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Review: Blur’s Reunion Tour

Blur’s headline performance at this year’s Glastonbury Festival exceeded the expectations of press and public alike and will be remembered as a classic. A set t

hat perfectly combined the obvious hits with some carefully chosen surprises was played with an energy that made the songs sound fresher and more relevant than ever.

At Hyde Park, for the last UK date of their reunion tour, the band was in the same mood, on the same good form, and the setlist was the same, however the overall effect was very different.

As Albarn remarked in a break between songs, this was the first date of the tour to be announced and go on sale. You might have guessed from half a glance around the crowd. The typical audience member was a one-time Blur fan who had somehow remained on their mailing list in spite of the fact that they had long since ceased listening not just to Blur but indeed to any music at all, and who thought it would be a fantastic laugh to hear the band play together again.

They got their laugh. With the lager flowing all day long in the relentless sunshine

and the cloudless sky marked only by the jubilant criss-cross of hurled bottles, the scene was immaculately set for a one-off reunion gig that would have an overriding ‘novelty’-flavour. Whatever the reformed quartet could conjure up in the way of vitality and energy, they were never going to compete with the expectations of the crowd; that this was to be a nostalgic journey through a host of familiar classics.

The vitality and energy from the band were there, if anything, in greater measure than was seen at the festival appearance. The opener ‘She’s So High’ had Coxon kicking the air, ‘Oily Water’ saw him tumbling around on the ground, and he belted out ‘Tracy Jacks’ with impressive vigour. Albarn charged about the stage, so fired up with emotion that tears often marked the conclusion of a song. He jogged his way through ‘Sunday Sunday’, spent ‘Parklife’ in lively interaction with special guest Phil Daniels, and into the first encore was still leaping off the drumkit to the sound of ‘Popscene’.

To say that the quality of the performance was lost on a large part of the audience might suggest that the band was attempting some sort of sophisticated redefinition of themselves which went over the audience’s heads. In fact their intention was clearly to be nothing but the essence of themselves. The emblem of the greyhound in goggles that was projected from the screens harked back to what is arguably their definitive album, Parklife, while the twin maps of London and the British Isles emblazoned at either side of the stage proclaimed their Britpop roots.

The setlist was designed to match. Heavily focused on Parklife (eight songs) and the underrated Modern Life is Rubbish (five), and including of their many slower numbers only the essentials (‘Tender’, ‘The Universal’, ‘To the End’, ‘This is a Low’, ‘Out of Time’), it was by and large a set of simply-structured, tuneful but rocking pop songs. The brilliance of this approach to a string of come-back performances was stifled by the fact that the audience was hoping for (and therefore ensured it was) something predictable.

So this concert was good but not sublime. From the godlike heights to which they attained with the Glastonbury set, they fell to mere demi-godlike status, and leave us unsure not only whether they will carry on, but whether we want them to, or if they’d be better off bowing out now on a high.

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