You wouldn’t think that the task of playing a set before an adoring stadium of fans would be such a drag, but after doing just that, it turns out that Blur frontman Damon Albarn found himself contemplating if there might be some way to escape the fate of having to play the second date of the band’s two-night stint at Wembley last summer.
“I never thought I’d love Wembley,” Albarn said in an interview with the radio station KROQ in advance of Blur’s performance this past weekend at Coachella. “The first night was great, and then the next night, I didn’t want to do another gig. I was trying to find reasons to cancel it. 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.’”
Albarn played two nights with Blur at London's Wembley Stadium last summer.
In fact, the decision to move forward with the gig after all turned out to be a positive thing in the end. "It was actually, maybe the best gig in that time that you could ever, ever dream of having," Albarn admitted. "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.”
During the interview, Albarn and Alex James also explained how this past weekend's Coachella gig came about for the band:
Damon: “Well, we all got a phone call about 10 o’lock at night...”
Alex: “Which is not normally a good thing when it’s management calling at 10 o’clock at night. It’s usually trouble.”
Damon: “And it was, ‘Do you want to do Coachella this year? You’ve got five minutes to decide.’ And that was it. And I suppose we were just, like, ‘Well, okay, even though we said we weren’t gonna do anything more, we’ll do one more.’”
Alex: “This was just a wonderful opportunity. You know, the greatest show on earth. It’s the biggest show on the planet. If I wasn’t here, I’d have FOMO, I think.”
With that said, it's arguable just how much fun the band actually had during the course of their Coachella performance when all was said and done. Whether you want to blame it on American audiences not being nearly as familiar with the band's older material as they are with, say, "Song 2," or simply the fact that they just couldn't be bothered, the end result was that Albarn was clearly less than thrilled with the crowd's reception when he tried to get them to participate in Blur's performance of their UK hit "Girls and Boys."
“You can do better than that,” Albarn chided at first, and when they continued to fail to engage with what's typically the singalong bit of the song, he informed them, "You’re never seeing us again so you might as well f--king sing this.”
In fact, the band is playing again during the second weekend of the festival (April 19-21), which is coming up fast, so time will tell whether he'll be working with a better audience this time or if he'll be in a less annoyable mood.
Never miss a story — sign up for the Q newsletter for the latest music news on all your favorite artists, all in one place.
Powered by RedCircle
