Blur: Classic Or Dud

If you're referring to this mentally overspeedy version of Parklife, this is not "better". Oh, maybe compared to BEP, it is.

too bad Phil Daniels couldn't leg it over to help them out with 'My Humps'

Now that I would have watched.

full choir indicates that 'tender' may be imminent

― the funk soul custos (country matters), Sunday, June 28, 2009 9:27 PM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Did I see the camera catch Alex flat out laugh at the expression Damon affected while singing this song, or is that just the default face of Alex?

ailsa, was referring to sunday sunday

i'd forgotten how kickass keith flint and maxim were XD

and i did not see that bit, sadly, although i did see aj's sweat patches

if anything, a double bass is a more laughable affection amirite

zane's going audiovisual on us

oh you teases i thought this was gonna be one of your arty ones

probably not the thread for it but wtf at the bbc pimping for bruce springsteen? i honestly don't know when springsteen became a thing, but on top of neil young it kind of reminds me why i liked the britpops at the time. ie it wasn't earnest americans being earnest. the boss moar liek the DROSS.

NOW PLAY THEME FROM RETRO

kinda get whatcha sayn nrq but apparently he was rly good so whadda i know

Bruce was good unlike most of the shite on offer. it would pain me to say it for fear of sounding like a boring old git but considering most of the line up is boring old gits it aint a thing.

Ha, I was about to say similar, perhaps I have become a boring old git. There was a time when I'd have been going mad for Blur and wouldn't have pulled the curtains to watch Bruce Springsteen if he'd been playing in my garden, but somehow I've done a total 180 in the last ten years or so. I watched his set earlier, he was great.

(Prodigy also old gits, but not exactly boring)

For Tomorrow still a cracker, and off-form weird-voice Albarn can't ruin it.

bad closing choice imo

best one was either beetlebum, countryhouse or there's no other way, badhead surprisingly strong considering i don't rly like the song much

for tomorrow not so good this time for some reason

Best bit was Badhead and Beetlebum back-to-back (seeing as those are probably my two favourite Blur songs anyway). Re: above, I can't stand Bruce Springsteen, never could, and what with you-know-who dying the other day this weekend I've been feeling like I've been transported back to the 80s and forced to listen to loads of music I hate.

Yeah what am I talking about, Beetlebum was the highlight. Coxon really let go for 30 glorious seconds. More of that plz.

Loads of revered kinda-conservative american stuff getting an airing but if it's convincingly performed I got not much of a problem

i checked in my parents' guiness book of hit records and the so-called 'boss' never had a hit in this fair isle before 1985. no 'born to run', no nothing. but i meet people my age who are like brooce! legend! wv ppl.

damon's voice was always blur's weak spot.

To be fair, he had a bunch of big hit albums over here by then, but yeah.

OMG, imagine people liking someone who hadn't troubled the charts much. that's never happened ever.

They played "Girls & Boys" ("Boys & Girls"??) last night at the club. It was a fucking classic gay pride moment that happened to intrude on a goth night. What a song! I remember playing that on college radio in the early 90's.

Damon's never been able to sing, wtf are people talking about.

Seeing the reformed blur play glastonbury reminded me what excited and irritated me about them in the first place.
Damon's whole persona, that got-it-all believe-in-nothing little squirt, was such a sharp contrast to springsteen, whose passionate sermonising I would have hated a decade ago, but seemed to speak to our times on this occasion, and connected with the crowd.
On the plus side, for Blur, there's the songwriting and coxon's guitar playing. So yes, I missed them, but there's an emptiness about them too.

Damon's 'frontman' act is the same as when they played small places.

Damon's whole persona, that got-it-all believe-in-nothing little squirt, was such a sharp contrast to springsteen, whose passionate sermonising I would have hated a decade ago, but seemed to speak to our times on this occasion, and connected with the crowd.

imo you are over-mythologising, or at least reading a slightly false narrative. dudes got different styles.

Springsteen can be blues for white people who don't partake of OG blues (call and response breaks were pretty cool) but is better than that whole shite shite Van Morrison universe that I'm thinking of when I cite BFWP.

Damon had quite a few moments where he sounded like he was turning into Billy Bragg, and fastfastparklife *sucked*. Perhaps Alex James has been on Atkins; he put them all to shame by stepping effortlessly back into that haircut.

yr not telling me Graham Coxon is fat?

Aside from looking like indie/aspie Serge Gainsbourg, I thought Graham had perhaps aged best.

We stood next to Ant from Ant 'n' Dec as he was buying ice creams during Vampire Weekend.

The day itself was all very artless but well worth the cost of admission. The best bit would have been the little speech Albarn gave about Britpop and reforming and hinting about whether the band will continue before launching into 'Death of a Party', if only that had been the last song and they'd left the stage without saying another word.

"Death of A Party"! Oh man, that's great stuff.

It was great when they played it though, about two songs from the end and you can almost feel the majority of the crowd's attention going onto other things, like their mobile phones or planning the bus home or throwing more bottles at people in front of them.

Still think they should have brought Phil Daniels out, with everyone expecting 'Parklife' but the band instead plays 'The Outsider', that bizarro-Parklife off the last album.

ain't that called "me, white noise"

Friends emailed a picture from the concert last night. Way to rub it in guys. :-( JEALOUS.

spotify has "me, white noise" incorrectly labelled as "the outsider"

Yeah, I couldn't remember what it was called and looked it up.

Also:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJaUu7IyEf0

There's a live version of that song I got on a free CD which kicks the original's ass. Totally smokes it, even. And the recorded version's pretty good.

at whatever recent Leeds festival Blur played there was a fat old cockney guy standing in front of me bellowing "ME WHITE NOISE" throughout every single gap in Blur's set, like properly trying to get the band's attention to force them to play the song, for about an hour solid, and he kept striking up conversations with us and people around us about whether they would play Me White Noise, and then eventually he got really frustrated and left, and then about five minutes later Phil Daniels turned up and they played it

Damon was really, heroically inane at the first Hyde Park show

Went to see them on Thursday, it was great, except for the people who kept throwing half empty bottles of beer around the place. As one of my friends said after the Bruce Springsteen gig on the Sunday, just by looking at the number of bottles of beer on the ground at £3.50 each, someone is making a lot of money from these shows.

I thought it was a really great mixture of songs, from the ones that everyone could sing along to and the quieter moments. With all the 'hits' it felt like being at the biggest indie disco.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3569/3683290696_e739ae8a1a.jpg

nice foto!

thursday at hyde park was the best outdoor live show ive seen in a good half decade and one of the slickest 'events' that i've ever experienced in terms of organisation, facilities, etc. the atmosphere was blinding down the front, the weather was beyond perfect and the band were flatly fantastic.
if it had been in a movie on tv you'd have switched over because it was too unrealistic.

Setlist still a bit too straightforward for my tastes. We got Trimm Trabb, Oily Water and Death Of A Party but they were just about the ONLY concessions to avant-Blur.

Dream Blur setlist:

Battle
On Your Own
Slow Down
Best Days
Bugman
Ambulance
He Thought Of Cars
Blue Jeans
Chemical World
Beetlebum
I'm Just A Killer For Your Love
1992
Dan Abnormal
Birthday
Resigned

*encore 1*
Trouble In The Message Centre
Caramel
This Is A Low

*encore 2*
Clover Over Dover
Essex Dogs
Yuko & Hiro

Strongly doubt Dave Rowntree would be able to play Slow Down these days. Really strongly doubt it.

jesus for a second I thought that was the actual setlist

i dunno the crowd could take the excitement of the classic

I'm Just A Killer For Your Love
1992
Dan Abnormal

run. i mean god, give them a chance!

If Blur played that exact set I would be, shall we say, somewhat elated

Dud. However, I wanna fuck Damon Albarn if that counts.

So Dud: http://www.holymoly.com/news/random/couple-dry-hump-crowd-blur-gig18749.html

FIND MORE STORIES ABOUT: BLUR | DAMON ALBARN | DRY HUMPING | SEX

That would be a great gig, Louis, but I'm not really a fan of 1992. Replace it with 'Mellow Song' and I'll be there.

:o

Mellow Song is great as well but we're talking Coxon's finest hour, Damon's descent into the abyss, my own personal 13 joint-favourite (along with Battle, Caramel and Bugman; the four songs together represent Blur reaching a level so heroically elevated from their expected standard that I boggle now as to how they did it)...

I mean I can see why some people think it's a tuneless dirge but for me it's transcendent. And surely Sing is the natural replacement? :P

Glad you like the rest of the gig mind. Always thought Blur were at their most exciting when playing around slightly, or allowing subtlety into their songwriting, as my choices attest. Blue Jeans for instance is a beautiful little song but doesn't have the 'pop chops' of the far inferior For Tomorrow. Occasionally, Blur managed to balance great musical values with a fucking massive, populist tune (Beetlebum, Chemical World, On Your Own, This Is A Low) but for me they suited sophistication. Or mentalism.