London Camden Electric Ballroom
It's like watching Blur, of course, only not so good.
This is their B-sides show - an unsettling revisionist history of one of
the few bands you might genuinely have grown up to with in the past decade;
a parallel universe where they never wrote Chemical World or Girls and Boys
or Tender, instead gaining a substantial following with a bunch of vaguely
familiar songs lacking the requisite wit ot invention. It's a startling
glimpse into the word of a Shed Seven fan.
Oh, not that horrific, obviously. Like Frasier, even when not at their
best, they're never going to be bad, and hell, this is Blur, close-up,
personal, and distinctly truculent.
"Comments like that can fuck off" barks Damon at a heckler, faintly amused
but steely around the consonants. "He said, 'Are you going to play
Parklife?" Graham looms forward - "We can play the same set as Reading if
you want", he says loftily, like he's asking us to share the joke with the
class. Damon nods. "It don't bother us."
Playing again in their old battleground of Camden, lacking that plump
mattress of greates hits to fall back on, they've become a gang again -
edgy, subdued, suspicious. The singer admits he's stressed - "It's not easy
this, you know."
Yes the audience know.
Tonight is basically the indie equivalent of The Antiques Roadshow - band
rifle through the attic of their back catalogue, unearth a few tarnished
fragments and dubious daubs and hope they can look suitably surprised when
the audience decide they are in fact priceless lost masterpieces. It's a
form of validation - "Mmm, yes" they're saying, "we are so embarassed by
the riches we could afford to leave them languishing round the back of the
washing machine." Or on the B-side of Bang, which is pretty much the same
thing.
If someone can carry this off, it should be Blur, yet there are few
Faberge-calibre treasures lurking among the murk of formatting and
"exclusive live versions".
The raw Young and Lovely, (B to Chemical World), seeps
best-time-of-your-life nostalgia, Damon pausing to gather himself because
he wants to "do it justice". Peach (from For Tomorrow) is a woozy waltz
with a gigolo aunt, a sweet slice of their terribly British tea-and-cakes
whimsy phase, while at the other extreme, Swallows in the Heatwave (from
MOR) shows just how good they were at coming from Louisville and skipping
math on Friday afternoon. That Graham guy? He rocks, man.
Instead of providing an alternative route map through their mazy
development, however, the weaker songs just highlight their mocked
stylistic slavishness. Watching them shuffle through the early Down, the
sound of Joe Bloggs denim rustling along the ground, or ricochet around the
cider-in-the-precint bovver of Fried and Uncle Love, is not only ridiculous
how much they've outstripped these songs, but bizarre they should want to
play them.
You can't imagine Marco Pierre White knocking out a few rounds of toast and
Marmite in his restaurant for "fun", or Garry Shandling accepting that
guest role in Babes in the Wood as a laugh. Masters of their art slumming
it - it's entertaining sure, but fundamentaly unrewarding.
Yet pop depends on its ephemera to give it shine and texture, and if
tonight was little more than an exercise in hem-touching, a genuflection
before relics and artifacts, then it's a testament to the power of a band
worth loving.
They get away with this show for one reason: because they are Blur.
And, really there is no finer compliment you can pay them.
Victoria Segal (from NME of September 18th 1999)
Transcription by Francesca