Thirty years after the Festival stunt

Thirty years ago, one of the most delightfully bizarre performances in Sanremo history unfolded, courtesy of international guests (back when they still got invited to the Festival). A surreal, thoroughly British sabotage that mocked the country's foremost pop-nationalist liturgy, though few seemed to notice at the time. The culprits were Blur, among the guests of that star-studded edition on the stage of the Teatro Ariston. Back then, the global showcase of Sanremo was practically a parallel festival: Bruce Springsteen, Cher, Tina Turner, Céline Dion, Bon Jovi. A lineup of stars unthinkable today, among which, almost slipping under the radar, was Blur, one of the leading acts of the new wave of British pop.

A year earlier, Damon Albarn and co. had won the "britpop battle" against Oasis with "Country House", the lead single from "The Great Escape". But while the media narrative celebrated them as the symbol of Cool Britannia, something inside the London band was already starting to crack. Success was beginning to weigh on them, Alex James's rockstar posturing was getting on Graham Coxon's nerves, and Damon Albarn was exerting ever tighter control. Britpop itself, meanwhile, was already showing its first cracks. When the invitation to Sanremo arrived, the band knew exactly what they were in for: a lip-synced performance, rigid TV scheduling, an unchanging liturgy. It wasn't unprecedented — before them, equally big names had accepted the same deal, from Queen to the Smiths. Blur said yes, but decided to do it their own way…

The scene has survived in the Rai archives like an almost invisible, quietly erased incident. Pippo Baudo introduces them with his usual solemnity as "an English group, five years at the top with great prestige," even venturing a comparison to the Beatles. Behind him, Albarn bursts in with a deliberately cartoonish march, a walk straight out of a Monty Python sketch. Baudo remains impassive. The show, once again, goes on. Then "Charmless Man" kicks in. And that's when you realize something's off… The camera lingers on a life-size cardboard cutout of Graham Coxon, placed on stage with disarming nonchalance in place of the flesh-and-blood guitarist. An absence made visible, almost flaunted: Coxon had chosen to opt out of what he saw as yet another televised charade, and that seemingly playful gesture already hinted at far deeper fractures — ones that would soon lead to the radical turn of Blur's self-titled album and, later on, to his own departure from the band.

Behind the drums was Dave Rowntree, dutifully miming his part; on bass, however, there's no Alex James, but Smoggy, Albarn's bodyguard, sloppily disguised in a parka and bleached hair.

In effect, Blur showed up at Sanremo missing half the band, turning the lip-synced slot into a conceptual performance — and pocketing the full fee regardless.

But almost no one noticed: the Festival ran on its own rhythms, and no one — before or after — felt the need to explain or comment on what had happened. And yet, with hindsight, that appearance said an awful lot: about the band's looming crisis, about britpop's growing exhaustion, and about a way of being on TV that was already becoming unbearable for anyone coming from a rock background.

A few months later, Blur would shed their skin with the self-titled album and set off on an entirely different path. Graham Coxon, fittingly, would be the first to bow out. Sanremo 1996 thus remains a footnote, but a precious one: an elegant, almost invisible prank that today looks far more subversive than plenty of loud, showy provocations.

The thirtieth anniversary of Blur's "raid" is also a chance to look back fondly on a deluxe era in which, on the Ariston stage, instead of today's unlikely — and scarce — international acts, artists such as Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Depeche Mode, Queen, America, Talk Talk, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Diana Ross, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Alanis Morissette, Bono and The Edge of U2, Placebo, the Cranberries, and even the ever-present Burt Bacharach, would parade across it. Good times, worth sitting through even a surreal lip-sync for.

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19/03/2026