Blur + Elbow

It rarely happens that at a concert the support act puts on a more convincing show than the headliner. Yet the feeling at the end of the evening, held in a packed-out Alcatraz, is that Elbow proved they can outdo Blur.

In the three-quarters of an hour allotted to them, Elbow, the Manchester band, favor tracks from their debut, "Asleep in the back", over material from the just-released "Cast of thousands", and hypnotize the crowd with their unmistakably English range, spanning from Turin Brakes-style acoustic pop to a rock sound recalling Radiohead and Arab Strap. Their performance is genuinely excellent, free of frills and, at times, quite moving.

Around 9:30pm, Blur take the stage with an expanded line-up (alongside Albarn, James and Rowntree there's also a guitarist, a keyboardist, a percussionist and three backing singers), and they're greeted with a roar from the crowd, which deserves a few words: very warm-slash-annoying (tick whichever box suits your point of view), very young, ready to go wild whenever the more familiar songs kick in, and noticeably cooler when tracks from the new album are played.

And this, I believe, is why the show ultimately proves a bit disappointing: Blur know their audience wants to dance and jump around, and appreciates their most recent, more complex and quasi-experimental work rather less. That's probably why Blur give so much room to their older, more playful side (though also the more dated one): there are many, too many, songs drawn from "Parklife" and "Modern life is rubbish", and the crowd laps it up, but you have to wonder whether this isn't a step backwards. Yes, because the setlist relies too heavily on the sheer chaos of "Girls & boys" (the crowd's favorite moment) and on the old songs that were already the backbone of their shows a decade ago ("End of a century", "Badhead", "To the end", "This is a low", "For Tomorrow"…). Amid this big revival, even the songs from their latest album "Think Tank" end up watered down, often stripped of their character and flattened out, with the exception of a few excellent moments like "Ambulance", "Battery in your leg" and "Out of time".

All in all, Blur give the impression of having failed (or perhaps not even tried?) to fully reinvent themselves in the live setting, and of having already consigned to oblivion the songs that made up their best records: just "Song 2" and "Beetlebum" from that cauldron of great ideas that was "Blur", and only the interminable "Tender" and "Trimm Trabb" (the best moment of the night) from a dark, fascinating record like "13".

That's why the show is missing the moments that could have been more unpredictable and interesting, even though, to be fair, the only way Blur showed they could stretch and rework their songs was the all-too-easy trick of hammering the drums and cranking up the guitar noise in the last two minutes: not much for a band that in recent years had made claims to innovation and to shedding its image as a simple Britpop outfit (one also suspects Coxon is sorely missed, the most eccentric and inventive member of the band).

If you take a clear direction, you should honour the commitments that come with it, so as not to end up hybridising your repertoire and disappointing both types of audience: those drawn in by the carefree early Blur, and those who came on board only recently, intrigued by their latest, more singular work.

Either way, it ends up a triumph and the show is impeccably good: throughout, Damon Albarn plays to the crowd's delight, and on many songs people clap along and sing at the top of their lungs. You leave happy, but not entirely: there's a lingering bitter aftertaste from realising more could be done. It would just take the will to do it.

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