Reunited band Blur begin European tour
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Along with the summer in Barcelona began the annual music festival Primavera Sound, and at the same time the continental European part of the reunion tour of the English band Blur. As usual with Blur, the reunion will be followed by a new album. But Igor Gavrilov along with all those present, he primarily enjoyed songs from the albums of the 1990s.
One of the main intrigues in rock music in the 1990s was the rivalry between the two flagships of Britpop – Oasis and Blur. Then, in 1995, Blur won in record sales, but Oasis remained their main competitor, and as a result, Oasis’ losing single “Roll With It” stayed on the charts longer than Blur’s “Country House”. The war of the Britpop stars is a thing of the past, and there is no one to fight – the Oasis group broke up a long time ago. True, fans do not lose hope for her reunion, and in every replica of the eternally warring Gallagher brothers they are trying to discern something inspiring.
In the case of Blur, despite the long pauses in the band’s career, its line-up has never changed. Now, after playing four comparatively small English venues, she arrived in Barcelona, where the gigantic Parc del Forum was waiting for her, where Depeche Mode and Kendrick Lamar were to perform a day later. The last time Blur played on a venue of this magnitude was in 2015, one might say, in a past life. In the one in which they performed for the only time in Russia. During this time, Damon Albarn confirmed the stadium status of his other project: his Gorillaz took the lead compared to Blur both as touring performers and as creators of a musical product. Now it’s time to go back to where it all began.
“I’m so damn excited to be on this stage with my friends that I met when I was 12,” Damon Albarn said during a performance at Primavera Sound. Blur is generally easy to imagine as teenagers or very young people – and yet the first half of the concert left a feeling not of youthful lightness, but of hard physical work.
If from time to time Albarn suddenly hummed verses from some old musical or strummed on the piano, then his colleagues worked hard as in a mine. Drummer Dave Rowntree seemed to be extracting gold from ore with his chopsticks. Bassist Alex James writes books, works on TV and makes commercial cheese in his spare time at Blur, and this burden of professional diversity was also visible in his behavior on stage, although he smiled more than others. But the central figure in terms of creating the entire musical fabric of the concert was guitarist Graham Coxon, a living classic in his own right. The “meaty” sound of his guitar cut through the space of the night no worse than the most powerful spotlights placed along the edges of the field.
Blur kicked off the show with the new song “St. Charles Square”, which will be included in the new album “The Ballad of Darren”. Its release is scheduled for July 21. A large block of songs from the 1990s was played in a gritty and mature sound. Not very clean-shaven, slightly rumpled and extremely concentrated men worked on the stage. They are all over 50, and it was thought that before our eyes, in just some 30 years, they moved into the category of “used” musicians. This wasn’t just about Blur. On the same day, aching sadness erupted at Alison Goldfrapp’s performance, and even more so during the New Order set. Men with glasses, women with veins appearing on their hands – people who, it seems, just yesterday turned the musical fashion upside down. Now they are creeping up to the seventh ten.
But specifically Blur in this context did not look like an outgoing nature at all. Probably precisely because they always found sources of inspiration and ways of rejuvenation outside the group.
Played in a row “Parklife”, “To the End”, “Girls & Boys” and “Song No. 2” brought into ecstasy not only the audience, a serious part of which were the British, but also the musicians themselves. It would seem that “Song No. 2” has been living its own life for a long time, the life of a football chant and the most popular song from commercials. But Blur have not forgotten how to get adrenaline out of it for themselves. This song was immediately followed by a jam session, during which Damon Albarn pounded the keys, and Graham Coxon played the guitar literally with his own buttocks. And then the musicians gathered in a moment, played the majestic “This is a Low”, then another new song – “The Narcissist” – and the great gospel of his own composition “The Universal”. It seems that only this ability to be different and unpredictable even for themselves makes them get together every five or six years – and prevents the authors of Wikipedia from writing that the group has broken up.
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