Damon Albarn, lead singer of Blur, has given his candid thoughts on the Coachella audience and attendees he’s encountered during the band’s appearance at the festival. The longstanding Britpop group, consisting of Albarn, guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree, was set to grace the main stage of the much anticipated music and art festival on the 13th of April.
During an interview with KROQ before their set, Albarn said: “I don’t know, it’s a weird one Coachella when it comes to audience you know. It’s hard to know sometimes because they’re quite sort of on their own planet really,” in response to being asked if the reaction and excitement from the fans to the band’s appearance at the festival was surprising.
Albarn also explained how they came to perform at the event this year. “We all got a phone call around 10’o-clock at night. Which is not normally a good thing, when it’s management 10’o-clock you know. Usually it means trouble. [Management] was like ‘Do you want to do Coachella this year? You’ve got five minutes to decide’. That was it and I suppose we were just like ‘Well, ok. I know we said we weren’t going to do anything more but we’ll do one more’,” Albarn confessed in the interview with KROQ.
Despite gaining positive audience responses with a career-spanning set, which included smash hits like ‘Song 2’ and ‘Popscene,’ Albarn was visibly irritated when attempting to perform a call and response with the Coachella crowd during the renowned hit ‘Girls & Boys.’ “You can do it better than that,” he told attendees at one point, which was met with a silent crowd. When a desired response wasn’t forthcoming, Albarn exclaimed: “You’re never seeing us again, so you might as well fucking sing it. Know what I’m saying?”
This weekend, Blur is set to grace the Coachella Valley for the second weekend of the festival set to take place from the 19th to the 21st of April. This weekend, the band is likely to perform tracks from their 2023 album ‘The Ballad of Darren,’ which includes hit singles ‘The Narcissist’ and ‘St. Charles Square.’ Additionally, the band is set to be joined by the Torres Martinez Cahuilla Bird Singers – a group of tribal singers from the local area surrounding the festival’s Mojave Desert, California location
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