Damon Albarn makes surprising admission about Blur’s second Wembley gig
Last year, Britpop giants Blur reunited for two huge shows at Wembley Stadium. The gigs were enjoyed by 180,000 adoring fans, spurred on by the release of The Ballad of Darren, the first Blur release in eight long years. However, frontman Damon Albarn has now revealed that he wasn’t too keen on the idea of the Wembley shows.
Admittedly, this fact should not come as a complete surprise. After all, Albarn has enjoyed an incredibly successful music career post-Blur, with the likes of Gorillaz and the ad-hoc supergroup The Good, the Bad & the Queen. Furthermore, most rock and roll reunions are a self-aggrandising and frankly depressing journey into times passed, and you can understand why Albarn was not all that keen on the notion of reunion shows.
Nevertheless, Blur at Wembley was announced as far back as November 2022, with a second date quickly added to match the intense demand. The first of these gigs, occurring on July 8th, went off without a hitch.
Speaking to KROQ, the frontman shared, “I never thought I’d love Wembley. The first night was great”. However, the success of the show did not inspire confidence in Albarn for the following night.
In his chat with the outlet at Coachella, he revealed, “The next night, I didn’t want to do another gig. I was trying to find reasons to cancel it,” adding, “I was sitting in a hotel at Wembley Parks, like a travel lodge or something, and I was watching these people coming in and I was like, ‘Well I can’t cancel that’”.
As all those who were lucky enough to get tickets for the show can confirm, Blur’s second show, if anything, eclipsed the first. Albarn himself can attest to the fact that, in the end, he had nothing to worry about, “It was actually, maybe the best gig in that time that you could ever, ever dream of having,” he said “But it was weird, I was really not into going onstage, and then I was on stage and it was very nice to do that.”
This revelation comes shortly before an incredibly lacklustre reception for the band at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California. At the festival, Blur appeared for a sparse crowd, who didn’t seem all that convinced by their Britpop classics. Albarn told the crowd, “You’re never seeing us again, so you might as well fucking sing it. Know what I’m saying?”
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