The Feeling That We Thought We'd Never Lose:Blur @ Hammersmith Apollo.

"We have lost the feeling that we thought we'd never lose. Now where are we going?" - Barbaric, Blur

I hear you, Damon. You're a few months older than me (and, according to the Internet, £35,000,000 richer than me) but, like me, you can't escape getting old (the one way you can escape it is inadvisable) but, hopefully like me, you're wearing it well. In fact, Damon Albarn and the rest of Blur are wearing it incredibly well. They have their cake and they're eating it. They're reflecting back on their younger lives while at the same time remaining hugely successful pop stars/rock musicians.

A few weeks back, they headlined Wembley Stadium. I didn't go. I didn't want to go. For the same reasons I didn't go to see Pulp at Finsbury Park. It cost far too much money and I don't want my live music experience to be full of 'heritage' acts. Though my next gig, next Friday, is Primal Scream and The Jesus And Mary Chain at Crystal Palace Park so I'm nothing if not a complete fucking hypocrite.

When Pam told me she'd managed to procure two tickets to see Blur at Hammersmith Apollo (a treasure of an Art Deco venue) doing a livestream of their new album The Ballad Of Darren I must admit I thought twice. When she, incredibly generously, told me I could have the second ticket for a mere tenner (less than it would have cost to watch the livestream on my computer) I both bit her hand off and insisted that she at least let me buy her some south Indian veggie food in Sagar beforehand.

Thankfully, she accepted and so it was that last night we found ourselves in an absolutely rammed Hammersmith Apollo clutching £6.90 pints of Asahi and Meantime IPA (the barman apologised for giving the impression he'd wrongfully assumed the proper beer was for the man, no - the man likes fizzy Japanese lager) and wondering if we'd get just the new album (only about forty minutes long) or if the band would chuck in a few hits, or throw a few bones out to us dinosaurs at the back, as a kind of encore.

It didn't quite work out that way but it was still a great gig and a great night out. The album's opener The Ballad was probably the most disappointing song of the night. It's the one song on the album that sounds better on record than live and my main takeaway from the performance of it was that cheese fondling posh boy bassist Alex James played the song while lying prone on a leather sofa.

While wearing shorts. I think it's the only time I've seen somebody simultaneously channel the spirits of both Jacob Rees-Mogg and AC/DC's Angus Young. Things got properly moving with St Charles Square. It's the most instant, and insistent, track on The Ballad Of Darren and many have compared it to Bowie in his imperial phase. But, for me, even being performed at the venue formerly known as Hammersmith Odeon (a venue steeped in Bowie folklore) I didn't really get that. Angular and taut, it sounded more to me like Blur had been overdosing on their Pavement and Sebadoh records again.

The opening line, "I fucked up", is, presumably, intended to showcase Albarn's new found sense of reflection but, in truth, Blur have always had songs like this. Two of my favourite Blur songs, Blue Jeans and Badhead - neither (sadly) played at Hammersmith, are seeped in a deep sense of yearning. As I remarked to Pam between songs, Blur work better for me when they lean into their pop instincts rather than try to be out and out rockers. And I can leave the "oi oi" stuff completely. Got plenty of that after the gig when we had lasties in The Swan and an impromptu singalong of Parklife broke out.

St Charles Square may be the most instant song on The Ballad Of Darren but for me the standout track is Barbaric. Musically jaunty yet lyrically pondering trauma, the "pyre of abdication", "empty groves", and "winter darkness". It excavates the complex ruins of a failed, or failing, relationship but it could equally refer to the band's own complicated dynamics. Famously, members have fallen out in the past and I often wonder how drummer Dave Rowntree's Labour politics rub up against Alex James hosting Tory wankers like David Cameron at his 'boutique' festivals.

Equally, Barbaric works as a paean to ageing, to growing old. I chose to read it this way. Of late, I've become more cynical about gigs and the gig going experience. The demographic now is for older, wealthier people to go to gigs (I'm at least one of those things but I'm certainly not the other) and this pricing younger people out of the gig going experience is, for me, not great. That's why most of the big gigs this summer have been acts like Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Billy Joel, Guns'n'Roses, Neil Young, Pulp, and Blur. Even Arctic Monkeys would have been considered absolute dinosaurs when I came of gig going age in the eighties.

I guess rock, like Blur and like me, got old, its hair turned grey, it put on weight, and it started to wear sensible shoes. That's not, in itself, a criticism as much as its an observation but it feels sad that young people today won't have the life changing experiences of live music that me and my peer group were lucky enough to have. Memes are fun but they don't send a chill down your back like a great song.

After Barbaric, The Ballad Of Darren (played, of course, in strict order last night) takes a melancholy turn. Albarn spends a fair part of the gig sat behind his piano. Russian Strings and The Everglades (For Leonard) are pure ballad territory. They're yet to reach the level of a track like To The End but that doesn't seem to bother the devoted Blur fans. Many of them wave their arms in the air and sing along to every word of album tracks only released five days ago.

Devotion! Possibly the best received song of the night (bar one, the final song of the encore) was The Narcissist. It was the first single from The Ballad Of Darren so people have had a bit longer to get used to it but I don't think that's the reason why. It's just a classic Blur tune. Albarn singing "I'm a shine a light in your eye", guitarist Graham Coxon (Pam's favourite - that's why there's a photo of him and none of Damon Albarn) providing gentle backing vocals. In what seems to be a running theme to The Ballad Of Darren it seems to be about a disintegrating relationship and Albarn pondering the mistakes he's made. Luckily for him, he's a hugely successful pop star so he gets to do this on albums and at venues like Wembley Stradium and Hammersmith Apollo rather than the Forest Hill Wetherspoons.

The final few songs on the album are all of a kind. The super friendly audience, me and Pam included, more inclined to sway than jump up and down. Goodbye Albert could hardly be further away from a track like Song 2 if it tried, Far Away Island much the same, and Avalon a bit livelier (as an aside if you're going to call a song Avalon you're going to find me comparing you, unfavourably, to Roxy Music who, for me, OWN that title). Album closer The Heights, a graceful piece about "running out of time" and "something so momentary you can only be it", ends the set, and the livestream, with more of a whisper than a scream and that seems wholly appropriate for this late period, almost grown up, Blur. Even if, admittedly from some distance back, they all still look fiendishly youthful.

At the end of the set, Albarn said a few words and hinted, with a cheeky smile, they'd be back on if we were nice. An encore was confirmed and we wondered if it'd be hits. I kind of expected hits but hoped for a few deeper cuts. But not as deep as the ones we were given. Pyongyang (a track from 2015's The Magic Whip), Clover Over Dover (from Parklife, one I actually knew), Mr Briggs from Leisure, All Your Life from 1997's self titled album, and Theme From An Imaginary Film which was an extra track on a 2012 reissue of Parklife.

As Pam went down the front to take some snaps and ogle Graham Coxon, I used the opportunity to pop to the toilet (I'd gone five pints without a piss which is almost certainly some kind of record) and when I came out I heard an enormous cheer. Blur had decided to end the night with the anthemic crowd pleaser The Univseral and people were going fucking nuts for it. It was a nice note to end the gig on and it made me realise that Blur hadn't actually lost that feeling that they thought they'd never lose - and nor had I. Not just yet. Still some life left in the old dog.

Thanks to Pam for (some of) the photos, for sorting the tickets, and, most of all, for being (as always) absolutely brilliant company at Sagar, at the gig, and in the pub afterwards. By the way, did I mention I walked all the way to Hammersmith (for the first time ever)? It took about four hours and I saw a woman rescuing an injured seagull in Vauxhall.

 

Fleapit revisited:Oppenheimer.

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"

These words, from the Bhagavad Vita, are, possibly apocryphally, the words that J Robert Oppenheimer said when the nuclear weapons he invented landed on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki taking approximately 200,000 lives as they did.

Christopher Nolan's epic, both in scale and in length, new film Oppenheimer (based on the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J.Sherwin) tells the story of J Robert Oppenheimer, his life leading up to the atomic annihilation of those Japanese cities and his life in America following those events. But if you're hoping to see Japanese people dying in the streets and burning to death under mushroom clouds as their cities are razed around them you'll be a little disappointed.

Oppenheimer is not that film. You don't so much as see remote video footage of the bombs falling on Japan and you find out that even Oppenheimer himself didn't receive news of the bombings until nearly a whole day after they had happened. For the most part it consists of men (well, mostly men) in suits sitting around desks, scrawling equations on blackboards, and walking around discussing theoretical physics, politics, and morality which, admittedly, sounds like it might actually be a bit boring. It certainly doesn't sound like the stuff a blockbuster cinema release is made of. Which is perhaps why Greta Gerwig's Barbie is doing bigger business.

But, quite remarkably, it's not boring at all and it gets better the longer it goes on. It's hard to get a handle on just who everyone is and it's even harder to get a handle on the maths and the physics that underpin Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project. It should be hard to get a handle on Oppenheimer, or Oppie as those closest to him call him, but Cillian Murphy's brilliant portrayal can't help but draw you in. His piercing blue eyes, a fedora that put me in mind of Joseph Beuys, and an enigma that can never be fully unlocked.

Oppenheimer was a genius. He could speak multiple languages (even learning Sanskrit) and he could see mathematics and physics in ways others could barely imagine. He mixed with Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein (in the film played by Kenneth Branagh and Tom Conti) and he was able to bring together a team of the most eminent physicists in the Western World when appointed by Lieutenant General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to take charge of the Manhattan Project.

A project that would, undoubtedly, change the world forever. A project that, at one point, Oppenheimer and others feared would end the world forever. Surrounded by the likes of Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), Boris Pash (Casey Affleck), David L.Hill (Rami Malek), Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), and Klaus Fuchs (Christopher Denham), Oppenheimer set up the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos in his beloved New Mexico and then set about creating an atomic bomb with absolute urgency.

A Jewish man, Oppenheimer was aware that the Nazis were doing the same and he was aware that they had employed the services of the brilliant Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighofer), a man Oppenheimer had known when studying at Gottingen, to help them do so. He knew it was only a matter of time before the Nazis had the bomb. He wasn't sure if America would act wisely when given unknowable nuclear strength but he was certain that the Nazis would not.

He wrestled with his conscience over this but it was not something he was happy showing to his team, his colleagues, or even the women in his life. Somehow, Oppenheimer had time to be something of a womaniser. We first see him with Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), a Communist Party member who throws Oppenheimer's regular floral gifts straight in the bin and won't commit to a relationship. Tatlock is troubled where Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt), may best be described as formidable.

She throws glasses at him, she tells him - more or less - to man up, she takes virtually no interest in her always crying baby, and she seems far more concerned with pouring a Martini out than anything else. Blunt does a good job in giving depth to what could have been a fairly one dimensional character.

Then there's Oppenheimer's nemesis, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss. Played by a Robert J. Downey whom I didn't even recognise as first, Strauss (pronounced Straws, it's a Southern thing apparently) has never been able to forgive Oppenheimer for making a fool of him at a congressional hearing and, in Strauss' fevered imagination, badmouthing him to Einstein. So Strauss seeks revenge on Oppenheimer and the scenes where this battle is played out last far longer than any scenes of mushroom clouds.

As it's a Nolan film it is, of course, non-linear but Nolan's been doing that for so long now (Memento was twenty-three years ago) that he's a dab hand at it. Three timelines unravel together. There's Oppenheimer's early student life from Cambridge to his appointment on the Manhattan Project, there's his security hearing in 1954, and then there's Strauss's confirmation hearing in 1959. There's also an excellent scene when Oppenheimer meets with a scornful President Harry S. Truman. Gary Oldman has certainly come a long way since he was playing Sid Vicious and Joe Orton.

It's to Nolan's, and the cast's, great credit that this never gets (too) confusing. Ludwig Goransson's score can sometimes be powerful and can sometimes be jarring and the same can be said for the scenes that show fractals, stars, and melting planets. They don't all work and I wasn't overly keen that some of the film was made in black'n'white. Going monochrome seems a bit of tired old trick and one  that should be put to bed for good. Though, to be fair, it was hardly as distracting as the fact that the chap next to me spent a good 50% of the film scrolling on his mobile phone - although, to be fair, he did still seem to be taking the film in. Even if he was stopping others from doing so.

Ultimately, Oppenheimer is an exercise in style and it's a history lesson. It's interesting, it's involving but it was never, for me, truly moving. I didn't cry, I didn't really worry about any of the characters though I did laugh a couple of times (Matt Damon's Groves has a great line regarding what he might do to prevent leaks coming out of Los Alamos). In that I suspect I was not unlike J Robert Oppenheimer who even when pondering that he may have become Death, the destroyer of worlds, didn't seem overly bothered about it.

Every Mother Of Good Blood Shall Be Holy To Us: World Of Pain S2.

The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.

It's as true now as it was in the 1940s. I've been alive nearly fifty-five years and for most of my life I've had a keen interest in history. But even after all that time I'm still discovering new Nazi atrocities. It's become clear that an entire lifetime won't be enough to process the enormity of evil that they created - and that continues to be created by those who still adhere to their twisted world view.

The second series of World On Fire (BBC1/iPlayer, written and created by Peter Bowker, and directed by Drew Casson, Barney Cokeliss, and Meena Gaur) doesn't hold back when it comes to showing Nazi murder and rape but it also remembers, at all times, that it's not a documentary. It's a drama and it's a drama with a beating human heart that looks not at what war did to Europe (and the world) but what war does to ordinary decent people.

It destroys their lives - but it also tests their assumptions to breaking points and forces people to collaborate with others from different classes, different backgrounds, and different nations to either overcome extreme right wing menace or to simply get by. We start in Manchester. October 1940. The Blitz. Nazi bombs are falling on the city and young Polish refugee Jan (Eryk Biedunkiewicsz) is still living with frowsty Robina (Lesley Manville) and when her son Harry (Jonah Hauer-King who plays Harry like a Tim Nice But Dim character, but nice and not dim) returns from the war with his wife Kasia (Zofia Wichlacz), she ends up taking Kasia in as well.

Jan and Kasia's brother Grzegorz (Mateusz Wieclawek) is in Manchester too but Kasia's sleep is haunted by vivid nightmares of what she saw, and what she did, in Poland and the death of her mother at the hands of the Nazis. She's also frustrated. She'd come to define herself by her role in the resistance and staying at home with her mother-in-law and looking after her husband's baby (by another woman) is not enough to satisfy her.

Lois (Julia Brown), the mother of that baby - baby Vera, is equally frustrated. Her and her friend Connie (Yrsa Daley-Ward) are doing their bit by working as air raid wardens but Lois has not adapted well to motherhood and she's lost her father Douglas (his home bombed in the war) and her husband to be Vernon (during the Battle of Britain) and she wants to do more. Even if it means abandoning Vera.

Lois' brother Tom (Ewan Mitchell) is also, of course, mourning his father but at least he's distracted by continuing his active service as a sailor. In a Berlin that, at this point, has barely been touched by the war we're introduced to sixteen year old school girls Marga (Miriam Schiweck) and Gertha (Johanna Gotting). Marga and Gertha are best friends but when Marga is happily chosen to help defend the Aryan race by having a child with a Nazi soldier, that friendship is sorely tested.

Gertha thinks it, the Lebensborn programme, is a terrible idea. No less that government sanctioned mass rape. Marga disagrees and so does almost everyone else in Germany including Marga's parents (Matthias Lier and Friederike Ott) and Luftwaffe bomber brother (Carl Grubel). The only person who sees Gertha's side is teacher Herr Trutz (Beat Marti) but to take Gertha's side could lead him into mortal danger.

Marga, meanwhile, is taken to Brandenburg to join The League of German Girls (first seen carrying out acrobatics in gymslips adorned with swastikas) where she will be forced to have sex with a man not of her choosing. Surely an inspiration for Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale?

The war itself has spread to North Africa and soon Harry is posted to the desert to fight alongside his old friend Sergeant Stan Raddings (Blake Harrison) and his platoon (including, again, Cel Spellman's Private Joe Broughton) and a sapper unit from the British Indian Army which is headed up by the brave and fearless (perhaps even to the point of foolhardiness) Rajib Pal (Ahad Raza Mir).

They're fighting against the Italians in the desert so that oil can still come through the Suez Canal. Without oil they lose the battle. If they lose the battle the Allies lose the war. The stakes are that high but it's not the just the Italian soldiers (and the loathed Erwin Rommel) they're facing. They're also taking on snipers. sandstorms, s-mines (also known as, for obvious reasons, debollockers), and, eugh, septic foreskins.

Things are only slightly less desperate in Paris where jazz musician Albert (Parker Sawyers) is still detained at the pleasure of the Third Reich and where Henriette (Eugenie Derouand) is still working as a nurse and still working hard to keep her Jewish identity secret. A problem that becomes exacerbated with the arrival of her well meaning and idealistic, but naive, brother Luc (Arthur Choisnet).

As with the first series of World On Fire, each and every one of these characters will have their lives turned upside down by the war, many will face the very real threat of death, and, this is hardly a spoiler, some of them won't reach the end of the series. There's racism, insubordination, subterfuge, and shoot outs. There are people in England who don't approve of refugees (that train's never late) and almost everyone, almost everywhere, is suspicious of everyone else.

That's the paranoid climate fostered and encouraged by Nazism. It's tense, it's chilling, and the hard work put in by the first series really pays off in the second. There's a fantastic debunking of the tired old canard about Italian soldiers being cowards ("Mussolini wanted to fight, not them") and there are solid supporting performances from Grace Chilton as Robina's maid Joyce, Jay Sajjid as Rajib's deputy Basu, and Gregg Sulkin as debonair RAF officer David. A man who spends as much time cracking jokes and womanising as he does flying fighter planes.

Then there's Mark Bonnar's Sir James Danemer. A civil servant who is billeted at Robina's house, Sir James is charming, influential, and endlessly self-deprecating and he may, or may not, have a dark secret and he may, or may not, be trying to woo Robina. Can we trust a man who teaches a young boy to use guile, or deceit, to win at chess and gives a baby booze?

There are a couple of minor gripes. Some characters from the first series are absent and some of those absences are never explained and the depiction of the Aussie soldiers could have been less stereotypical. I know we're in the middle of a red hot Ashes summer but portraying them as boisterous larrikins simply isn't cricket.

That aside, however, World On Fire was a fantastic, and worthy, watch. I found it all quite emotional. When Jan wanted to fight to avenge his mother's death and to rid himself of the deep sadness inside, when Lois finds it within her heart to be completely reasonable to Harry and Kasia, and when an RAF pilot plunges to his death. Most of all when a teenage girl is horrendously betrayed by her best friend and then is forced to carry out a terrible act of betrayal herself.

By the end of the final episode I was, predictably, failing to hold back the tears. "The value of a life is the value of a life is the value of a life" says Rajib Pal at one point, pondering why the Indian soldiers are always first to be sent into the line of fire and last to be rescued. Of course he's completely correct about that. Except with one small caveat. The value of a Nazi's life is not the same value of a good person's life. The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.

 

Dolls Parts:John Lee Bird @ Ugly Duck.

"I am doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs" - Doll Parts, Hole

 

When the artist and musician John Lee Bird developed chronic spinal problems he found no longer able to paint. No longer able to create. This left him frustrated (quite understandably) but when he found some sheets of felt in his desk he struck on an idea and that idea, as you'll soon see, has spiralled almost uncontrollably.

He started making dolls. Of musicians he admired, of characters from horror films, and even his friends. At Bermondsey's Ugly Duck gallery there's a free exhibition of them so I braved yesterday's downpour and headed down there. Not quite sure what to expect.

You enter a warehouse, walk up some wooden stairs, and then you're confronted with, quite literally, shedloads of the things. I couldn't make out who they all were (I'd certainly not have been able to recognise Bird's friends) but I managed to identify quite a few. Some of my identifications are possibly even correct.

There's Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love (who head up this piece), there's Lemmy (like most of the dolls there's something of the Giacometti about the former Motorhead frontman), there's Marilyn Manson, there's Pennywise, there's the Grady twins from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, there's The Ramones, there's Robert Smith of The Cure, and then there's Sparks.

There's a guy who's naked apart from some golden boots and some golden pants with a golden dildo attached (any idea? I feel it's someone I ought to recognise), there's ZZ Top. there's Sigue Sigue Sputnik, there's Leatherface, there's Freddie Kruger, and then there's Bootsy Collins. It's not a line up you tend to see under the same roof at the same time.

Is that Five Star above? Or is it Steps? Either way that's a bit of a curveball. I think that's Jimi Hendrix below and I'm fairly certain that that's John Cooper Clarke and Freddie Mercury but one iconic figure of British music hasn't cropped up yet. David Bowie.

That's because there's another room, an antechamber if you will, which is full of Bowies. About seventy of them. There's the Thin White Duke, there's Aladdin Sane, there's the Let's Dance Bowie, and then there's the Low era Bowie which was the first doll that Bird ever made.

There's even some Warhol style screenprints of Bowie and, for some unknown reason, a grotesque figure who'd look more at home in The Wicker Man than in a room full of David Bowie dolls.There's not really much I can actually say about this show (which you can't already see) but I enjoyed it. Better still it seems to have brought Bird some satisfaction. 

In a recent, and very brief, interview in The Guardian the artist said "I only get a real sense of accomplishment if I can look at something I’ve physically made. Then I can haul myself upstairs to bed and feel I’ve achieved a tiny something with my day." That's pretty much how I felt when I headed back home, the rain still pouring down.