• Primavera Sound Music: few people for so many festivals
  • Pet Shop Boys concert: salad of hits to open Primavera Sound 2023

What do you come to a festival for? To have fun. Then each one elaborates the alibis that he more or less considers necessary, but in summary he comes to sing at three in the morning with several thousand people 'Parklife', 'Girls & Boys', 'Song 2', 'Tender', 'The Universal' and many other Blur songs. Refrains that burst into the throat like a victory, like the heroic culmination of something long desired, spreading across the chest with a warm liberating effect.

This was the great end of Blur's party on the first day of the Primavera Sound festival, which is held until Saturday in Barcelona. "I'm so happy to be back with my old friends," Damon Albarn confessed in that final stretch of his performance.

The singer, guitarist and pianist had been clowning since the second song, making faces and shaking as if he had tabasco in his underwear. Damon Albarn did not stop impressing a sosete audience and did not take long to start singing in the face of the front row. That hooligan attitude was an extension of the group's sound, a bit messy and stumbling (they finished the songs anyway, just letting them die); however, it often happened, as in 'End of a Century', that the feeling of having sneaked into their rehearsal room was compensated with a rather amusing self-indulgent lightness. It wasn't the most compact concert of their lives, but it was being wonderful.

The best news was to bring guitarist Graham Coxon back to his prime. The man brought out his entire repertoire of figures with an accurate sound and crisper than a torrezno. His ability to constantly transmit that nerve was portentous; in some cases, as in 'There's no other way' or 'Tracey Jacks', the interpretation of their acid guitars returned the songs to their sixties inspiration. In addition, he sang 'Coffee and TV', one of the best songs of the night, and part of 'Tender'.

Blur's intermittent and muddled returns contain several overlapping lenses, they are like layers of a sandwich: to a large extent they satisfy the nostalgia of their generation; in part they give the opportunity to new listeners to experience their old songs live (last night they barely played songs of this century, to the joy of the young audience); and, although it seems like the lettuce of that sandwich, they bring a new series of songs to the repertoire of the group that took more and better risks in Britpop.

Well, now Blur have a new album, 'The Ballad of Darren', which will come out on July 21, and from it they advanced only two songs: 'The Narcissist', their first single, in full finale and between two colossi, 'Tender' and 'The Universal', and 'St Charles Square' to start the concert. Convincing both, they did not clash at all.

'The Ballad of Darren' will be their third album in this century, after recording six albums in their very impetuous 90s, and the first they publish in eight years. In that span, Damon Albarn has recorded four albums and toured four times with Gorillaz; In addition, he has released the second album of The Good The Bad And The Queen and another solo.

That is, Gorillaz is the main project of Damon Albarn for decades and Blur his parallel group. He knows it and everyone knows it: when last year Billie Eilish headlined Coachella and invited him to sing with her before almost 100,000 people, at the height of his great concert of consecration in the most important festival in the USA, he introduced him as "Damon Albarn, from Gorillaz" and they sang together 'Feel Good Inc', The megahit of the cartoon band.

Blur singer Damon Alban tonight at Primavera Sound.Alejandro GarcíaEFE


What explains that? That Damon Albarn takes up Blur without losing the creative form, with the impetus and strengths of the musician who remains active and even hyperactive. A group of fifties who have not performed for a lot of years can reappear as a gang of old pedorros with their old songs playing for their old followers. Well, it is true that these Blur and their followers and their main repertoire have gotten older and that they played significantly enough songs from their second album, 'Modern Life is Rubbish', which just turned 30, but Blur can still sound exciting and fun and hooligans and, finally, relevant.

Graham Coxon, Albarn's antagonist but at the same time his perfect complement, also contributes decisively to this: a versatile and very imaginative guitarist, endowed with a great creative personality and capable of developing his own language without repeating pop clichés.

  • Pop
  • music
  • Concerts
  • Barcelona
  • Primavera Sound

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Learn more