Has anyone ever been more excited to headline Wembley Stadium than Damon Albarn? The Blur frontman anoints it “a temple for the agnostic”, pays tribute to Freddie Mercury at Live Aid, delights in the echo when he speaks, and turns breakneck instrumental Lot 105 into an ode to the place, coaching the crowd to chant “Wembley” in rhythm. “Obviously we’ve been waiting for this moment all our lives,” he says. That much is very clear.
Blur give good reunion. Their bridge-mending set at Glastonbury in 2009 was one of the most emotional nights in the festival’s history. Marking the closing of the London Olympics at Hyde Park in 2012, they felt rather like Britain’s national band. The thrill of headlining Wembley for two nights – a trophy that eluded them at their mid-90s peak – insures against diminishing returns. Albarn may be a famously restless musician, slaloming between Gorillaz, Africa Express and so on, but he is always visibly moved to be sharing a stage with Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree, whose four-cornered friendship is crucial to their appeal. Fundamentally unchanged in their 50s, they still look like the only 90s band who could have been an animated TV show.
Albarn is a winning frontman, unvarnished and unjaded. Appearing in a baggy blue suit and Harry Palmer specs, he buzzes with a lairy, ragged energy. Just four songs in and he’s wading into the crowd to sing Tracy Jacks. “I didn’t think it would be like this,” he admits. Revelling in the jollity of Sitcom Blur, he dons a deerstalker for Country House and a Fila tracksuit for Girls & Boys, two songs whose crowd-moving, beer-flinging power is only exceeded by Parklife, with guest vocalist Phil Daniels emerging from a road worker’s tent like Kramer walking through Seinfeld’s door. The tent is a rare prop. Notwithstanding a pair of giant mirrorballs, there’s none of the standard stadium-rock hardware: no B stage or confetti cannons or hi-tech visuals. The songs carry the weight.
And what songs they are. The set’s roughly chronological opening stretch drives home the hungry velocity of Blur’s evolution, from indie-dance to punk petulance to Kinksian character studies to lo-fi squall, telling a very 90s story of ambition and ambivalence. Songs like Popscene and Beetlebum, which at the time felt as if they were thumbing their nose at success, sound Hulk-sized tonight. Most remarkably, the Coxon showcase Coffee & TV, an introvert’s lament veined with one of his signature keening anti-solos, mutates into an anthem. The fond dynamic between singer and guitarist makes for a delightful subplot if you notice the way Albarn pulls Coxon close for the line “I’m never sure why I need you” in Song 2’s gonzo sports-rock or waggles his tongue at him during fan favourite Tender. Albarn is having too much fun to keep a straight face during the lighter-wavers.
Despite the popularity of their handful of oi-oi capers, many of the essential Blur songs run on melancholy, doubt and an inchoate yearning for better days. The island ache of This Is a Low might have been designed to undercut Britpop triumphalism, scrutinising the English condition rather than celebrating it, while Tender, featuring the London Community Gospel Choir, assembles a hymn to perseverance from the shards of shattered love. Stranger, noisier inclusions like Oily Water and Trimm Trabb represent the art-rock prickliness that always rubbed against the grain of their pop aspirations. Two strong songs from their imminent album The Ballad of Darren (due for release on 21 July) suggest that the essential push-and-pull has not been lost.
Coinciding with Pulp’s own ecstatic reunion tour, Blur’s return reminds you how much more interesting the reality of Britpop was than the naff Cool Britannia caricature, what it meant for such sharp, characterful music to be so widely beloved, and how well it holds up three decades later. What makes this night so special is the clear impression that Albarn truly cherishes Blur – as people and as an experience. After The Universal’s bittersweet valedictory refrain of “It really, really, really could happen,” he takes in the roaring crowd with a dazed grin. “You’re properly mad, you lot, for sticking with us for so long,” he says. “Why?” Blur have just spent two glorious hours answering that question.
• Blur play Wembley, London, on Sunday.
• This article was amended on 10 July 2023 because during the performance, Phil Daniels emerged from a road worker’s tent, not from a canvas wardrobe as an earlier version said.
