Originally, the idea of gathering the Britpop generation at Wembley Stadium for a lively parents’ meeting sounded like an invitation to the saddest party in the world. But then the grown-up children of those 20th Century Girls & Boys unexpectedly arrived at the Blur reunion, which soon grew into an international tour
and sang along to their melancholic millennium hymns at the top of their lungs.
Had these young people actually lost their way into the Nineties while browsing through the streamed juxtaposition of past and present? And why were they hanging, supposedly all the sexually unfluid,
despise the ancients responsible for the death of the planet, suddenly on the lips of a 55-year-old Damon Albarn?
Longing for a (seemingly) better era
“You are very beautiful/ But we haven’t been introduced.” But yes, they had known this voice for a long time. Only back then she was called 2D and accompanied her childhood as the blue-haired cartoon singer of the Gorillaz. If the discovery of Albarn’s previous life as a sweet blonde Blur front boy made Generation Z long for a seemingly better era that was missed due to late birth, it should actually sound familiar to Generation X.
Wasn’t Britpop once inspired by exactly the same longing for the Sixties? The fact that Blur manage to capture this collective melancholy on their comeback album “The Ballad Of Darren” is one of those magical ironies that only the best pop can achieve.