It speaks volumes about music fans’ love of nostalgia that three decades after their creative and commercial peak, Blur played their biggest-ever headline show to 90,000 people at Wembley Stadium last night. And the Britpop favourites aren’t stopping there – they’re doing it all again tonight.
A timorous comeback from the lads who helped rescue British music from grunge’s sludgy hegemony in the early Nineties? Not likely.
Two questions hung over this vast show. The first was whether Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree – all in their fifties – could pull off a mega-gig in a place usually reserved for the big productions of Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and Taylor Swift. Big shows rely on big concepts nowadays, from Coldplay’s flashing wristbands to Sheeran’s in-the-round sushi conveyor belt stage.
The second question was more profane: drummer Rowntree’s leg. Last week Blur pulled out of a French festival due to his knee injury. Would his crocked appendage hold up?
On the first question, there was something extremely old-fashioned about this concert. There were no ego ramps or secondary stages, just a couple of giant mirror balls suspended above the crowd. There were dashes of eccentricity, though. Roadies ran around in scientist-style white coats like they used to wear in Abbey Road. Members of the crowd donned weird paper masks, part of a marketing ruse for their upcoming album The Ballad of Darren.
Under bruised skies, this was, therefore, almost the opposite of a flash stadium show. Its triumph lay in the music (a very English melding of The Kinks, XTC and early Pink Floyd), the band’s tightness and the crowd’s energy. Blur dug deep into their catalogue with early songs like Popscene, a synth-punk masterpiece. Meanwhile To The End, Coffee and TV and Beetlebum had the crowd, to a person it seemed, singing along.