Blur Singles Out New Dates, Creates Drug Controversy

08/30/1999 4:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Craig Rosen

(8/30/99, 1 p.m. PDT) - Fans who missed out on the opportunity to see Blur play some of its greatest hits Saturday (Aug. 28) at the Reading Festival in England will have a chance to hear those songs and a lot more soon, according to lead singer Damon Albarn.

During the band's set at the annual festival, Albarn told concertgoers that Blur is planning two shows that will focus on the band's entire output of singles, with B-sides comprising one of the gigs and A-sides the other. Albarn added that the shows would take place at Camden Electric Ballroom and Wembley Arena, though he did not specify the exact dates.

The announcement wasn't the only one Albarn made onstage that stirred interest on Saturday. The singer's admission that he and bassist Alex James had been given the drug Ecstasy by a record company official just before their appearance on the British show Top Of The Pops in the early 1990s immediately drew fire from Paul Betts, a retired police inspector who founded the charity Action For Drug Awareness when his daughter Leah died after taking the drug in 1995.

"Mr. Albarn should not be boasting in this way," Betts told the BBC. "The music industry should be sending out a much more positive signal to young people."

Though Albarn was not available for further comment after the show, a band spokeswoman told the BBC, "It was a spur-of-the-moment decision and not something he had been planning to do. I doubt he considered it to be a big deal at the time, and I don't know what the record company will make of it."

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-- Stephen Peters

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