Reviewed on Saturday July 25 (photo by Ashley Mar)
Blur have always disliked the term ‘Britpop’. The word is a media fabrication, they argue, and it groups them in with a bunch of bands that had very little to do with them, apart from being coinhabitants of a particular era in English guitar music. Just don’t tell the news to Jamie T, who’s one of a growing class of contemporary indie acts to have taken enormous influence from the band that first gave Britpop its Englishness.
Jamie T and his collaborators play a haphazard set to open the first stop on Blur’s triumphant return to Australia, but it’s without doubt a whole lot of fun. The man born Jamie Alexander Treays speak-sings his lines at scattergun pace into a microphone that he swivels around on its boom stand in alternate verses and choruses, from left to right and back again. ‘Sticks ’N’ Stones’ and recent single ‘Zombie’ have a buzzed-up crowd doing its darndest to keep up.
Blur’s first Sydney show for some 18 years begins with ‘Go Out’, one of six songs from comeback album The Magic Whip that get an airing tonight. The strength of that record has put them in a near infallible position when it comes to ordering a setlist – the fans aren’t here for the classics alone, and as if to prove it, they’ve nearly filled a venue five times the size of the room Blur played on their last visit here.
That doesn’t mean the most famous songs are neglected. Those career-making statements on modern English society arrive in due time, but first it’s an ode to the hangover (this time more applicable to jetlag, Damon Albarn says) in ‘Badhead’ and a rousingly magnificent refrain on ‘Beetlebum’, which only builds into the Graham Coxon-led avalanche of sound that is its coda. Alex James and Dave Rowntree work impressively hard in the rhythm section, as do the respective backing vocalists, percussionist and horn players, but it’s the interplay between the reunited Albarn and Coxon that makes for the finest moments, including the customary sing-along on ‘Tender’. This Sydney crowd has barely witnessed a love-in like it.
Love doesn’t make the rock’n’roll world go round, though – not nearly as much as adolescent posturing. Like Jamie T, Blur still have enough of that to offer, too, with Albarn moving around maniacally on ‘Parklife’ before the entire audience joins in on ‘Song 2’.
From there on in, it’s anthem after festival anthem – ‘To The End’ and ‘This Is A Low’, then ‘For Tomorrow’ and encore closer ‘The Universal’. Blur have always been more than a knees-up-down-the-pub band, and while they’re masters at that craft in itself, there’s an irresistible depth in everything else they do. Welcome back, lads.
