Blur live at the Roseland Ballroom, NYC
10 February 1996
Reviewed by Eric Arnum & madamgayle@aol.com, posted to alt.music.blur

The Rentals open at 8 pm, Blur at 9:15 pm.

The venue was a fading ballroom off Broadway in Times Square. The sold out crowd filled the dance floor early for Blur and opening act The Rentals, where decades ago dancing divas like Betty Grable and Sandy Duncan had hung their tap shoes.

Damon Albarn preferred jumps to dance steps, leaping at one point from the speaker stack to the stage below. He was a blur of motion all night, running his way through a 90-minute set that featured nine new tunes from The Great Escape album released last year.

Bass player Alex James preferred his cigarettes and a pose somewhere between John Entwistle and Sid Vicious. Across the stage from Alex was guitarist Graham Coxon, and in back drummer Dave Rowntree pounded his way through the energetic set. A saxaphone and trumpet player took the back left corner and an unidentified female keyboard player took the right. Once in a while, she also stepped out to play the keyboard at center stage that Damon also occasionally plinked.

The setlist, as best we can reconstruct it, is written above, but there are some songs missing, including the opening pair. If anybody else who was there knows their names, please fill 'em in and post it as a follow-on message in the alt.music.blur news group. We don't know if they did either of the tunes on the new "Trainspotting" soundtrack, but maybe someone can fill in the blanks.

During several songs, they had these three strobe lights behind them, plus more at the sides, so whenever Damon was in a jumping mood, the flashes made him look like he was suspended in mid-air for a second. Lots of colour-coordinated lights and the occasional space jams gave it a feel at times as if Damon were Daltry swinging the mike at an old Who show with the green lasers shooting from behind him.

But the music was all Blur, much of it at a faster tempo than on either The Great Escape or Parklife discs. Even the slower tunes like "He Thought of Cars" seemed faster onstage Saturday night, while songs like "Globe Alone," "Jubilee" and "Bank Holiday" just thundered by. The night was dominated by mostly new tunes but they also included past hits, such as an encore of "There's No Other Way," the club hit from the days when Damon said "we were baggy." Also from 1991's Leisure, they played a real fast version of "She's So High" and maybe a few others we don't know. Their closers were a fast "Parklife" and the recent single "The Universal," a quick cheers! from Dave and they were gone before 11pm.

Friday night, on the day before the Roseland gig, Blur were on American TV: the Late Night with Conan O'Brien show that airs on the NBC network. They did a great version of "Charmless Man" with the la-la-la-la backing vocals supplied by Graham and jumps by Damon. He took his blue blocker shades off halfway through the song in order to mug for the camera.

The Rentals opened, paying homage to all the 80s synthesizer bands with a tight 45-minute set of Moog mayhem. The band is a side project for Matt Sharp of Weezer, and it has already gained some small screen exposure with its MTV single "Friends of P." You remember Weezer, with that "Buddy Holly" video last year, set in Arnold's Happy Days chipper. Think of that with two girls and a guy on synths and you got their sound.

Eric Arnum & madamgayle@aol.com

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