I’ll be honest, I didn’t really get Blur at the time. I first took an interest when Steve Lamacq played the spiky synth-punk ‘Girls And Boys’ which I bought on cassette (it came in a faux Durex box – very witty; see picture below) and felt sufficiently compelled to buy Parklife, but just couldn’t get my head around it and so I sold it to my sister. I adopted a negative stance on Brit Pop, chiefly because I was absorbing myself in techno at the time and also because I still hadn’t embraced guitar music. I was a late developer. Fast forward to university a year post-Parklife and Blur and their ilk were the requisite soundtrack to nights in the student bars and it was hard not to fall for their charms; plus, I went to Essex University in Colchester, where Blur hail from, and so it really felt like they were our local band. Happy times. Hence I found their Glastonbury show moving in an unexpected way, prompting my to reminisce about how good the first year at Essex in particular was.
Another band that prompts similar recollections on the bill at Glasto was The Prodigy. ‘Firestarter’ was released at the tail end of my first year and it just seemed to capture a mood, a feeling, that sucked in a number of us non-Prodigy fans. A typically unexpected British heat wave offered a sticky end to the academic year and ‘Firestarter’ provided a soundtrack to the euphoria of having completed our first set of exams and the prospect of a long, hot summer with not a lot to do before the second year started.
The Glastonbury performance that most impressed me, however, was not from a band from yesteryear; it wasn’t Neil Young and it certainly wasn’t The Boss. It was Franz Ferdinand, a band whose first two albums were, for a time, in heavy rotation on my iPod. However, I always thought they were lousy on stage and so avoided rushing out and buying their third album Tonight : Franz Ferdinand, in spite of how good the singles ‘Ulysses’ and ‘No You Girls’ were. Their performance on Saturday at Glastonbury was nothing short of incendiary, and laid to rest any memories of previous crappy appearances at festivals. So I went out this week and bought Tonight… and think it’s a gem. It serves to remind you that the band are the best export from Scotland since whiskey and bad teeth.
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