Parklife Revisited | livemusic.fm

I've always had a strong connection to Blur ... Albarn and Co are only a year or so older than me, they studied arts about the same time as I did ... and of course I stole Graham Coxon's girlfriend!

Well obviously the last one's a bit of an exaggeration ... but I did spend most of my first year at Art College trying to go out with a girl who claimed she went out with him for a bit (or was it just snogged him at a party?) So, consequently I suppose it's a bit weird, with that tenuous connection, and only 1-degree of separation between me and one of the most talented guitar players of my generation, that I've never seen either Coxon (or more importantly Blur) live. I haven't seen Radiohead or Oasis either - but that's another story!

I have to confess there's always been sense of 'missing the boat' about not seeing any of those bands live ... and I might still not have seen them if it weren't for the tenacious missus, who, having witnessed the triumphant return of the Kings of Britpop to the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury on the BBC, announced that she was getting tickets to the Hyde Park gigs come hell or high-water! So, after a bit of compulsive eBaying and some Paypal jiggery-pokery we had e-tickets duly emailed to us (which I was personally convinced weren't going to work!) The weather report had forecast rain, at the Thursday night gig Albarn had confessed the gig 'would be hard to repeat'... and so I kinda thought it would all be a bit of an anti-climax.

Anyway... the weather stayed hot, the sun was shining and the khaki-grass expanses of Hyde Park were strewn with plastic bottles, crashed out 30-somethings and cans of cheap lager. Even the tickets scanned in perfectly and before we knew it, we were in the dusty, Tuborg & Merrydown Cider-soaked throng. The sun was still beating down strongly when Blur took to the stage – opening with She's So High ; an echoey, spiralling, semi-soporific track from their more ‘Madchester’ influenced Leisure album. Potentially a strange track to open with I thought, but since this was the opening track of their first ever LP it remains an evocative sound-scape of what brought Blur to most people’s attention back in 1991. The crowd dreamily sang along with the chorus, and Damian geared himself up for the more up-tempo Girls & Boys - which found both the crowd and the rest of the band in boisterous uproar. As he had done at Glastonbury, Albarn went on a foray down the front and got as up-close-and-personal as can be reasonably expected at a festival – while most of us had to be content with watching the good-natured scuffles down the front on the huge side-screen monitors. Coxon and Albarn seemed positively infused with energy (not bad when you reach 40) and bounced around the stage doing jumps, and in Coxon’s case backward rolls with his guitar, as the set progressed through the golden evening accompanied by songs charting the history of golden-age Blur. Spikey TrimmTabb preceded eerie and edgy Out of Time which segued with almost psychedelic applomb into Badhead. Musically (if not perhaps emotionally) Blur’s comeback had reached a pinnacle. Songs such as There’s No Other Way re-enforced the fact that even when heavily-influenced by the scene at the time, Blur were able to carve out highly-original song-crafting; and that particular Coxon-riff remains one of the most memorable sounds of early 90s indie pop.

The strange thing though was that all the songs did seem really fresh, with an almost feral intensity that certainly didn’t sound like songs they’d all played a thousand times before. Coxon, James and Rowntree seemed to be relishing the return to playing their songs together with Albarn. Other than the fact there were 50,000 people in attendance and you knew nearly all of them were over 30 ... you could almost believe that this was a band at the height of their powers, not looking back nostalgically at a back-catalogue of hits. As the sun went down, Albarn picked up his toyishly-small Spanish guitar and struck out the first chords of Beetlebum. One of the benefits of the ever-present side-screens was that every nuance in the band’s faces could be picked up by the cameras and shown to the whole crowd. During both this song and To The End I detected quite a lot of ambivalent emotions in Albarn. The rest of the band still looked like a bunch of adults who’d suddenly been allowed to act as teenagers again and were revelling in every moment but for Albarn there definitely was a bittersweet element. Some powerful emotive memories were being stirred up by both the re-forming of the band AND playing songs which were clearly detailing the emotional fall-out from the long-drawn out destructive breakdown of his relationship with Elastica frontwoman, Justine Frischmann. At Glastonbury he’d looked quite ‘wired’ and I’d originally thought maybe he was being chemically assisted ... but at Hyde Park I got the impression that the slightly wild-but-mournful look in his eyes was coming from deep within himself. As he referenced both the powers of sun and moon more than a couple of times during the set, he was clearly tapping into some almost pagan spirituality and deep, complex emotions. Coffee &TV saw a switch to Coxon as centre-stage, exemplifying his slightly-off key vocals and off-beat style in one neat number ... and then we were into the predictable singalongs of Country House and Tender is the Night. The crowd joined in with gusto and continued for some time after Tender had ended - which prompted some amusement from Albarn who orchestrated the singing like a slightly-wild-eyed conductor for a while. Parklife saw the arrival of original narrator-vocalist Phil Daniels in the "Fred-Perry-and-white-jeans" uniform of an über-Mod supplanted to the 21st Century. Again the crowd sang/talked along with enthusiasm and reflected that the origins of the song came directly from what we were all collectively indulging in – a drunken, summery, doss-about in a London park.

Finally after over an hour of back-to-back hits the band retired for their first break ... to re-appear minutes later with For Tomorrow and the punk-inspired, anthemic Song 2. Personally I thought that might be it, as they’d played for well over an hour and a half, and all major hits had been covered. But just before 10pm the band re-appeared for a final two numbers - the first the slightly-haunting and evocative Death of a Party which seemed extremely fitting, and then The Universal ... which once again precipitated universal singalongs that carried on long after the band had said their final good-byes.

As we trudged over the detritus of the wrecked parkland in the dark, I was left with a similar ambivalence to what I’d imagined Albarn had felt on stage. The gig was a real and fantastic example of why a band should reform and play live gigs again; but was there perhaps an eagerness in most of the audience, gazing through rose-tinted spectacles, to re-experience the golden age of Cool Britannia? The TV screens bring the live experience closer and yet also perhaps disguise the real ‘feeling’ of being at a gig. Or is it just that we’re older and more cynical and to be honest, as a nation, just a bit more middle class these days? One thing that did strike me during these 'age of reason' musings was that 20 years ago I would have been more pleased with myself stealing Coxon’s girlfriend, whilst these days what I’d really like to get his hands on is his ’72 Telecaster Deluxe ...

Blur ARE clearly one of the best British Pop bands produced in the last 25 years and both as song-writers and musicians they can’t be faulted. For some reason their songs have kept a resonance with the moiety of middle-class middle-england that perhaps Oasis (and others) might have lost. It will be interesting to hear after Wembley if the Brothers Gallagher will be gathering the gushing plaudits that have followed Blur’s Glastonbury & Hyde Park comebacks? When it comes right down to it, it’s the music that matters. Blur’s opus encompasses such a gamut of musical styles and influences, it’s difficult to imagine that the rocka-rolla formulas of Oasis can compete. I’m almost tempted to go along and find out ...