Damon Albarn & Graham Coxon - Shepherds Bush Empire, London - 19/02/12
5/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Once, I stood next to Bill Murray in the back yard of a bar in Texas and watched Thurston Moore and J Mascis perform a set of Black Flag covers backed by the rhythm section from Fucked Up. I’ve had the singer from the Dillinger Escape Plan defecate in to a plastic bag mid song and throw it at me in the middle of a field in Berkshire. Grace Jones, David Yow, Nick Oliveri – I’ve seen them all sing completely naked. But this, this was the weirdest gig I’ve ever been to.
I’ll just list the facts by way of demonstration. Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon tonight played a duet on guitar and piano at Shepherd’s Bush Empire in aid of War Child. Their support was twenty minutes or so of indie darlings Dry the River and Malian guitarist Fatoumata Diawara (who plays for a pleasant enough whole half hour, despite nobody ever having heard of her). Headlining after them was Ed Sheeran.
Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon were/are in Blur. Headlining after them was Ed Sheeran.
Still! It’s the two best ones from Blur, performing a stripped down acoustic set that by necessity limits them to by far the most interesting parts of their back catalogue – surely this has to be more ‘Blue Jeans’ and ‘Country Sad Ballad Man’ than ‘Girls & Boys’ and ‘There’s No Other Way’, right? Plus, rumour has it there’s a new song to be debuted.
The rumours are right. Blur play one new song, and two others. Tickets are £40.00. Headlining is Ed Sheeran. Blur play one new song, and two others.
But what a pair of songs those others are. To the surprise of the Ed Sheeran fans who shouted ‘Parklife!’ all the way through Fatoumata Diawara’s set, they start not with a hit but instead a charmingly skeletal take on ‘He Thought Of Cars’. On it, Graham’s voice (a tool he once came across as almost scared of using) sounds beautiful harmonising with Damon’s more honeyed tones during the dreamlike chorus, and Albarn’s handling of the brass parts on the piano lends the tune a gorgeously wistful quality its album counterpart eschewed in favour of continuing with the bombast of the rest of The Great Escape’s vision for mid-Nineties indie. Of course, it’s really bloody lovely. But there are one or two duff notes here and there (if you’re not as forgiving a lifelong Blur fan as I, there are probably a fair few), and noticeable grins on both faces when they fumble over the beginning of the final chorus. But that’s something which, for me, imbibed the whole show with a friendliness the like of which we’d once never have guessed these troubled buddies would be able to muster again.
The following ‘Strange News From Another Star’ has them settle in to their stride a more; an elegiac, otherworldly highlight from 1997’s Blur album, it’s delivered with an elegance that eluded ‘He Thought Of Cars’ for reasons we can only ascribe to nerves. It nears perfection. Then, as its gentle beauty finally fades and the Sheeranators’ chattering invades my consciousness once more, something happens that has only occurred on one other occasion in the past 12 years. A new Blur song arrives, prefaced by this introduction from Damon;
“We wrote this up the road a few weeks ago. It’s got a lot of words in it. Not as many as Ed Sheeran has, but it’s got a lot of words. I’ll try to remember them all. It’s called ‘Under The Westway’.”
It’s a subtle little bastard, this one. In this stripped back rendition, it sounds like a cross between their own ‘Best Days’ and The Beatles’ ‘For No One’. There’s no chorus, not really. As he has done all night, Graham’s guitar work plays it pretty safe, a calm and studied delivery of that ‘third way’ – not quite rhythm, not quite lead – that he’s the best at, no argument. It’s the most Damon-led piano number since ‘Sing’. And I think it’s absolutely lovely.
So why the sense of anti climax?
Because then, it ends. Then, Ed Sheeran comes on and is requesting participation from every member of the audience before his first song has even finished, almost demanding we both be his friends and friends with all the people around us. Then, I take a leaf out of Blur’s book and leave. Having seen Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon, who were/are in Blur. Headlining after them was Ed Sheeran. Damon and Graham play one new song, and two others. Tickets are £40.00. Headlining is Ed Sheeran. Damon and Graham play one new song, and two others.
But what songs.
Artists in this article: Blur
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