As Blur’s frontman he was labelled the most loved — and hated — man in pop. His many reinventions would make a chameleon blush. In his latest incarnation Damon Albarn has shown that he is also perhaps the most interesting and irritating singer-songwriter of the past decade.

The first album by Albarn’s new supergroup the Good, the Bad and the Queen has seen the 38-year-old hailed as “a polymath musical genius”. The Sunday Times’s reviewer wonders in today’s issue: “Is there a more gifted tunesman in Britain today? The melodies pour out of him like a torrent.”

The flipside is the suspicion that, once again, Albarn has been too clever by half, overegging his lyrics with the Iraq war which, as one critic notes, he links to “everything from global warming to binge drinking”. Another said: “He’s overreached himself, but he’s one of those artists who doesn’t care if he’s liked.”

He has done himself no favours with remarks such as: “If you’re a good-looking young male with talent you’re not going to be taken seriously.” But since he writes the most memorable melodies in the business, many are willing to overlook his self-regarding irony.

With remarkable backing by the Clash’s Paul Simonon on bass and the great Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, Albarn has felt confident enough to describe the new group’s eponymous album as the “natural successor” to Blur’s 1994 breakthrough, Parklife. Which could be tempting fate, because with every Albarn smash has come a backlash — a syndrome that began in the mid1990s.

It’s slightly humiliating that Blur’s success has been vastly eclipsed by four cartoon characters that Albarn dreamt up with a friend as a way of avoiding interviews and the promotion circus. Two albums by their virtual rock band Gorillaz have sold millions, with contributions from the likes of Dennis Hopper, Ike Turner and Rosie Wilson, winning acclaim in America that Blur failed to capture.

Perhaps Albarn’s biggest mistake was to stoke a feud between Blur and their biggest rivals, Oasis. The media-fuelled “battle of Britpop” pitted the gritty, working-class, northern Oasis against the art-rock, middle-class, southern Blur, dividing fans like football supporters between two teams. It brought out an inverted snobbery against the latter for not growing up on a council estate and breaking into cars to steal radios.

Albarn exchanged insults with the foul-mouthed Oasis brothers, Noel and Liam Gallagher. Noel said he hoped Albarn would “catch Aids and die”. Liam taunted Albarn’s girlfriend, Justine Frischmann, the lead singer of Elastica, claiming he wanted to have sex with her. Albarn said Noel suffered from Tourette’s and gave impersonations of him effing and blinding. The rivalry reached a peak in 1995 when Blur and Oasis released two singles on the same day — Country House and Roll With It respectively — and tussled for the number one spot. Blur claimed the initial victory, but their artful music lost out in national affections. Noel Gallagher’s Wonderwall became an alternative national anthem, and Albarn was ridiculed.

Gallagher maintained the rivalry was conceived by the magazine NME and Blur’s entourage as a way of raising their profiles. Albarn has suggested the reasons were more personal, without elaborating. The wounds of his class stereotyping rankled for years afterwards. “Yes, I was blessed because my family stayed together and there were lots of books in the house,” he told an interviewer in 2003. “But it wasn’t a country mansion with servants. It irritates me that people think that.”

So did the accusation that he was too intellectual and literary to be a pop star: “Are they saying it’s better not to be intelligent and have no knowledge of other things outside pop music? So let’s close all the schools and burn the books. How can anybody be too clever?” He remains defensive about opposing the Iraq war; his grandfather was jailed as a conscientious objector in the second world war. “People threw eggs at him in the street.”

Now one of Tony Blair’s biggest critics, he had started out as one of the band of celebrities that surrounded Blair when he was leader of the opposition. “I will vote for a Labour government, definitely,” he proclaimed in 1994. However, while “cool Britannia” was being launched, Albarn jumped ship and by 1998 he was expressing open hostility. Objecting to the introduction of university tuition fees, he appeared at a Westminster press conference in the company of Ken Livingstone, then Labour MP for Brent East. “I’m not surprised that most young people want to stay well clear of Labour and any of its ideas,” he said.

Six months previously he had rebuffed an invitation to a Downing Street reception, which Noel Gallagher accepted. Albarn claimed he sent Blair a note saying: “I am now a Communist. Enjoy the schmooze, comrade. Love, Damon.” In 2002 he took out full-page advertisements in the NME challenging the need for war.