Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution

In February 2012, Blur were awarded the Outstanding Contribution to Music award at the 2012 Brit Awards . Later that month, Albarn and Coxon premiered a new track together live, ” Under the Westway “. In April, the band announced that a box-set entitled Blur 21 —containing all seven Blur studio albums, four discs of unreleased rarities and three DVDs—would be released in July. Blur had also entered the studio early that year to record material for a new album, but in May producer William Orbit told the NME that Albarn had halted recording. Blur’s official Twitter and Facebook pages announced that the band would release two singles ” The Puritan ” and “Under the Westway” on 2 July. That August, Blur headlined a show at Hyde Park for the 2012 Summer Olympics closing ceremony . In 2013, the band performed at the Rock Werchter in Belgium, the Spanish and Portuguese dates of the Primavera Sound festival, and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in the United States.