Blur’s great Glastonbury comeback

Britpop champions Blur brought the 2009 Glastonbury Festival to a close with a blistering 24-song gig that is already being hailed as one of "the greatest headlining sets in the festival's [39-year] history".

The band, whose last album Think Tank came out in 2003, only decided to reunite last November last year and will also play two massive concerts this week in London's Hyde Park.

The four-piece had warmed up for Glastonbury with a series of well-received gigs at small venues, and from the ecstatic welcome that they received when they walked on stage soon after 10pm it was obvious that the crowd needed no winning over.

Kicking off with their first single, She's So High, the band ran through their entire back catalogue, playing tracks from each of their seven studio albums.

WHAT THEY ARE SAYING

Tim Jonze, the Guardian: "Blur [stuck] their fingers up to dad-rock by falling in love all over again with the dumb art of playing pop music – and playing it loudly. Girls and Boys literally throbs with sordid energy, Song 2 sees the crowd threatening to pogo themselves off the earth's axis, and Parklife turns every man, woman and anarcho-crustie into a cockney geeza. Some things haven't changed, of course. Dave is virtually anonymous, Graham spends the most thrilling, spine-tingling moments staring at his fretboard and Alex stands on the stage amps, desperate to hog the spotlight that little bit more than his bandmates. We wouldn't want it any other way."

Pete Paphides, the Times: "If there was one thing that the group’s warm-up gigs of the previous weeks had lacked, it was a fitting arena for Britain to show how much it had missed them. Not here though. Not a chance. A guesting Phil Daniels came on for Parklife and 100,000 people absolutely bellowed the chorus into the night sky. It was perhaps at this point that our memory of how good they were intersected most dramatically with their readiness to confirm it. Had we just witnessed the greatest headlining set in the festival’s history? The eno-o-ormous sense of wellbeing that swept through Worthy Farm suggested we most definitely had."

Laura Barton, the Guardian: "The audience, elated, even a touch delirious, wills them on; when Albarn's voice gives way a little in Beetlebum, the crowd rushes to catch it. Tender, one of the set's many highlights, is greeted with a warm rush of approval. "I'd forgotten they're a singalong band!" says the man to my right, as the band stops and starts, revs up the chorus once more and then falls silent, the sudden quiet filled by several thousand festival-goers softly singing the song's chorus: 'Oh my baby,' they lilt, 'Oh my baby. Oh why. Oh why'."

Nick Hasted, the Independent: "When Damon Albarn starts to grin five songs into their great Glastonbury comeback, Blur start to look like a band again. And when he breaks down weeping near the end, you know how much it meant. Beetlebum is the song where Albarn's errant guitarist and childhood friend Graham Coxon fizzes up his effects pedals, bassist Alex James starts to spin, fag dangling, and you remember Blur were the 1990s' great psychedelic band. It is just before This Is A Low, the best of Albarn's often deeply personal songs, that he sits on the stage and weeps, utterly overcome by all the times that have just been unstopped. Getting up to sing it is almost heroic."