There’s a very special surprise for Blur fans tonight, the Britpop kings are streaming a performance of their upcoming album.
On March Friday 20th, Blur played a very intimate gig in London for 300 fans, previewing for the first time, their new material from The Magic Whip.
Tonight (Wednesday 25th March) at 8pm you’ll be able to stream the exclusive gig in full and hear all twelve songs from the forthcoming record.
After completing their set, the band played ‘Trouble In The Message Centre’ from 1994’s Parklife as an encore.
It’s a one-time chance to see the concert, so make sure you tune in to watch it.
The Magic Whip was recorded in Hong Kong and features twelve new tracks, it’s expected to be released in Ireland on April 24th 2015.
Blur’s last album Think Tank came out in 2003, after which each of the members went their separate ways, to relax, regroup and work on other projects.
Earlier in the week, Blur put out the track ‘Lonesome Street,’ the third tune to be shared by the group, since the shock announcement that the band are bringing out their first album in 12 years.
The first song Blur released was the very catchy ‘Go Out’, then last week they put out the song ‘There Are Too Many Of Us’. The video was shot on a smartphone, showing the four members cramped together in a small room.
Speaking to the Guardian about the LP, drummer Dave Rowntree said: “If the music is good everything else follows quite naturally from it. We were all concerned that if we came back with something substandard … it had to be very confident and [we needed to] think it was one of the best things, if not the best thing we’ve done. Otherwise there’s no point. There’s no point in coming back with a mediocre album after all this time.”
Dave’s favourite track on the LP is: “Pyongyang. It’s really beautiful. It’s very hard especially at this stage to have a top-10 list of things. It’s still very fresh.”
Speaking about the recording process, the drummer said: “Yeah, we did five days in Hong Kong and that all seemed to go very well. But it wasn’t until Graham picked up the ball and ran with it and got Stephen Street involved. They did some editing and production work on it and then sent around the initial tracks to everybody to show us what we’d done and we all realised we’d done something quite special.”
“It was very hard at the time while you’re in the midsts of recording to know what you’ve actually done. There were 18 months or so that allowed us to have a bit of perspective on it and allowed Graham and Stephen to do that work and then play it to us. That was the time everyone got very excited about it, and we realised we were actually a lot closer to it than we thought. It’s actually going to be really good.”
