For Your Weekend Listening Pleasure: Blur Pays Homage to Dallas at Trees on a Cold Night in '96

The best part of posting secret audio from concerts you've attended is using them as an excuse to ring up others who were also there and reminisce about that, like, amazing night, remember? Like, say, Jeff Liles, who recalls Blur's February 3, 1996, show at Trees (scroll down) as "a mob scene" and "loud as fuck." (Jeff, incidentally, had stopped booking Trees a year earlier, after he signed to Virgin and moved to L.A., but he was back and forth so much I always forgot he'd moved.) Or, Peter Schmidt, who recalls, among other things, how brutally cold it was that winter's night -- upper teens, with a coating of snow on the ground. (Good memory.) And: "That was a great show."

So it was ... and can be again. What I recall, off the top of my hand, about that set list: the surprisingly thorough cover of the Dallas theme song, in between "Mr. Robinson's Quango" and "Globe Alone," two of the many Great Escape cuts played during that tour in support of the band's fourth record. Also: Graham Coxon's very rare performance of "End of a Century" B-side "Red Necks," sung in that hilarious 'Merkin accent. Also: that "Parklife" singalong (and jumpalong) during the second encore, back when encores meant something. Says here many of the shows on that tour were out-of-sorts, with Damon Albarn occasionally getting "very lazy with his vocals, changing lyrics, forgetting them." Not on that night. Not then, not now.

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