“You’re never seeing us again”: Blur’s Damon Albarn rounds on the Coachella crowd as they refuse to engage in a Girls & Boys singalong

Blur’s Coachella set has been making social media headlines over the weekend, but probably not for the reasons that the band would have hoped. 

The British four-piece, who performed before No Doubt and Tyler, The Creator on the Coachella Stage on Saturday night, undoubtedly have a huge library of hits to draw on, but when lead singer Damon Albarn attempted to lead a call-and-response singalong durning Girls & Boys, their 1994 single, it appeared to fall on deaf ears.

Social media footage shows Albarn repeatedly attempting to engage with the crowd and holding his microphone in their direction. “We’ve got one more - you can do it better than that,” he says after an attempt at encouraging audience participation, but it appears that they couldn’t.

Eventually, with hand in pocket and in a last bid to fire up the crowd, Albarn said: “You’re never seeing us again so you might as well fucking sing it.”

Happily, the band got a much better reaction when they performed Song 2, which was a big radio hit in the US back in 1997. That said, before launching into the raucous number, Albarn admitted that one particular cover of it has had a profound effect on him.

“This next song has been so good to us, but I did get shown a TikTok of it being, kind of… performed by a vacuum cleaner,” he told the crowd, “which is… humbling and inspiring at the same time. And I think all the best things in life are like that.”

Here’s the clip in question - do your own jokes about how it ‘sucks’.