Blur
Goldsmiths College, London

The problem with rock band reunions is that all the nice words surrounding them – reconciliation, healing, closure – just aren’t very rock-and-roll. This is instead the language of rehab, destination of many a rocker, and the effect is as saccharine as a feel-good Hollywood movie: groupthink with a group hug.

Rehab played a part in Blur’s separation when their guitarist Graham Coxon was treated for alcoholism prior to his insensitively timed ejection from the group in 2002. A running dispute with singer Damon Albarn about the band’s musical direction ended with pyrrhic victory for Albarn. A final Blur album followed, but then the Coxon-free band fizzled to a halt.

Now the foursome are back, with all the requisite talk of last chapters and renewed friendship. Their reunion has caused much excitement – a 50,000-capacity show in Hyde Park in London next week sold out in two minutes – but also a degree of nervousness.

Alongside bitter rivals Oasis, Blur were a key force in Britpop, the mid-1990s restaging of the Swinging Sixties. Conflict was crucial to their dynamics, both externally, as they and Oasis did their Beatles v the Stones routine, and internally, as Albarn and Coxon tussled over the band’s evolution. Take that element away and all that risks being left is nostalgia: Britpop redux.

Their show at Goldsmiths College was a warm-up before a run of large shows including a headlining appearance at the Glastonbury festival next weekend. The choice of venue was symbolic: Blur formed at Goldsmiths in the late-1980s when Coxon and bass-player Alex James attended as art students.

Albarn looked astonished to be back at the student union, a dark, foetid place that resembled the hold of a particularly dismal passenger ship. “I’m having a strange spatial moment,” he admitted: in his memory it was a cavernous venue, not the hot, heaving space he saw before him now.

Memories can be deceptive, but there was no mistaking the ones that flooded back of Blur’s exceptional power as a live act. Opening with their debut single, 1990’s “She’s So High”, they performed a bravura tour of their back catalogue, from the antique indie subgenres of their early songs, mementos of “Madchester” and “shoegazing”, to the prime Britpop of 1994’s Parklife album and the more adventurous work of their later years.

Albarn hopped about maniacally, neck a knot of vocal chords as he bellowed lyrics, whipping both band and audience to new pitches of intensity as sweat dripped from the ceiling. Post-Blur projects such as the cartoon group Gorillaz and the Sinophile opera Monkey have established him as an inventive and talented genre-hopper, but now he revelled once more in his old role as band frontman, as if possessed by some crazed, pent-up energy.

To his left, James, a former Damien Hirst drinking buddy who once boasted of blowing £1m on champagne in three years, played bass with unfoppish reliability, while drummer Dave Rowntree, a prospective Labour party candidate at the next election, showed a level of muscular commitment that many MPs would do well to heed.

Coxon, creator of a modest but rewarding solo career after Blur, was magnificent on guitar. “Beetlebum” combined Beatles melodies with raging torrents of feedback, while the chirpy pop of “Country House” was transformed into full-blooded rock.

Rapprochement with Albarn was underlined with a fluid version of “Out of Time”, recorded after Coxon’s exit from the band, and sealed with a monumental finale incorporating the deranged thrash of “Song 2” and the expansive, optimistic ballads “For Tomorrow” and “The Universal”. Reconciliation can rock after all. ★★★★★