Blur
Imma, Dublin
* * * *
First things first: ridiculously long queues for the bar tents notwithstanding (as well as the usual will-they-ever-get-it-right toilet set-up), a gig at this easily accessible venue is as pleasant an outdoor event as you can experience. And it didn’t rain, either.
It gets even better from the start of Blur's remarkably savvy show. Opening with Girls and Boys, and continuing with one surefire hit tune after another (including There's No Other Way, Beetlebum, Country House, Coffee + TV, Out of Time, Trimm Trabb, Caramel, To the End, Parklife, This Is a Low and Tender), the reconvened British band proved a simple point: that nostalgia can be a highly efficient tool at detailing the virtues and flaws of memory.
In other words, anyone who was a steadfast fan of this hugely commercially successful band from 1990 to 2003 (wherein they had 19 top-20 UK hit singles, one of which, Country House, sold more than 600,000 copies) would now surely be removed enough by time and general life experience to reflect, maturely or otherwise, on whether Blur's music was really as good as they had once thought – or whether the memories were better.
So, yes, there was an element among the thirty- and fortysomething girls and boys of being set adrift on memory bliss. But time has been kind to Blur, and they remain the sole British band of the 1990s to have intuitively stretched far and away beyond the parameters of their early material.
From 1991's There's No Other Way to 1999's Coffee + TV, and most points in between, here is a band that has taken risky off-road routes and wonderful creative deviations. Who would ever have thought that lead singer Damon Albarn – happy as a bunny here, high-fiving the front-of-barrier fans during Country House – would go on to form a virtual group (Gorillaz) and write operas (Monkey: Journey to the West, Doctor Dee)? That has – to paraphrase a line from Parklife – very little to do with your vorsprung durch technik, but rather one band's quite brilliant career trajectory. Which they celebrated here in balmy, swaggering style.