BLUR take the stage at the Brighton Centre, a venue more akin to staging regional basketball than playing host to one of Britain’s premier music acts. The stage is long and wide, and I feel like I’m at a school disco. Damon informs the crowd that this is the penultimate gig of the tour, then proceeds to explain what the word penultimate means (it’s easy to see how he can give off the wrong impression). "Ambulance" opens the set and after "Beetlebum", old favourite "Girls and Boys" whips the crowd into shape- a song that sounds as incredibly good live, if not better than it does on record.
"She’s so High", Damon tells the audience, reminds him of Brighton. In 1990, the band played at the Zap (no fans of the club in this audience), supported by little- known- then Elastica. “I reckon this song worked the magic” quips the singer.
On "Gene by Gene", Dave Rowntree is accompanied by a second percussionist to straighten out a reggae beat, whilst Alex James plays double bass. James appears a funny character, smiling and seemingly sharing a joke with himself throughout the gig, a mug of tea on his amp; though I was too far back to decipher whether it was Earl Grey or Lapsang Souchong.
"Out of Time" and "Caravan", taken from Think Tank, reflect the evolution in Blur’s style and sound. Most of the last album was recorded during the band’s stay in Morocco and on the back of Albarn’s brief flirtation with Mali Music, so the influences are not unclear. Perhaps the beauty of Blur is the band’s willingness to adapt to and digest various styles of music, whilst many of their peers have failed to be as fluid, and as a result, have become stale and since fallen by the way-side.
|
Blur’s diverse musical output is reflected in the set, as the band move from the grunge-lite "Song 2" into the beautiful pop of "To the End."
Blur encore with the beautiful "Sing", the haunting piano chords taking me back to my first viewing of 'Trainspotting'. Albarn, encompassing the vast stage, breaks his focussed demeanour to raise a laugh with the subtle change of lyrics in "End of a Century"- “When you get closer… to forty”, rather than the ‘thirty’, which he sang back in 1994. This raised an interesting point for me. Albarn, James and Rowntree- once Britpop’s bright young hopes, are now middle-aged men, married and with children. However, the short and punky "We’ve Got A File On You" demonstrates that post- Coxon Blur have not lost their youthful exuberance. The track is sandwiched by two of the band’s timeless classics, "For Tomorrow" and "The Universal", demonstrating what an important musical force Blur have been in the last decade and a half.
|
