Blur, Live at Wembley Stadium (2024)

"Doesn’t everyone do a Live at Wembley Stadium album? . . . Well, now it's Blur's turn . . ."

Release Date: July 26, 2024
Label: Parlophone
Length: 134:00
Produced By: Matt Butcher, Stuart Lowbridge
Rating: 8.3

Review by: Alexander Hellene
Highlights: “St. Charles Square,” “Coffee & TV,” “Oily Water,” “Trimm Trabb,” “Under the Westway,” “The Universal”

Doesn’t everyone do a Live at Wembley Stadium album? Not everybody, really, just thanks to a quick Google search, Queen, The Who, Beyoncé, Bad Company, Meat Loaf, Bring Me the Horizon, INXS, BABYMETAL, Electric Light Orchestra, Will Young, Muse, Bob Dylan, Halestorm, Elin Sandberg, Pink Floyd, and Level 42. Well, now it’s Blur’s turn.

Oh, Blur. You remember them! The “Woo-hoo!” song¹ band! It turns out that while they were a niche buzz-bin band here in the States, particularly in the 90s where only serious and committed Anglophiles knew any songs beyond “Song 2” and maybe “Coffee & TV,” over in England and much of the rest of the world, Blur were filling stadiums.² So yeah, Blur are kind of a big deal. They’ve also been around for a long time: the band formed in 1988, and released its first album, Leisure, in 1991.

But of course: Blur vocalist and songwriter Damon Albarn is known mostly as the leader of virtual band Gorillaz, who had a surprise hit in 2001 with “Clint Eastwood,” followed by a successful string of albums and tours. I wonder if Albarn ever felt consternation that his side-project is more popular in America than his main band.

Some might know Blur for their mid-90s feud with Oasis, the one Britpop band of the era who was quite big here in the U.S.³ What you might not know is that Blur: Albarn, guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James, and drummer Dave Rowntree, are one of the most inventive, unique, exciting, and important bands to come from Old Blighty.

Blur (L-R: Graham Coxon, Damon Albarn, Dave Rowntree, Alex James)

“Important?” you scoff. “I’ve never heard of them!” That’s great, but tens of millions around the world have—the band enjoys enormous popularity in Europe, South America, and the far east. What makes them so important is that Blur proved experimental, boundary pushing popular music is commercially viable as long as it’s also catchy and well-written. Make no mistake, Blur are art-pop, but damn do they know how to write memorable melodies. Quirky tunes you can hum to.⁴

Live at Wembley Stadium sees the off-again, on-again quartet putting on a show for tens of thousands of screaming fans on July 9, 2023, the second of their two shows at the famous stadium, mere weeks before their surprise release of their ninth album, the beautifully sad The Ballad of Darren. Now, while Blur’s April 2024 shows at Coachella were marked be audience ennui—I told you most Americans don’t care about Blur—Live at Wembley Stadium finds the band playing for a very much invested fan base.

The setlist reads like a greatest hits, drawing heavily from 1993’s Modern Life Is Rubbish and 1994’s breakthrough Parklife, though all albums are represented—even 2003’s Coxon-less Think Tank via an emotional rendition of “Out of Time”—save, regrettably, for 2015’s excellent reunion album The Magic Whip. These songs are familiar, but the performances unique. The weight of age and experience makes these songs feel lived in, even cheekier numbers like “Girls & Boys” and “Stereotypes,” that famous ode to wife-swapping, given a weary sober-eyed life by Albarn’s now gravelly delivery. It helps that the bass and drums are pushed up high in the mix, showcasing one of Britpop’s most underrated rhythm sections.

When Albarm sings the druggy, anthemic “Beetlebum” or the heartbreaking “Tender” as a man in his mid-50s who has seen things, you feel every year and every cigarette in his voice.⁵ When he sings sensuous French-pop ballad “To the End,” you feel it’s as much to the band as it is to the unnamed lover.⁶ This is a warts-and-all chronicle of a band at the top of their game; when Albarn forgets the words in “Bettlebum” or divisive single “Country House,” he doesn’t care. This is a party, a celebration.

Coxon, for his part, cements his reputation as one of his generation’s most interesting guitarists, right up there with Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. Eschewing guitar-hero pyrotechnics, Coxon has spent his career focusing on texture, tone, unique chord progressions, and parts that slither and snake between Albarn’s vocals and James’s busy bass.

So if you like Blur, you’ll like Live at Wembley Stadium. There are few things as cool as hearing the original band run through a nearly forty-year-old song like “There’s No Other Way” or playing an elegiac masterpiece like 2012’s non-album single “Under the Westway” in front of a packed arena. The punkier-material like “Advert,” “Song 2,” “Popscene,” and “Sunday Sunday” sounds no less energetic for all the bands’ restraint and taste, born of their status as middle-aged rockers, something that adds a new dimension to their trippier, more challenging material like “Trimm Trabb” and “Oily Water.” The new tracks sound great too, with the choice to open with “St. Charles Square” a bold one, but it shows that the band has plenty of new ideas. Maybe Blur are done—as James said in a 2023 interview with The Times, the band basically exists at Albarn’s whim. Here’s hoping he gets the itch to reunite again someday soon before retiring from the music business for good.⁷

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Live at Wembley Stadium

Disc One:

1. St. Charles Square

2. There’s No Other Way

3. Popscene

4. Tracy Jacks

5. Beetlebum

6. Trimm Trabb

7. Villa Rosie

8. Stereotypes

9. Out of Time

10. Coffee & TV

11. Under the Westway

Disc Two:

1. End of a Century

2. Sunday Sunday

3. Country House

4. Parklife

5. To the End

6. Oily Water

7. Advert

8. Song 2

9. This Is a Low

10. Lot 105

11. Girls & Boys

12. For Tomorrow

13. Tender

14. The Narcissist

15. The Universal

1. Aka “Song 2.” You know the song, trust me.

2. When I saw Blur in 2003 on their tour for Think Tank, it was at the, now sadly gone Avalon in Boston, MA, on Lansdowne Street in the shadow of Fenway Park. There’s a House of Blues there now where the Avalon, the Axis, and Bill’s Bar (site of my first ever gig in Boston) used to be. The Avalon was a small club that had some great acts. Damon Albarn jumped into the crowd during “Girls & Boys” and held out his mic to me to sing the chorus, which was awesome. He also splashed water on us and gave high-fives after the show. A consummate and electrifying performer.

3. A band who, against all odds, just announced their reunion.

4. I think this is why Radiohead gets recognized as the innovative 90s British band and not Blur: Blur were too accessible to be cool. They were also too cute when they were young, especially compared to Radiohead. I mean, just look at them:

5. Though Albarn has recently quit smoking, he once turned down an offer to record with Prince because Purple One didn’t allow smoking at Paisley Park.

6. In fact, before the song Albarn remarks to Coxon how it blows his mind thinking back to when they met at ages 13 and 12, respectively, to now playing at Wembley.

7. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the recent Blur documentary To the End, which I plan on watching sooner than later.