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