Blur to headline London Olympics closing ceremony celebration concert

While it’s pretty much a given that the London Olympics’ opening ceremony will not match up to the extremely high standard set by 2008’s Beijing Olympics, it appears the organisers have an ace up their sleeve when it comes to closing the event.

Being billed as a “Best of British” concert, Blur, New Order and The Specials have been booked to play in Hyde Park on August 12th. Regardless of the fact that none of these bands have released an album in seven years (which makes calling this the “Best of British” a bit of a slight on some of the great young talented British bands out there at the moment turns out they will be adding more acts to the bill), this is exciting since it marks the first proper show that all of Blur will have played together in over two years. And, since any movement within the Blur camp is exciting at the moment, we’re pretty excited about this.

Following Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon’s airing of a new Blur song entitled “Under The Westway” at last night’s War Child benefit gig, the speculation can now commence about how many new songs they might have by the time we get to August. And what about the ever-elusive American tour? Could it be inching back into plausibility again? Only time will tell.

UPDATE: Tickets for the Closing Ceremony Celebration Concert go on sale this Friday (24th) at 9am GMT. They cost £55 plus £6.50 service charge and £3.50 processing fee (i.e. a ticket costs £65). You can get them from Ticketmaster UK.

If you’re on O2 you can get access to tickets 48 hours in advance (22nd February, 9am GMT) by doing the following:

BT customers have a 48 hour priority window to make their purchase for the Opening and Closing Ceremony Celebration Concerts. The priority window for the Closing Ceremony Celebration Concert opens at 09:00 on Wednesday 22nd February. BT customers need to log on to www.bt.com/londonlive with their account details to get their own unique password. Only one unique password will be generated for each customer account. BT customers can purchase a maximum of 6 tickets per customer account for the opening and Closing Ceremony Celebration Concert.