who are just starting to get somewhere. It was weird. Someone came up to me to talk. It wasn't `How are you?' It was `What are you doing here?' Fame is a funny old game."