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