Comeback concert earns Blur five-star reviews

Blur have received five-star reviews for their first official concert in six years. Last night’s highly anticipated reunion concert was held at London's Goldsmiths College, where frontman Damon Albarn, guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree first met as art students in 1988.

Blur, who made front-page news with their 'Battles of Britpop' against Oasis in the mid-1990s, are reuniting for a series of concerts this summer, including the Glastonbury festival this weekend, and two sold-out reunion gigs in London's Hyde Park.

Although Blur played an intimate gig for a handful of friends and family last week in Colchester, where Albarn grew up, last night's gig in the tiny Goldsmiths student union bar was their first official comeback concert. "This was a night of pure joy," wrote James Hall in the Daily Telegraph. "It was hot as hell. The black walls were slimy and dripping. And for two hours the four men on the tiny stage were revelling in having re-found their mojo. It was the little looks between them, the smiles, the sweat. We could see the whites of their eyes."

Alex Petridis, who gave the gig a five-star review in the Guardian, wrote:"Uniquely among their peers, Blur's music seems to have potentiated by the passing of years.”

"How could we have forgotten that they were quite this good?” asked Times reviewer Pete Paphides, in another five-star review. "And while we were at it, how did we think that, between Oasis’s one-trick mule and Blur's three-ring Britpop circus, it was a close-run thing?"

Since their last concerts in 2003, the four band members have followed very different career paths - Albarn has been involved in other musical projects including the virtual band Gorillaz and the Anglo-Chinese 'circus opera' Monkey: Journey to the West. Coxon, who left the band in 2002 after an acrimonious dispute with the other members, has since released four solo albums. Meanwhile James has become a farmer and Spectator columnist and Rowntree has joined the Labour Party and is studying to become a barrister.

Last night a new generation, including 19-year-old Harry Potter actress Emma Watson, was at Goldsmiths to hear the band, now in their forties, play hits such as Tender, Girls and Boys and Country House. "Many present would have been under 10 when Blur last played with this line-up," wrote James Hall, "but you wouldn't have known it from their reaction."