Blur @ Music Hall of Williamsburg (Photo: Ken Grand-Pierre)
Brit-Pop legends Blur swept across the Atlantic and into New York last week, a surprise visit that saw the band play a triumphant show at Music Hall of Williamsburg, NYC on Friday.
It was a whirlwind visit, but one which left no doubt that Blur are still a force to be reckoned with on stage. They still sound great, they still look great, and they still need each other as much as their fans need them too.
Singer Damon Albarn and guitarist Graham Coxon rather famously fell out with one another years ago, dissolving a friendship and partnership that – when it was working – brought out the absolute best in the pair. This isn’t to dismiss the importance of bass guitarist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree, a formidable and underrated rhythm section and an absolutely integral piece of the Blur puzzle. But all the great bands seem to have a pair of strong personalities with electricity crackling between them; sometimes they’re a foil, sometimes an intimate partner, sometimes something in the vast expanse of the middle. The Beatles had it in John Lennon and Paul McCartney; Oasis had it in the Gallagher brothers; the Verve had it in Richard Ashcroft and Nick McCabe. Blur had it – and still has it – in Albarn and Coxon, childhood friends who are still, as adults, rebuilding a relationship they let unravel in the last few years of Blur’s first incarnation. There is clearly love there, as seen in stolen affectionate smiles onstage, and in embraces pretty much everywhere they go together. But there is also some underlying tension there they don’t seem ready to let go of. In interviews for the new album, The Magic Whip, Coxon has given the impression he was trying to make amends for past transgressions by pushing to do something with hours of abandoned material from five days of jamming in Hong Kong. And Albarn’s lyrics (“When we were like brothers,” he sings on “My Terracotta Heart.” “That was years ago”) point to the complexity of a longtime complicated relationship.
Blur’s relationship with the United States has also been a complicated one, beginning with their first tour here in the early ‘90s, a brutal jaunt across the wide expanse between the Atlantic and Pacific that has been described by members of the band over the years with the same detached shaken recall one might imagine having coming from survivors of the Bataan Death March. Prior to Coxon’s forced departure in 2002, Blur toured the US numerous times. They put in the time on TV and radio, played wherever and whenever, released and promoted singles and albums, and they’re still, to many people in this country, the “Woo-hoo!” band. “Song 2,”a jagged blast of adrenaline from their 1997 eponymous album, hit 55 on Billboard’s Hot 100, Blur’s highest-charting single in the country. It’s also become a staple of the sports arena experience in America, alongside the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “Rock and Roll (Part 2)” by disgusting pedophile Gary Glitter.
Blur toured the US as a trio in 2003, playing New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom on July 17 of that year. They last performed here with Coxon on March 30, 1999 at the recently demolished Roseland Ballroom. Their first shows with Coxon back in the fold were a series of warmup dates in the UK for a pair of triumphant Hyde Park reunion gigs in early July 2009. That reunion began with a small, symbolic show at the East Anglican Railway Museum on June 13 and ended with a headline set at T in the Park in Scotland less than a month later. Three years later, they were at it again, with a handful of warmup shows, two European festivals, and a celebrated Hyde Park set connected to the closing ceremonies of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. 2013 saw the band play a total of 25 worldwide dates, most of them festivals, including appearances at Coachella on consecutive weekends. Those two shows, until last Friday, were all the attention the band has paid to the United States in over a decade.
No one can definitively answer the question as to who won the BritPop wars; Blur took the singles battle, with “Country House” debuting in the top spot, just above “Roll With It” by then-rival Oasis. Oasis, of course, took the albums battle, with What’s the Story (Morning Glory)? rolling over Blur’s The Great Escape like a freight train. These fights were primarily fought on British soil, though Oasis also won the fight for the hearts of the US market as well; “Wonderwall” reached number 8 on Billboard’s Hot 100, and the band was still filling Madison Square Garden on their last US tour in December 2008 before imploding the following year.
How much Blur has taken this relative failure to break America to heart is unclear. Albarn took tentative steps with Gorillaz, plotting live dates as special events rather than proper tours in spite of the cartoon-fronted group having greater commercial success over here than Blur. He eventually did the arena thing with Gorillaz, including a stop at Madison Square Garden in October 2010 with a lineup that boasted half of the Clash, Lou Reed, and Mos Def.
Damon Albarn @ Music Hall of Williamsburg (Photo: Ken Grand-Pierre)
Albarn’s solo album yielded more festival (Governors Ball, SXSW) and special one-off (Irving Plaza) performances last year, and whether deliberate or not a pattern has emerged. He may seem like the most confident, self-assured guy on the planet, but Damon Albarn is afraid of America.
Here’s an example: Last Friday, Blur left one song off their run through The Magic Whip: “Ice Cream Man,” which opens with the sound of a Tamagotchi pet melting in a hot sedan before acoustic guitars and those inimitable Blur harmonies kick in, is the fourth song on the new LP. It’s also apparently really difficult to play: “We haven’t worked out how to play it yet,” Albarn confessed from the stage. “If you’ll have us back, we promise to play it next time.” On the surface, this is the enigmatic Albarn making two off-the-cuff promises he has no genuine intention of keeping; but the truth is, he has a history of doing this sheepish shit when it comes to America: He’s said it in interviews over the past few months. Hell, he said it to me when I point-blank asked him nearly three years ago when he was in town to promote the late Bobby Womack’s final album, The Bravest Man in the Universe, at an Apple Store event in Soho: “Well, do you think people would come see us?” YES, I probably screamed.
I was right.
Last week, if you’ll forgive the awful pun, was a blur. Within hours of announcing they’d be playing the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on Thursday, Blur announced a small headlining set at Music Hall of Williamsburg, a 550-capacity venue in the throbbing, bearded heart of Brooklyn’s presumed hipster nerve center (never mind that the trend is spreading across the borough, over the Pulaski Bridge, and deep into Queens.) A ticket lottery on Ticketmaster was a predictable clusterfuck, and if it wasn’t clear from the multitude of complaints online from fans who were shut out, shell-shocked optimists were going up and down the line on Friday afternoon hoping someone would hook them up with a spare.
The scene inside was no less celebratory: The Magic Whip is a testament to the efforts of Coxon and producer Stephen Street to cobble together enough material from Hong Kong jam sessions to give Albarn something to write pretty melodies on top of; it was an idea Albarn apparently bristled at, even though the jams had initially grown out of ideas he’d assembled on his iPad. But when he heard what Coxon and Street had done, he was hooked. Described thus, the album is sort of a lovely Frankenstein’s monster, hatched in a lab from seemingly disparate parts to create something that works wonderfully as a whole. But live, on the small stage at Music Hall of Williamsburg, the songs reconnected with their roots, as four musicians who’d been through the wars together recaptured the intangible magic that made them so special in the first place. And the crowd, these people Blur have largely ignored since they started playing shows again six years ago, loved every minute of it.
The Magic Whip has a handful of songs that are a seemingly natural fit for live crowds: “Ong Ong,” which they performed on the Tonight Show, is a goofy love song; “Lonesome Street” is awash with harmonies and guitars and odd little noises, and “Go Out” is about going out. But blur also succeeded on the album’s subtler delights, too. “New World Towers” saw Albarn sit behind a keyboard, James sit on the drum riser, and even though it was just the second song in they never lost their momentum. “Ghost Ship,” the album’s romantic center, dripped like honey from the stage; “My Terracotta Heart” delivered its oddly beautiful sense of detachment to a room full of people, a collective swell of heartache. It’s unlikely Blur will continue playing the album in full before hitting the back catalogue, so there was something extra special about the show. And, a testament to the quality of The Magic Whip, the three “oldies” they closed with – a transcendent “Beetlebum,” a churning “Trouble in the Message Center,” and an explosive “Song 2” – fit in perfectly with everything that had come before.
There was, it has to be said, a great sense of joy coming from the stage. Maybe that’s good news for North American Blur fans, who are clearly hoping Blur will come back soon and play again. Albarn’s gee-whiz worries about people turning up seemed to have been jettisoned in Brooklyn last week, and they’ve certainly focused a good amount of their promotional attention on the colonies (in addition to last week’s visit, an ice cream truck made numerous stops in Los Angeles on Record Store Day last month.) There were smiles from everyone up there, perhaps at least in part knowing that the struggles of trying to break America are well behind them now, and they can come over and play some proper shows and enjoy this, whether it’s a victory lap or a whole new chapter. One can only hope.