Which opens the door for a few old people jokes, but the guys looked spry, especially on “Song 2.” (And Graham looks much happier than when we caught the sad sack at SXSW.) We’ve been keeping you abreast of Blur’s impending reunion, complete with the album speculation and sundry teasers. Over the weekend (6/13), folks got the real thing at the East Anglian Railway Museum near Colchester, also the site of their first public performance back in 1988 (poetic). The summer warm-up was billed as a “friends and family” gig. Blur have around 150 friends and family members. As you’d expect from the band’s first show as a four piece in nine years, they pulled out the hits during the two-hour set. It started with “She’s So High” and ended with “‘The Universal.” There were 26 others in between. We have the setlist along with some video.
“Coffee & TV”
“Charmless Man”
“Parklife”
“Song 2″
The setlist:
01 “She’s So High”
02 “Girls And Boys”
03 “Tracy Jacks”
04 “There’s No Other Way”
05 “Jubilee”
06 “Badhead”
07 “Beetlebum”
08 “Trimm Trabb”
09 “Coffee & TV”
10 “Tender”
11 “Country House”
12 “Charmless Man”
13 “Colin Zeal”
14 “Oily Water”
15 “Chemical World”
16 “Sunday Sunday”
17 “Parklife”
18 “End Of A Century”
19 “To The End”
20 “This Is A Low”
21 “Popscene”
22 “Advert”
23 “Song 2″
24 “Out Of Time”
25 “Battery In Your Leg”
26 “Essex Dogs”
27 “For Tomorrow”
28 “The Universal”
NME has additional details. There’s another “secret” show tonight, UK folk.
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Well this post makes me feel old and happy. Makes me wanna break out the old mogwai “blur are shite” t-shirt as to confuse the stay-at-home mommies and tweeners at my local coffee shop.
Videographer has it bad for Damon. I realize he’s the frontman, but shifting the camera to the left and right may also yield fine results.
And yes, I’m bitching about free ice cream.
That setlist puts just about every other band around to shame.
Blur broke up?
Here’s hoping they hit the states.
SIGH
Blur > Gri- fuck it, Blur just rocks.
If Blur is back, then hopefully Albarn is working on Gorillaz too :)
http://bonafidewithheadphones.blogspot.com/
Alex is even hotter then back in the day
Yes, yes, a million times yes.
Everyone remember the Coffee & TV video with the little milk carton? What a cool video. One of my all time faves. Blur definitely the best britpop of the 90s.
Here’s to hoping they can follow up the reunion with a good album.
Come on, Think Tank! You’re a great record warranting more representation!
i dont do men, but damon is so fine that i’d do him in a fartbeat
I’m so glad these guys are back together. The chemistry seems to still be there like in the good old days. Here’s to hoping they get back in the studio soon!!
Quick breakdown:
Think Tank > The Great Escape > 13 > Blur > Parklife > Modern Life Is Rubbish > Leisure
Of course they still have chemistry. It’s a chemical world. I don’t know about you…
How is Think Tank better than Parklife and Modern LIfe is Rubbish? Just curious…
I actually really like Think Tank. My question is how 13 is better than those albums.
Oh I love 13. The whole experimenting they had started with Blur just seemed to fully blossomed into what they felt they wanted the band to sound like at the time. Coffee & TV, Tender, Swamp Song and No Distance Left To Run are pure brilliance and are among my favorite of their songs. I love the older albums and I know Parklife is regarded by many as their best but I guess I became a fan a little later than others.
I just love Think Tank. It’s probably the only Blur album I could not stop listening to when I heard it for the first time. The only weak track on the album for me was the Norman Cook-produced track Crazy Beat, but the rest of the album is amazing. I’ll agree with you that Parklife is among their best albums(my favorite Blur song is on there, This Is A Low) but the older stuff just doesn’t do it for me. I guess it just sounds a little too britt-pop for me. The newer Blur was what I started to get into. The point where they decided to experiment a little more in the studio and create all these different sounds. Anyway,The Great Escape is one I can appreciate a little more than some of the newer ones because of such songs as Stereotypes, The Universal, Country House and Charmless Man. That’s my two-cents on that.
Honestly I don’t think I could put them into a hierarchy like that. I really like Think Tank and Modern Life is Rubbish and Parklife and 13, but I like them all for different reasons. I think I go back to Great Escape and Parklife more than I do to the rest of the catalogue. On first listen I would have said Blur was their weakest album but it grew on me like crazy
Ok so check this out everybody.. This is a Over/Under for Blur where a music critic for Magnet breaks down which songs he/she considers to be the bands most over and under-rated songs from their catalog. I find it interesting and agree and disagree with some of it. Read on..
Blur was one of the most quintessentially English bands of the Britpop era. Drifting from shoegaze to grunge to pop, the group always retained its core influences of the Kinks, the Beatles and XTC. But despite a few solitary hits, Blur never quite made it in the U.S. And that?s a shame, because with a span of seven full-lengths, multiple EPs and some killer singles, Blur proved that it had the staying power many of its contemporaries lacked. But as the band succeeded financially, guitarist Graham Coxon grew more and more disenchanted, finally leaving after 1999?s 13. Following 2003?s difficult Think Tank, Blur went on hiatus. Since then, Coxon has developed a prolific solo career, singer Damon Albarn founded Gorillaz, bassist Alex James started a cheese farm, and drummer Dave Rowntree ran unsuccessfully for public office. Now reunited as a four-piece for the first time in nearly a decade, Blur is back in the public eye. And with rumors of a new album circulating, what better time to examine its most underrated and overrated songs?
:: The Five Most Overrated Blur Songs
1. ?Song 2? (1997)
Woo-hoo! Now name another line from ?Song 2.? A Nirvana parody that the rest of the world took seriously, ?Song 2? is good, grungy fun and remains Blur?s highest-charting single in the U.S. It?s not that Blur couldn?t do heavy riffs (the brilliant ?Popscene? or ?Bank Holiday?) or that it didn?t know when to just have fun (?Girls & Boys?). So what made ?Song 2? so huge? It?s probably the woo-hoos.
2. ?Parklife? (1994)
Parklife the album made Blur the defining band of the Britpop generation. (For the few months until Oasis? (What?s The Story) Morning Glory? came out, anyway.) But ?Parklife? the song made Blur feel like a caricature by reducing its many talents into something cheap. ?Parklife? goes beyond comedy and into just plain goofy. In attempting a Who-style character piece (the song even features spoken verses by Quadrophenia mod Phil Daniels), Blur assumes the ?cheeky chap? image that would often hold it back from experimenting with its musical potential.
3. ?She?s So High? (1991)
With its droning beat and slightly sketchy lyrics (?I want to crawl all over her?), Blur deserved a better beginning than ?She?s So High.? Despite its flaws, Leisure is a thoroughly solid debut thanks to buoyant numbers ?There?s No Other Way? and ?Bad Day.? So why start off a career with ?She?s So High?? At least it gave Blur a chance to produce one of the most dated videos in music history.
4. ?Country House? (1995)
By the mid-?90s, Britpop was beginning to show signs of strain. With Oasis scrambling to repeat the success of Morning Glory, Pulp struggling to deal with success and Blur working on a follow-up to the massive Parklife, it was only a matter of time before it all fell apart. ?Country House,? the center of a publicity feud with Oasis, was Blur by the numbers, complete with a goofy video and a sneering dismissal of the middle class. While it might have won the battle of the charts, Blur ultimately lost the Britpop war, and ?Country House? has aged about as well as Albarn?s Penguin Books T-shirt.
5. ?Crazy Beat? (2003)
OK, so there aren?t that many fans of ?Crazy Beat.? Not in this universe, anyway. But it was one of Blur?s final singles and also one of its biggest chart successes. A supposed reinvention that wound up more annoying than inventive, ?Crazy Beat? can always be defended under the catch-all of ?experimentation.? Duck noises are not experimentation. They are annoying. And until Blur release something new, our last memories of the band will be of ?Good Song? and ?Crazy Beat.? That is, frankly, unacceptable.
:: The Five Most Underrated Blur Songs
1. ?You?re So Great? (1997)
A Coxon number from the often bombastic Blur, ?You?re So Great? is strangely sweet and instantly memorable. Coxon?s too-often neglected talents (see 1998?s ?Coffee & TV?) might have led to the band?s split, but it gave him free rein to explore a vibrant solo career. True, if the world had paid a little more attention to Coxon during his time with the band, we might?ve had more Blur. We certainly wouldn?t have had Think Tank. But we probably wouldn?t have had this overlooked, stripped-down love song gone awry. ?Sad, drunk and poorly,? indeed.
2. ?Badhead? (1994)
A brief pause in the hectic mash of Parklife, ?Badhead? is one of Blur?s loveliest pop moments, with a horn section and ironic detachment in spades. But as with many of Blur?s best songs, it?s clear that Albarn?s claim of ?I might as well just grin and bear it? isn?t fooling anyone. How ?Badhead? wasn?t released as a single is surprising; how it didn?t become a pop classic is unthinkable.
3. All of The Great Escape (1995)
OK, so The Great Escape wasn?t the best follow-up to the chart-conquering Parklife. It was indulgent, possibly due to some illicit substances consumed during its creation. But The Great Escape is stacked with some of the band?s best singles (?Stereotypes,? ?Charmless Man?) and one contender for its top five (?The Universal?), as well as Albarn?s clever, even haunting, lyricism. Take, for instance, the Morrissey-influenced disaffection of ?Best Days?: ?Other people break into in a cold sweat/If you said that these were the best days of their lives.? The album is Albarn?s most notable attempt to recapture the Kinks circa Village Green in the light of the morning after, and even if it doesn?t always succeed, it makes for an interesting failure.
?Best Days?:
4. ?Caramel? (1999)
Like Blur grown up, 13 struck a fine balance between feedback-heavy fuzz (?Bugman?) and delicate melodies (?No Distance Left To Run?). In a way, it was its Abbey Road, a breakup album (or at least, a breakup-with-Coxon album) that combined the experimentation of Think Tank with both classic melodies and straightforward lyrics. This gospel-infused number is one of Blur?s strangest ever, ambient and dreamy and completely deserving of its seven-minute length. While ?Tender? might have been 13?s most celebrated tearjerker, ?Caramel? is a haunting depiction of a band coming apart at the seams.
5. ?Mace? (1992)
Picking up 1994?s The Special Collectors Edition is a must for any obsessive Blur fan, as it tracks the band?s b-sides up to the Parklife era. But it?s worth getting for ?Mace? alone, a snotty, poppy number that taunts, ?Used to know/But now you don?t.? While ?Mace? was the b-side to the classic ?Popscene,? it stands completely on its own. At its release, Blur was still in the process of finding a new style that would be artistically and commercially successful. Even if the culmination of that process?Modern Life Is Rubbish?didn?t sell as good as it should have, it?s gone down in history as a classic precursor to Britpop. For a band still uncertain of its future, ?Mace? is a surprisingly cocky example from the Modern Life era.
?Written by: Emily Tartanella for Magnet Magazine
I liked Blur more when Damon Albarn didn’t look so..old.
I liked Blur more when Damon Albarn didn’t look so..old.
damon albarn is so ridiculously talented.
graham is by far the hottest! i just wish he could sing live. i love that little voice of his.
yet the awesomest blur member is dave rowntree – what he has done with his life between blur is really inspiring as a solicitor-in-training giving counsel pro-bono for the neediest and poorest at the police station in one of the toughest areas in london.
WOW! what a setlist. Amazing band, never get enough credit here in the states. Epic discography.
Cool, glad to seem them back. Hopefully they will start making records as well. Albarn is a very talented musician. It will be interesting to see what he’s got up his sleeves for Blur.
Most bands don’t have 26 songs worth playing live. Blur are amazing.
this makes me so happy i cant even stand it
Damn, they look (and sound) great! I really really really hope they plan on making a nice long trip overseas sometime in the not-so-distant future.
And to dude who said Damon looks old, to hell with that. I’d hit i– er, I mean, I hope I look that good in my forties.
Am I the only one that thinks this sounds terrible? Not just the mix, but the performance too. And Damon needs to pull up his trousers.
One of the best bands ever? I think so
Can’t wait to see them at Glasto
Just fucking amazing!
As far as 1997 output goes….
D’you Know What I Mean>Song 2
Think Tank and Be Here Now are probably two of the most underrated albums of the past 15 years or so.
This could be one of the best pieces of information I’ve come across in months.