Here are some clips from June/July's Ray Gun, which has Blur on the cover. Like always Alex quotes are in bold :)

RAY GUN:The last time you were here you brought a lot of cultural baggage. You were Blur: The Biggest Band In Britain!
DAMON: I became obvious to me that we couldn't get arrested over here because we had such a strong tag. And our choice of singles was ridiculous.
ALEX: When we look back to last year, releasing "Country House" off The Great Escape, we didn't stand a chance. We had this romantic notion that we could change America's tastes just by putting out very British records, but you can't do that...We've never done ourselves any favors over here. To be honest, I think we were a bit childish about our whole attitute to the rest of the world. The arrogance of us thinking people should be grateful for what we gave them. Looking back on it, it was a bit fucking pathetic.

DAMON:...I'm not all-consumed by the idea of being massive in America, because I've survived without that happening, but I'd really like this to be a relatively successful record here---because it would be a good British record doing well, as opposed to the fucking shit that does well here.
RG:You're referring, I imagine, to the Spice Girls and Gina G?
DAMON: And Bush.
RG: They don't really count.
DAMON: No they don't, but I'm sure they use their Britishness to open up some doors.
RG:Didn't the Spice Girls show up at one of your shows?
ALEX:They had to be thrown off the stage. Slutty Spice and Sugary Spice. They came up to the side of the stage and said, "Can we go on and dance with Blur?" And the road manager said,"No", and they said, "Well, we talked to the manager and he said we could." So on they went and that's the great thing about them, when you're that famous, you've got the key to every door.

RG:Do you still have your huge teenypop following?
Alex:In Spain. We're a teenybop band in Spain; we're kind of an intellectual art-wank band over here; in Britain we've got a fairly wide demographic;in France, we're tres cool; and we're big in Japan, fuck knows why.

[WM Note: now this makes me feel immature]
DAVE: We used to go on stage going "SHUT UP!" and they were still going, "WAAAH I love you!"But that is what lends pop music a lot of its potency, its ability to make young girls react in that way. You do need a little bit of that.
ALEX: They've got the right idea in Japan: they scream, but only at the allotted time.
DAVE:I'm in no way knocking audiences, but we got so many reviews where the journalists only wrote about all the 14-year olds in the audience.
ALEX: Music meant more to me when I was 14 than it does now. Music's more alive to you then, it's such an important part of building your indentity.
RG:It sort of sounds like you're getting back to the music that affected you when you were that age. There's a real '70s feel to the record.
DAVE:'70s?
RG:1970s, I mean.
DAVE: I don't think its sounds very '70s at all.
RG:There's some latter-day Beatles-sounding stuff, there's some Mott The Hoople there, there's some David Bowie...
ALEX:That's Damon; I hate David Bowie.
DAMON:I'm the only one who likes David Bowie in the band.
ALEX: I fucking hate David Bowie and I fucking hate Sonic Youth--they always struck me as art-wark bullshit, just so complacent. I think [Thurston Moore] is a cunt and I told him so. He was like, "Get this guy away from me..." And that remix he did [Moore remixed the Blur song Essex Dogs] ...God...

DAVE:I'm finding it harder and harder to dismiss other bands and artists. When music's what you do, you don't have the right to just dismiss other people's stuff.

At this point, Alex gets up and plays a CD. An insanely cheerful German disco jingle blares forth.
ALEX: You dismissed this. We were reviewing German singles releases for a magasine and I liked it and you went, "Fuck off."That's the last things I heard you dismiss.
DAVE: I was being a pompous cunt.