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Blur

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Rough Trade East
E1,

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Woo hoo! Blur are back on track

 

Distance left to run: a blokeish Damon Albarn delights fans at the Rough Trade East show

Doing what they do best: Albarn with bassist/farmer Alex James

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Blur never formally split up. They just lost heart after firing guitarist Graham Coxon in 2002.

Singer and chief songwriter Damon Albarn went on to break the American Top 10 (something Blur never came close to) with Gorillaz, restore his critical reputation with The Good The Bad And The Queen and indulge his more obscure cravings with the Chinese opera Monkey: Journey To The West and the Mali Music album.

Coxon embarked upon a diverting solo career, bassist Alex James took up farming and writing and powerhouse drummer Dave Rowntree, 45, has gained his pilot’s licence, is training to become a solicitor and is prospective Labour MP for the new Cities Of London And Westminster constituency.

That no party actually needs Blur’s return makes it all the more convincing. That they sold out two 50,000 capacity Hyde Park dates next month suggests there’s a Blur-shaped hole just waiting to be filled. The truth is out there: we’ve missed them.

First though, they needed low-key dates to get match fit. On Saturday they played a railway museum near their Colchester heartland and yesterday morning, Coxon announced, via Twitter, the four’s first London date since the Royal Festival Hall in 2000.

Just 170 souls were allowed to secure the green wristbands money couldn’t buy (they were free), which gave access to the show at Rough Trade East, where Radiohead almost played last year until the masses descended and police moved the “secret” gig to 93 Feet East. Blur’s omertà held firm.

Unless your living room is lined with Melt-Banana CDs or Phil Spector box sets and has a dartboard hovering precariously above a tiny stage at one end and a coffee bar at the other, last night wasn’t like having Blur in your living room at all. But it was close enough. In comforting truth, while James’s hair is less floppier than of yore, things are as they were.

Crucially, the debilitating on-stage tension which bedevilled them from the moment they broke through has seemingly evaporated.

At 40, James himself still gives every impression of finding all this pop star malarkey a hoot. Bless him, he managed to topple off the stage just before Girls And Boys, only to re-emerge, typically unruffled. Coxon hovered awkwardly around his microphone to sing Coffee And TV and you imagine he’ll have posture problems in later life, but the 40-year-old’s guitar work (most tellingly on Out Of Time, recorded after his departure and last night’s most joyful re-discovery) was a vivid, pointed reminder of why Blur were never a one-man band.

And Albarn? At 41 and more closely resembling Roman Abramovich with each passing year, he still dresses like a teenager, but his artistic and commercial success outside the mothership has brought the freedom to enjoy revisiting old, mainstream haunts, even an especially raucous Parklife, where, his neck bling swinging, he outbloked Phil Daniels’s original blokeisms.
The real delight of an hour comprised entirely of singles (bar a fevered Advert and a magnificent This Is A Low), was speculating what would come next. Even if it was Beetlebum. That career nadir aside, they chose wisely.

Debut single and last night’s opener, 1990’s She’s So High soared magisterially; the delirious crowd took over the gospel choir’s role in Tender and Popscene, the great lost Blur single, packed a butch punch, while the fireball that is Song 2 sounded as made for connoisseurs’ record shops as it does for sports stadia. Woo hoo, indeed.

Watch video of Blur in rehearsal below

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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