These are not reviews. I wouldn't do that very well. They're just memories. I have called the segment "I 'n' Gigs" (a pointless pun on the name Ryan Giggs)... that is a good indicator of the quality writing to come ...
This is, when all the votes are counted, the best of them.
Blur in Hyde Park in July 2009.
This was the first show they announced after a 5 year
absence. I snapped up four tickets. They’d go on to announce another Hyde Park
show the day before and, of course, headline Glastonbury the week before. I
tried to avoid seeing the Glastonbury show on TV or hearing clips of it, not
wanting to spoil the impact.
Everything about the day. It was one of the great London
days. Sizzling, before sizzling gave us the shivers. I went with Mikey,
Alexander and John. I remember Mikey had broken his arm the month before, so
one of our duties was to protect anyone from bumping into his sling. John came
down from Edinburgh. He’d been down 8 months before, having bought me tickets
to see Paul Weller for my birthday, but then the weekend before that was meant
to happen, in November 2008, I’d broken my leg. Accident-prone times.
This was a better replacement for Weller. It was an event.
Blur were the band of my generation, I think. More than Oasis, because I tend
to think Oasis transcended generations a bit more, and they feel like a damaged
and woolly entity now. Blur were more precise, so could never be quite so
massive, yet they really were as massive as they could be for a while, and
being there, a decade and a half later, with 60,000 others that day felt like a
generational happening.
We four were all 30 – younger than we thought. It felt, at
the time, like going back to youth – now, of course, it feels like we were
still, just about, in that youth. None of us were married yet or had children –
the other three would all be married within a year, for me it would be 5 years
later.
Everything about the day. We approached from Green Park,
walked up through Mayfair and had a lunchtime pint in a pub. So I’d already had
my two DVTs and my leg break – I think this will have been one of the first
days after being put on blood thinners for good that I fully relaxed, went
against medical advice, and thought fuck it with the alcohol, thinking life’s
too long not to (for better or worse).
I’d missed seeing Blur in their first prime, even though
they were the gateway for me, the first music of my own generation that I loved
(it was, of all things, ‘End of a Century’ on ‘Top of the Pops’) – there were a
couple of times I should have gone, but between 94 and 99 I just wasn’t a gig
goer, and, then suddenly, stupidly, it felt like the chance to see them had
gone.
So, this was the next century, and, thankfully, the
universal was … not free but a very reasonable £45 for the day. These days,
something like that would be upward of £70. The support line-up … Deerhoof (who
we didn’t pay much attention to), Florence and the Machine, Amadou and Mariam,
Vampire Weekend … pretty fucking good really.
We were well-positioned. Of course, then the worry is
timing, food, drink, toilet breaks, losing your position. Other friends were nearby, within
about 50 metres, I think, but we never found each other, too densely packed and
losing signal.
But I think we all got it right. I don’t remember missing
anything. Florence and the Machine and Vampire Weekend became headliners in
their own right not long afterwards, but that day, they were a glorious warm-up
pleasure.
I’ve been looking at pictures of the day. We look happy. And
thin, and young. There were a lot of Fred Perrys about, including on stage. We
sang along to almost everything. It seemed like everybody did. I think Blur’s
songs are exceptionally good for singing along to. Maybe ‘cos Albarn is a good
not great singer and when he writes some of those soaring notes, he’s testing
himself and you feel like you in the crowd are testing yourself along with him.
“And it LOOOKS like we might have made it …”
“This is a LOOOOOW”
“When the DAYS JUST SEEM TO FALL THROUGH YOU”
“And I don’t know bout YOOOO”
And, of course …
“Oh my baby, oh my baby”
which was as cheesy and wonderful as everyone said ...
I remember that day seeing lots of people I vaguely
recognised, or fully recognised. It did feel like a massive gathering of
friends, which is so rare. I mean, for me, it’s pretty unprecedented.
It was a hits set. Nothing to promote. Mikey and I went to
see them in Hyde Park again in 2015 and they were brilliant again. I love ‘The
Magic Whip’, I think it’s one of their 4 best albums, but as they played about
half of it, sometimes the mood dropped a little, just a little. Also, in 2009,
I feel like a band at Hyde Park could still get away with a massive sound. By
2015, if you were well positioned, it was fine, but the ground didn’t shake.
Blur are such a proper band, aren’t they? Four such
entities, for good or bad. Each one irreplaceable. I tend to think the fact Albarn was able to diversify so successfully has meant Blur have, very unusually, never got too small or too big ... they haven't dwindled to a decent but smaller version of themselves, not have they kept on chasing big success and become flabby.
Funny, I’m not sure, now, I’d place them in my 10 favourite
bands, I’m not sure they’d quite make it in terms of what I fall back on
listening to, but the love they inspired in the 90s and on that day had a
hugeness I think I’ve only been part of the once.
Here’s a lovely postscript I’ve just remembered. Me,
Juliette and Rosa were at Leeds Castle last year and we got talking to a mother
and her little boy, who was about R’s age. And he was talking about something
he liked … I can’t remember exactly what it was, trains, I think, and he said
“they give me a sense of parklife” and we did a double-take and the mother said
they were massive Blur fans and played it to him all the time and he loved it.
How about that … good days that give me a sense of parklife.
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