Blur Live At Wembley Stadium Review: Britpop heroes’ late-career peak captured for posterity

Live album documents Blur’s two biggest ever shows at Wembley Stadium in 2023.

Blur at Wembley Stadium July 9 2023

by Victoria Segal |
Published on

Blur

Live At Wembley Stadium

★★★★

PARLOPHONE

“Obviously we’ve been waiting for this moment all our lives,” Damon Albarn declares from the Wembley Stadium stage, where Blur played their two biggest-ever shows in July last year.

Appropriately, then, this live album begins with a glorious compression of their career, collapsing down the distance between the manic St Charles Square – from 2023’s The Ballad Of Darren – and There’s No Other Way’s baggy menace. What follows is a remarkably moving distillation of Blur’s 33 years as pop stars. Albarn often sounds noticeably verklempt, but they keep a perfect balance between their deftly scaled-up alienation and melancholia (Under The Westway; This Is A Low; Beetlebum) and breaking-glass aggro-pop (Girls And Boys; Song 2; Popscene). Even Parklife, with inevitable Phil Daniels, is a complex pile-up of nostalgia and jubilation. So many people, so many songs – and even if you weren’t there, you can feel it – so much love.

Blur Live At Wembley is out now on Parlophone.

LISTEN/BUY: Spotify | Apple Music | Amazon | Rough Trade

Tracklist

Disc One:

St Charles Square

There’s No Other Way

Popscene

Tracy Jacks

Beetlebum

Trimm Trabb

Villa Rosie

Stereotypes

Out of Time

Coffee & TV

Under the Westway

Disc Two:

End of a Century

Sunday Sunday

Country House

Parklife

To the End

Oily Water

Advert

Song 2

This Is a Low

Lot 105

Girls & Boys

For Tomorrow

Tender

The Narcissist

The Universal

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Picture: Tom Pallant

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