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Blur live at Goldsmiths College,
London
22 June 2009
Reviewed by
Times Online
 Reflecting
on a riotous two-hour fug of near-uninterrupted hits played with
demented brio by four old friends with unfinished business to address,
one or two nagging questions followed us into the dying midsummer light.
How could we have forgotten that they were quite this good? And while we
were at it, how did we think that, between Oasis’s one-trick mule and
Blur’s three-ring Britpop circus, it was a close-run thing?
In fairness, it might not just have
been us. In the six years since he last sang with Blur, Damon Albarn
seems to have lived in denial of his talents as a proper old-fashioned,
look-at-me frontman. Yes, in a low-key sort of way, interim projects
Gorillaz and The Good, The Bad & The Queen had seen him singing. But,
returning to Goldsmiths — the art college where Blur formed 20 years ago
— he donned his de facto Britpop work clothes (Fred Perry and blue jeans
of course) and reminded us what a superb pop star he is.
Most groups would save songs with
the pedigree of Girls And Boys and There’s No Other Way
for the final stretch. Looking exceptionally well-preserved, Blur spat
them out within the first 15 minutes.
On Tracy Jacks an audience whose
perfect recall of the words hadn’t diminished with the years helped out
with the words. A visibly delighted Albarn urged caution: “You should
probably pace yourselves ’cos there’s a long way to go.” Sound advice
perhaps, although he didn’t follow it and neither did anyone else. There
were impromptu stage dives from the 41-year-old singer, scissor kicks
from a bespectacled Graham Coxon, and touchingly — considering the brief
estrangement that saw Blur’s 2002 album Think Tank recorded
without Coxon — several fond exchanges between the two. It was enough to
make your eyes mist, were it not for the fact that several songs were
doing a perfectly good job of that on their own.
Really, it was outrageous how
ceaselessly they would pull out another song whose imperishable
magnificence somehow caught you unaware. Beetlebum — the 1997 hit
that saw Blur redefine their sound and put some serious distance between
themselves and Britpop — drew from a deep emotional well. Perched on the
monitor like a rakish meerkat, Alex James seemed close to tears as the
rest of the band navigated the song’s aching melody into something more
visceral — Albarn attacking his acoustic guitar with finger-grating
intensity.
Audience participation wasn’t so much a
choice as one long, lovely reflex action. Tender — Albarn’s 1999
lullaby-cum-requiem to his relationship with Elastica’s Justine
Frischmann — was a full-throated singalong that seemed fleeting at seven
minutes. On This is a Low, Dave Rowntree’s cymbals caught the
light as they crashed like an electrical storm.
When they finally got around to them,
it took the opening chords of Parklife to set off a Proustian
avalanche measured out in the finger-jabbing zeal with which everyone
bellowed out the chorus. On Song 2, the wooh-hoos started before
the tune even got going — fans goaded into action by Dave Rowntree’s
slowly accelerating drum intro. Respite eventually came in the encore
when Blur lowered the tempo with For Tomorrow. Back in 1992, this
was a sad, sweet love song Albarn penned for the city on which he had
yet to truly make his mark.
Seventeen years later, you’d think his
hunger to prove a point must have diminished in some way. And yet,
having seen him spend the best part of two hours tearing into his band’s
stockpile of hits like a dervish with a grudge, we knew that was
anything but the case. If this was, as billed, a warm-up show for the
real business of the summer — a pair of festival dates and two Hyde Park
headlining shows — then one shudders to think what they still have in
reserve.
Blur play Glastonbury this weekend;
Hyde Park July 2-3 (Sold Out)
(5/5)
Pete Paphides
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