Blur in concert this weekend – recorded at the Canguro Club in Colombano Italy by RAI on November 4, 1993.
This concert hits right around the time they broke worldwide – 1993 was a good year for Blur, and for music in general. If you got past everything coming out of Britain being called “Brit-Pop” (a name that still makes my skin crawl), you found a lot of interesting music and a lot of energy flowing out of the recording studios, clubs and concert halls. Coupled with what was going on in the States at the time, you could say this was one of the last truly big blasts of Pop Music still overseen by major labels. Because later on in the decade things would begin to change and the stranglehold the major labels had over new music was getting slowly broken by the presence of that thing known as Downloading was looming on the horizon. Streaming was still a ways off, and even by the end of the decade, downloaded songs were in its infancy. But the writing was on the wall.
But bands like Blur, Oasis, Pulp, Lush, Ride, The Charlatans, Stone Roses and so many others were making huge inroads to the music buying public. And this concert pretty much typifies the atmosphere at the time.
Recorded in Italy, where Blur always had a huge following, which only got bigger by 1993, this set reads like a Greatest hits package, it it weren’t for the fact that all of the songs they were doing were hits in and around 1993. That was the kind of impact Blur and the others had at the time. Pretty exciting stuff. And even though every decade has its cornerstone bands and artists, it would be safe to say Blur were at least one of the cornerstone bands of the early 90s.
The sound on this is fantastic, and more than captures the excitement and energy of what was a powerhouse performance.
Turn this one up.
