The One Band Reunion I’d Want To See Live

Being of a certain age and a certain nationality, it’s probably saying very little to admit that Blur are one of those bands to me, the ones that have some strange magical quality that made them seem, for awhile, to be soundtracking my life so closely it was as if I’d imagined them (In my defense from calls of cliche, it wasn’t the Modern Life Is Rubbish/Parklife/The Great Escape era of their heyday that I fell for so hard, but the Blur and 13 albums, particularly the former). There was something about them that I identified with, but I could never explain it – It’d be the way that Damon Albarn’s voice cracked during “Tender,” or the way that the line “Nothing is wrong, she turns me on… I just slip away and I am gone” seemed too true when I first heard the song, or everything about “Essex Dogs,” from the dystopian summer lyrics to the drone and noise the song falls into – and, when Graham Coxon left the band during the recording of Think Tank, I felt sad as if something important had happened.

That they’ve come back together now, and are playing gigs and Glastonbury and everyone’s singing along, is a weird feeling – I’m jealous that I can’t be there, and curious where my cynicism has gone about the whole reunion thing, and also, in some unspoken and unexplainable way, feeling less old at the thought of seeing them again, just like I did more than a decade ago, in a tent too small, standing next to people who made me happy, nervous and alive in ways I didn’t understand at the time.