Blur: Classic Or Dud

WCC, yes I know what you mean. The thing with Blur is:

Back when they were extant, they were Damon's number one outlet for all his thoughts, tribulations and personal matters. Alongside the 'everyman' anthems, the private thoughts and personal doubts, bis brances into differnt musical styles, all squeezed out of that Blur nozzle.

Now he has as many outlets as he likes, the 'cartoony' stuff via Gorillaz, the 'srs' via GoodBadQueen, his affectations to 'world' music via his contact list. And the stuff that sounds a bit like Blur via, um, Blur.

I managed to 'obtain' all the Smiths' remasterd tracks, but was really unmoved by hearing them again.

Whereas hearing the J&MC stuff again sent me straight back to Reverie Street.

Yeah, I quite agree. Except all of that stuff was squeezed through the nozzle of those specific four people, some of whom often actively fought his worse tendencies and stamped their own personalities and aesthetics onto the music. And I think that I found that nozzle more interesting than anything inherent about ~Damon~.

The concert's free isn't it?

WCCC mostly OTM. Though I admit to shedding bit of a tear when the boys played To The End on their Glasto reunion, I'm a different person to the teenager who obsessed over their back catalogue and bought all their singles. It's all too easy to feel cynical about their music now I understand the many many points of reference in their music (whereas before I hadn't really heard much by the Kinks, the Specials, Syd Barrett, Pavement or Wire), whereas now it's fairly obvious they were the Harry Potters of Britpop - a carefully arranged conglomeration of past influences, all wrapped up in a nice neat package.

Haven't heard the new song yet, but as WCCC says, there's something unnatural about getting a band together to try and recreate the spirit of something they no longer have. That said, I'd be overjoyed to be able to see them with NO and the Specials at Hyde Park, so...

I haven't heard this new one, I did hear "Bad Day", it's OK as far as it goes. If it was the 'first track heard from the new album' then yes I'd be interested. But at the moment, it's like a series of 'square one on the snakes and ladder board's where what I really want is to be taken up to 63 and fall to 49 and so on.

I got the 'Monkey' Cd for a pound (I think, might have been three) in Fopp a while ago. We (royal we there) were quite interested in seeing the show, but couldn't get tickets. After hearing the album, she said "well, I guess you had to be there, really"...

What's the Monkey CD?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey:_Journey_to_the_West

and the album is pretty shite to be honest ..

for my 40th i got a litho of one of the artworks for the show which is fantastic, but still not been able to listen to the album in one sitting.

The concert's free isn't it?

Closing Ceremony Celebration Concert @ Hyde Park
•12 August, 5.30pm-midnight
•Featuring Blur, The Specials and New Order
•Tickets £55+booking fee
◦on sale to BT customers 9am, Wednesday 22 February
◦on general sale 9am Friday 24 Februaryhttp://www.londonlive.bt.com/

funnily enough, neither did we. (xposT)

Fifty Five Quid? pssh

Then again, for three decent bands.

Still...

£55 is excellent for three bands of that calibre, isn't it? Or am I just used to paying the Australia tax on everything?

I know, it's been a long time since I went to a gig...

But, I've seen Blur a couple times, I've seen New Order, not seen the Specials but the music I know well...

It'd be a braw day out, the girls would love it, etc...

I'll have to try to win some in a comp...

What? I was told it was free but you had to register. I'm not a BT customer so... This seems horribly horribly corporate, but I guess that's the way of the world.

i do wonder though, will there be a constant stream of medal adorned athletes on stage turning it into a "T4 on the Beach" type of affair but with gurning cyclists instead of tv presenters goading the baying masses into a last night of the proms type of insanity ?

yeah probably. i'd almost expect this kidn fo thing from Blur, but the Specials? NEW ORDER? Seems VMOOC.

FUCK YOU BRITAIN

New Order possibly not the best example of a band who are above getting TV presenters on stage to inanely goad the crowd

yes i would be pretty shocked if they allow sports people anywhere near their music OH WAIT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWr3xMhm0ig

We are going!

Last night they were absolutely terrible. Well, Damon specifically, I guess the other guys played the songs pretty well.

The sound was abysmal.

Oh come on. The sound was not so bad. It's Blur, they're fucking terrible now, whatever they used to be.

Damon couldn't really sing live in the old days, so he must be awful now.

That Hyde Park thing is probably just going to be a big gig, right? I'd assume any athlete or politician worth their salt will be at the proper closing ceremony.

Blur were fucking great when I saw them in Hyde Park last time, have a good day out Mark G.

Yes and they were fab at Glasto in '09. Hopefully last night was a slip up.

my favourite blur stuff was always the melancholy and nostalgic songs, tbh. loved glasto 09, tho I only watched it on telly.

massively exceeded expectations for me but i think that was as much to do with a fuckload of people in field having a singalong as it was their performance, which i can't really remember. (although if it worked on tv it probably was more than that.)

Blur did maudlin surprisingly well, and it's a shame the irksome "La-da-dah" anthems ended up outshining their reputation as good balladeers. 'To The End' and 'End of A Century' are much more gratifying songs than 'Parklife' and 'Girls & Boys'. What often winds me up about Blur's critics is their overuse of the mockney knees-up strawman, which pretty much derives from Phil Daniels' performance on 'Parklife' (who is an actor and also a Cockney, so can't really be blamed for posturing). Other than that, Blur had few other Chas'n'Dave moments save a handful of deliberately tongue-in-cheek B-sides.

^^^ i'd say exactly the same goes for Madness

^^^and the Small Faces

Philip W. "Phil" Daniels (born 25 October 1958, Islington)

Previously.. (with Gary Kemp)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWIU_J7ShVQ&t=12m52s

Blur did maudlin surprisingly well, and it's a shame the irksome "La-da-dah" anthems ended up outshining their reputation as good balladeers. 'To The End' and 'End of A Century' are much more gratifying songs than 'Parklife' and 'Girls & Boys'.

The doomier songs are what I still end up playing, their poppier numbers seem to have gotten more annoying as the years have past.

What often winds me up about Blur's critics is their overuse of the mockney knees-up strawman, which pretty much derives from Phil Daniels' performance on 'Parklife' (who is an actor and also a Cockney, so can't really be blamed for posturing). Other than that, Blur had few other Chas'n'Dave moments save a handful of deliberately tongue-in-cheek B-sides.

i really am not into blur so this is maybe not the thread for me but re: the above, i kinda think the resonance of the mockney tag is similar to the thing that got discussed in the politics thread, of certain things just serving as neat synecdoches of bigger trends - so romney left his dog on the roof of a car is a small irrelevant instance but captures a lot about the way he more generally gets it wrong/is not a real human being, &c&c&c. and the mockney thing maybe only encapsulates a small era of blur (does it though? isn't it at least a little bigger than parklife, cf at least drastically, cynically insincere shit like country house), but it refers more broadly to the weird-interchangeable-identity thing that was kinda marked, with them (maybe more accurately 'him', idk) having convenient, fluid & au courant tastes & personae.

obscuritants and b-sidists might be interested in taking a gander at this rundown that came out today http://thequietus.com/articles/08056-blur-brits-beyond-the-hits

Graham Coxon just retweeted that link!

The first 5 tracks listed there are in my all time Blur top 30 easy. 'Inertia' is wondrous.

That's the side of Blur that made me put up with "Blur" for so long. And that's the side that's got completely lost now that "Blur" is something Albarn does every few years when he has a "Blur" track to record.

watching through the brit performance now. 1) girls and boys went on for too long. 2) song 2 sounds way too clean.

blur should've recreated this imo. and left it at that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy8RqNLgH7c

There is a rumoured to be a cover of it (Young & Lovely) by Saint Etienne too (just imagine that. Ooooh).

I would kill to hear this.

I think it's funny that people say stuff like 'Country House' is cynically insincere. I truly believe that when that song was written and recorded that the band, or rather Damon, truly meant it. In the case of that particular song, it's not as if the song is an imagined scenario either, it literally is about someone Damon had a touch of bile for. I know that people, even the band, have said that The Great Escape was some kind of effort to make a Parklife II, but sometimes when you're writing songs and recording, the general mood/human element of things which one really has no control over can invade the whole process and help to give the album a character all of its own. So on the surface, while it is a sort of Parklife II, under the surface it's something very different. That album speaks more to me than 13 does.

I recall British journalists at the time using the phrase 'Darklife' wrt The Great Escape.

Ugh.

Apparently that was one of the proposed titles for the record. I recall it mentioned in an interview once that they tried to get 'life' into the title somewhere. Sex Life was another one, I think.

I suppose one way of looking at The Great Escape is that it's kinda like a 'sister' record to Parklife, rather than a 'follow-up', in the same way that Queen followed up A Night At The Opera with A Day At The Races. I'm thinking about the way 'Entertain Me' comes across as a weary, more negative version of 'Girls & Boys'. Although, unlike the Queen album, The Great Escape and Parklife seem to be on opposite sides of the same coin - partly because it's intended to be, sure, but also partly because that was the general mood in the Blur camp at the time and I don't really think that's something one can falsify.

I recall British journalists at the time using the phrase 'Darklife' wrt The Great Escape.

have no problem with that. the message at the heart of that record, and its best tracks, seems to be: "We've made it, and 'it' is pretty shit when you get there, actually."

^ stevie otm.

The general theme of the album is escapism, hence the title The Great Escape, virtually every character in every single song on that record is either wanting to escape, has escaped or is in the process of escaping, either mentally or physically, from a particular situation or place. They're attempting to escape using many different means also. Again, I think this is partly intentional, but I do think it's also a reaction to having made it and having to deal with the more negative things that come with fame.