‘I wish I could be inside your head,’ she said, ‘on Sunday at Glastonbury. How must it feel to play to so many people?’ She wasn’t just saying it either. She really meant it, longed to know how it feels. Thinking about it now, I’m wondering whether the first bit is an appropriate thing for a married man to consider, but I am flattered and really, since I’ve been playing with Blur again, that’s what everyone wants to know more than anything else — not ‘How do you do that?’ but ‘How does it feel?’ So I will try to explain.
Playing music triggers just the same feelings as those generated by listening to music. It’s the same picture. Sometimes when I’m listening to music I’m completely absorbed by it, transported, inside it, whether my hand is shaping the thing or not. Playing an instrument, too, can generate pretty overwhelming feelings whether anyone is listening or not. I got goose bumps singing Clive Dunn’s ‘Grandad’ to my children the other day and a goose bump is a goose bump: the feeling is the same whether there is no one watching or a multitude.
Normally I’m sure the accurate answer to the question ‘How does it feel’ is quite disappointing. Normally when a band plays big concerts, it’s what they’ve been doing every day for years and even the most remarkable things become humdrum very quickly. Some musicians end up becoming tormented by their big hits. The music that has elevated them can quite easily become an exquisite form of torture. Imagine how the Queen must feel every time she hears the National Anthem; now imagine that the National Anthem is all she is known for and you’re getting close.
This was different, though. I’ve had four children since the last time Blur played. If you really want to appreciate luxury, it’s best to live in squalor, and if you really want to feel music, it’s best to be quiet for a while.
I sleepwalk on to the stage. People stretch as far as the horizon, far, far away: suggesting infinity like an Escher painting. It’s hard to guess how many there are. Like stars in the sky or leaves on a tree, it’s beyond counting. Then I can hear music and the music sounds good but it’s like it is coming from elsewhere, not out of my fingertips. It’s overwhelming to begin with, but I’ve played the first song so often that I don’t have to think about it. In fact, I can’t think about it. I’ve no idea what my fingers are doing: like when you’re learning to ride a bicycle, if you look down at what your feet are doing, you fall off. Just let them get on with going up and down while you concentrate on other things. As soon as I start to think about what my fingers are doing, what I am doing, it’s just like looking down over the edge of a tall building: giddiness, knees giving a little, hands starting to shake so that I could hardly hold on to my plectrum. So I listen to the music and lose myself in it.
I suppose it was a little like jumping into a rough sea and bobbing up and down a bit, being tossed around by the waves before diving underwater into another calm world of colour and abstraction. Somewhere around the fourth song I came up for air but by that time I’d somehow become completely unselfconscious, absorbed by sound. It was as if no one was watching at all. It was going well. As far as the horizon there were hands waving in the air. The BBC cameraman on stage had his camera locked off and was grinning, close to tears. The crowd sang every word. The front 50 rows started to behave like a sea — people squashed so close together that they moved like liquid, sloshing up and down. I guess on stage it felt a lot like it did in the audience. The crowd was a part of it, too. It was as if I was standing outside myself, which incidentally is the derivation of the word ecstasy.
I can’t remember a gig like it, playing one or being at one. How did it feel? Well, 150,000 looked like quite a lot when I first walked on to the stage, but by the time we walked off, it didn’t seem like very many at all. Still you know what feels even better than playing to the 150,000 coolest people in Britain? Getting home. That’s the best feeling of all.
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