Rolling Stone PODIUM: It Really Did Happen. We Saw Blur’s Historic Wembley Concert

“I met you when you were twelve and I was thirteen… Imagine that. We were in school. And we’re here now. It’s just – it’s mad for us. It really is,” says Blur frontman Damon Albarn to guitarist Graham Coxon. He pumps his fists on stage, grinning childlike at Coxon, who follows suit. Together, they go into “To the End” from 1994’s Parklife. 

Well you and I

Collapsed in love

And it looks like we might have made it

Yes it looks like we made it to the end

There it is, that eddying wistfulness in Albarn’s voice, counterpointed brilliantly by Coxon, bassist Alex James, and drummer Dave Rowntree, in the 16th of a spectacular 25-song set at the second of two consecutive sold-out shows (July 8th and 9th, 2023) at Wembley stadium. Tender is the night.

“What’s your favourite Keats poem?”, my brother Abhinav casually asks on that very Sunday evening as we change from the London Underground’s dank Victoria line to the air-conditioned Metropolitan. I quote a less-known fragment, and minutes later, Abhinav says, “Akhila, I have a confession to make. We’re not going to a poetry reading.  We’re going to see Blur at Wembley.” Blur fans crowding the train carriage smile as I squeal, unleashing my inner Roy Kent. Well done, mate, they tell Abhinav, shedding Londoner reserve. Woohoo.

It was mad for us, too, to walk into a packed Wembley stadium at the end of Paul Weller’s set. Before I arrived in London from Chennai for a two-week visit, I’d listened to “The Narcissist.” I enjoyed its lush, self-reflexive melancholy as much as the raucous old-Blur-ness of “St Charles Square” from their latest, The Ballad of Darren. The reference is to Darren “Smoggy” Evans, the band’s longtime security guard, the album an accidental by-product of show prep. But my love affair with Blur was nothing new. Take me away from this big bad world and agree to marry me.

As a child, I devoured my parents’ eclectic record collection, wearing out the needle on the gramophone playing Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. 10-year-old me would sing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” without comprehending a word. Years later, five-year-old Abhinav trilled “No-no-notorious,” equally oblivious. In the 1980s, I would twist the antenna of my Sony two-in-one this way and that, desperate to get past shortwave radio’s crackling static onto the BBC’s Multitrack 1 (top 20 hits), 2 (new releases), and 3 (alternative). Cassette tapes were hard won, copied or commissioned from friends and family abroad. Eventually, the mono player was replaced by a periwinkle Walkman. I embraced grunge, wearing a black armband for a week after we heard Kurt Cobain died. Found my transcendence. It played in mono, painted blue.

Abhinav, born nine years after me, would sneak into my room to grab the tapes stashed in a closet drawer. We read together, with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings a favourite, and later relished A.S. Byatt’s breathtaking Possession (1990). While my musical tastes ranged across epochs and genres, artists like Nirvana, Tori Amos, Alice in Chains, The Cranberries, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and Alanis Morissette fuelled my adolescent angst. There must be more to life than stereotypes.

An English major in college, I was gobsmacked by Martin Amis’s London Fields (1989). Atmospheric menace and apocalypse in postmodern novels combining satire, wit, and pathos, sharp shocks of originality that rattled the system, and playful, irreverent experiments with form were a clarion call. I moved from India to the U.S. at 22, leaving behind the cassette tape treasure trove with my brother.​​ We would each go on independently to explore Pulp, deliciously eccentric (with their own reunion concert on June 30th at Finsbury Park), Oasis with their signature sensitivity and snark, and Blur, artfully rakish, striking a pensive chord. Educated the expensive way, he knows his claret from his Beaujolais.

For the next 15 years, Blur continued to form the soundtrack of my life. I loved the eponymous LP from 1997, 13, and Think Tank. That last record’s cover art blew my mind, as had previously the music video for “To the End” inspired by Alain Resnais’s Last Dance at Marienbad (the screenplay was by Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose baffling prose I encountered in a graduate seminar at Ohio State). How I’ve reconciled postcolonial/feminist leanings with Britpop’s reputation for insular British androcentrism is a tale for another time. And I might as well just grin and bear it.

In the 2000s, teenager Abhinav was learning the guitar, discovering bands on his own. I missed him, while listening nonstop post 9/11 to Beck’s brooding Seachange and Blur’s evolving catalogue. “Sweet Song” –  which Albarn apparently wrote for then-estranged Coxon – takes me back to I-70, the expressway connecting  Ohio’s Columbus and Dayton, “Beetlebum” to my former bandmate Joey Brewer, “To the End” to inconsolable sobbing after every breakup. Stop crying now, here comes the sun.

As the decade wore on, I would crank up Demon Days by Gorillaz, the brainchild of Albarn and artist Jamie Hewlett, driving my black VW bug as the leaves turned yellow and red, or where bare branches slick with ice bordered bleak roads crunchy with salt. Are we the last living souls?

I relocated to Chennai in 2011. Abhinav had left for Sheffield, after which he moved to London. I can picture him in college, playing and singing “This is a Low” sitting on his bed in my parents’ flat. When Blur performed it at Wembley, I was misty-eyed; he wept a little at “The Universal,” the last song in the encore.  The days they seem to fall through you. Well, just let them go.

“The experience of a lifetime,” my brother concludes, as we walk to the train among thousands of tired, happy fans. I know I’ll relive this day — him spouting idiotic Tamil nonsense verse about betel nuts before Blur begin, me scurrying back from the bathroom locking eyes with the stranger who also knows the words to “Out of Time,” us bragging about our northern Irish connection (Abhinav’s wife Anne) to two Blur fans from Ireland, marvelling at the flawless tech crew, watching an overwhelmed Albarn break down after “Under the Westway” and before “End of a Century,” revelling in the London Community Gospel Choir’s performance in “Tender,” jumping for joy as Blur launch into “Parklife” featuring actor Phil Daniels, imprinting on my mind the ecstatic faces that mirror our own as evening darkens into night. All the people, so many people, they all go hand in hand…

This is what human music does. It makes humans collapse in love, the greatest thing that we have. It keeps modern life from being extra rubbish. Can a bot sense the pulsing current running through us as we clap and sing along? Can artificial intelligence generate fellow feeling? Can pitch-corrected or airbrushed perfection touch hearts? Can technology bestow communion on siblings separated by continents, this rush of bliss? No. It’s four middle-aged chaps who look like they just rolled out of bed that do, and a brother who conspired to make his sister happy. Tell me I’m not dreaming. Are we out of time?

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Akhila Ramnarayan is a Chennai-based indie musician, theatre actor, professor of literature and Dean, School of Arts and Sciences, Sai University.