Once in a while one has an experience that pulls one out
of oneself, out of the thinking, walking, talking brains that we hold onto for
most of the day and into an altered state, another reality, a scenario that
allows us lose ourselves and truly exist in that moment. In typical Aries
fashion, I find that skiing very fast usually hits this spot, but sadly, snow
is not in abundance at this time of year. Heat, however, is….and with heat came
something rather special last night….the return of Blur to the London stage.
And not just any old stage but to the green heart around which we exist, we walk,
and we talk, London’s very own Hyde Park.
I’d been looking forward to this event for a while in a
casual sort of ‘I do intellectually remember that every time I see Blur I buzz
for three days afterwards but I can’t quite reclaim that feeling when I
think about it now’ sort of way.
You may recall that I recently mentioned that I hadn’t left this city
for ten months. It’s a bit like falling out of love when you’re sick of the
sight of your own city. I was so incredibly, mind-crushingly, bored crapless of
every single thing I looked at that even if London had turned into a musical
theme park with free food on every street corner served by naked men giving
away free designer clothes and mini breaks to hot European destinations I still
might have been a teensy bit bored of my surroundings. A couple of trips to the
countryside have helped but Blur have refreshed the parts that other lagers haven’t
been able to reach and I’ll tell you why.
I do like a band that push the musical envelope, a band that
dare to be different, a band who are prepared to take the chance every time
they bring out a new record to forget what they wrote about last time around.
As I stood and watched Blur take the stage last night and knock out song after
song after song after song, each and every single one of them somewhat
different to the last, I felt some kind of internal epiphany about life and
that if one really wants to do something different in any department, one must
be prepared to take a chance and try something new.
Who would have thought it? I certainly didn’t when at
twenty two years old I went to work for Blur. It was 1990 and they had just
released their first album, the singularly named ‘Blur’. They were different,
they looked good and they understood the value of a catchy tune. But never in a
million years did I think that twenty years later I would be standing watching
them in Hyde Park. I knew that I loved the barely contained mayhem that I
witnessed every time I saw them live. I once took a ‘non believer’ to see Blur
at Roselands in New York. It was, she said at the end of the night, one of the
best live performances she had seen in her life. But I still didn’t think that
a band that refused to toe the musical line would be that successful. I was
wrong!
Long after I moved on to other jobs and new episodes, I
always kept going back to Blur. Long after Oasis momentarily moved our
collective earths with ‘Rock n Roll Star’ and ‘Supersonic’- and then just kept
churning out revised versions of the above with a slightly different haircut -
Blur kept taking us to new places. To tender hurt places with ‘13’, to the
States with Song 2, to hot political places with ‘Think Tank’ and with a
million other experimental strands along the way…..Popscene, The Universal, Beetlebum, This is a low, Parklife, Oily Water, Coffee and TV, Boys
and Girls, it goes on. It is testament to Blur that their fans are prepared to
take these trips with them.
Life appears to be a series of spurts, of explosions, of
deaths, of fallow periods when the earth seems to become dry and nothing really
appears to be happening, but unbeknownst to us, silence does not necessarily
mean that nothing is happening. I am getting a bit oblique now but it occurred
to me last night that Blur have had many incarnations: they have been Indie pop
boys, good old British geezers, they have po’goed, they have disco mirror ball’ed,
they have Country House’d, they have loved each other, beaten the crap out of
each other, drunk and imbibed far too much of all sorts of things and then they
have got over it. They have even given the whole thing up and done something
else. They have let the ground lie fallow ….and here they are again. And we’re
still here with them.
Of course the fact that we thought they might never come
back does make it all the sweeter but with a back catalogue like this, this is
so much more than just a sentimental trip down memory lane. This is a revival
of something that was great the first time round and just got even better.
Damon Albarn looked like he couldn’t quite believe it as he sang the words to
The Universal and the crowd sang them back to him. It really, really, really
could happen. And it has.
And me? I stepped back out into the night alone having shaken
off my companions earlier on in the evening. Irritatingly, I have a life long
fear of crowds. Stick me in a hot sweaty venue up front and I’m fine. As long
as I can see the door, everything is alright. But put me in a field of 55, 000
people and I start to lose the plot. Halfway through the set I’d had to move
back through the crowd and find some space to breathe. My chest felt totally
clear now and the sheer joy of the music, the night time and the fact that I
was wearing nothing but a pair of sandals and a skimpy dress in my own city
felt great. We are not accustomed to such heat here in the UK.
I decided to do the London thing and walk home; I wanted
to breathe my city in, to fall in love with it again, and to listen to the
other languages that you hear if you take the time to listen. We might be fighting
a war on terror in some places but there is no such commotion going on here in the Edgware
Road. Just the sweet scent of barbequed chicken, the smoke rising up from the
hubbly bubblys, the promise of exotic destinations, no naked men handing out
free designer clothes and holidays but one lives in hope. Then I headed on down
towards home, towards the Westway and I hummed ‘For Tomorrow’ to myself.
