Blur confirms one-off showing at Benicàssim FIB festival
Blur confirms one-off showing at Benicàssim FIB festival
BRITISH indie band Blur will perform at this summer's Benicàssim music festival – their only date in Spain – and will be promoting their new album, the first to be released since 2003.
The Britpop outfit led by singer Damon Albarn (pictured) – together with Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree – have just released The magic whip and will combine tracks from this and from their popular previous albums during the festival on the Castellón province coast between July 16 and 19.
Blur, whose heyday was in the early to mid 1990s – provoking a friendly 'north-south' divide and 'musical war' between their own fans and those of fellow indie-rockers Oasis – became the joint kings of grunge and alternative pop alongside the group led by the Gallagher brothers with hits such as Girls and boys, Parklife, Song 2, Modern life is rubbish, and Leisure.
Five Brit Awards later, Blur downed tools in 2003, the year of its last appearance at Benicàssim International Festival (FIB), having performed there twice previously in 1997 and 1999.
During Blur's self-imposed 12-year exile from the music scene, Damon Albarn launched his 'virtual' band Gorillaz, with whom he was on stage at Benicàssim, but he did not perform there last year after releasing his solo album Everyday robots.
Thanks to the FIB being under new management at the hands of Brit Melvin Benn, a hugely-famous festival promoter behind such massive UK dates as T in the Park, Lovebox, Creamfields, the Isle of Wight Festival and Glastonbury, the line-up for this year's four-day musical mudbath camp at Benicàssim includes a string of artists and groups from the land of Harry Potter and PG Tips.
Bristol-based indie band Portishead – who followed East 17's trend in the 1990s of naming their outfit after where they lived – controversial techno-rave team The Prodigy, Oasis brother Noel Gallagher's new band High-Flying Birds, plus Florence + The Machine, Jamie T, and Bastille.
The Crystal Fighters, although British, base their entire repertoire on traditional Basque and Navarran folk music and their lyrics come from unfinished opera scripts written by the late Basque-born-and-bred grandfather of band members Laure Stockley.
Their tracks have been described by British broadsheet The Guardian as “what would happen if you went back 100 years, dropped a load of recording equipment into a remote Basque village and left [them] to their own devices.”
The Crystal Fighters were chosen to perform the opening concert, which Melvin Benn says has to be the strongest act of the festival to 'hook' revellers and leave them with a lasting impression.
Other famous and less-famous international and Spanish groups include Public Enemy No 1, Clean Bandit, Los Planetas, and MØ.
Benicàssim's FIB festival has been struggling for some years financially and narrowly avoided going into receivership, which was blamed on a 'slightly erratic policy of band scheduling', with a programme of acts which did not flow smoothly between each other and were not tailored to the intended audience, but Benn is highly optimistic about FIB's chances of returning to profit this summer.
Entries, which include day passes, deals for two, three or four days and with or without camping passes, can be purchased from Ticketmaster via an agreement set up to target music-lovers in 15 countries, of which 13 are European.
And the Spanish Mediterranean's answer to Glastonbury is less likely to involve knee-deep mud than its West Country counterpart, given that it takes place during the hottest part of the year and is right on the coast, meaning revellers can cool off on the sands and with a dip in the sea in between their favourite acts.
