Blur have announced their new ‘Live at Wembley Stadium’ album, which will accompany their brand-new documentary and concert film – find all details below.
The band took to social media to share the news, posting a teaser trailer of their huge Wembley gigs that took place last July. While there, Blur played to over 150,000 fans across two nights at the stadium. Now, over a year later, a live concert album of the Wembley gigs will be released this July 26 – it’s currently available to pre-order now here.
If that wasn’t enough, Blur have officially announced their concert film of the Wembley gigs: Blur: Live at Wembley Stadium. It is set to arrive in cinemas across the UK & Ireland on September 6. Ticket and cinema details will be shared soon.
It will be their second upcoming film, alongside their previously-announced reunion documentary To The End. The feature-length documentary will land in cinemas on July 19. You can book tickets for To The End here.
NME attended the Blur Wembley gigs last July, dubbing them “stadium-sized eruptions of pure, utter joy” in a five-star review: “At one point, [frontman Damon] Albarn turns to us and says, “You’re properly mad, you lot, for sticking with us for so long.” Well, the proof is here.
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“This two-hour performance shows that Blur have soundtracked the audience’s lives with real emotional impact. James recently called the making of their new album an “utter joy”. It’s clear that fans would say the same about tonight.”
Along with classics such as ‘Song 2’ and ‘Girls & Boys’, Blur played tracks off their most recent album ‘The Ballad of Darren‘, which NME gave four stars: “Unlike many of their peers, there has never been a timelessness to a Blur album – that’s a good thing. When you listen to ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’ now, you can feel disdain for the culture that surrounded them, or the raw confusion of heartbreak on 1999’s ‘13’; they have a way of transporting you to a precise moment or emotion.
“It’s why ‘The Ballad of Darren’ is so memorable and touching: you can feel it, everything, in every line sung or note played. Speaking to NME last week, Rowntree says that when they were recording, “everything we tried, worked”, and that “magic was in the air”. It is keenly felt here; may it never fade away.”
Damon Albarn announced in December that it was time to “wrap up” Blur again, reasoning: “It’s too much for me. It was the right thing to do and an immense honour to play these songs again, spend time with these guys, make an album, blah-blah-blah.”
He continued: “I’m not saying I won’t do it again, it was a beautiful success, but I’m not dwelling on the past.”
After a rocky performance at Coachella Festival’s first weekend – in which Albarn told the lacklustre crowd: “You’re never seeing us again so you might as well fucking sing it” – the frontman later claimed that the weekend two performance was “probably our last gig”.
Albarn had previously spoken with KROQ about the Coachella audience, saying: “I don’t know, it’s a weird one Coachella when it comes to audience you know. It’s hard to know sometimes because they’re quite sort of on their own planet really.”
In other news, Damon Albarn has revealed he didn’t want to perform during the second night of Blur’s Wembley shows.