Gorillaz’s first stadium show is quite the event. It’s a staggering hi-tech spectacle, a two-and-a-half hour mini-festival with a seemingly endless stream of high-profile guest stars, and its audacious ambition and military precision all stem from the fecund imagination and magpie mind of one man.
Damon Albarn has never come across a genre of music that he doesn’t want to turn inside-out to see how it works. In recent years, he has turned Gorillaz from the mildly gimmicky virtual band he co-conceived with graphic artist Jamie Hewlett into a sprawling expression of his own musical curiosity and rampant eclecticism.
The days of holograms of 2-D, Murdoch, Noodle and Russel being projected on stage are gone. Instead, Hewlett’s striking graphics play on giant screens over a stage on which Albarn, bearded in a combat jacket and beanie hat, plays the grinning ringmaster and MC of this dazzling circus.
There are a stream of virtuoso Indian musicians, reflecting a motif of Gorillaz’s recent, ninth album, The Mountain, from Anoushka Shankar’s fluid sitar patterns to Ajay Prasanna’s skittering flute. Yet Albarn also skilfully infiltrates the falsetto, rococo pop of tonight’s support act, Sparks, into the pulsing, melodic The Happy Dictator.
For The Moon Cave, veteran cosmic-pop diva Asha Puthli, in a silver cape, shimmers alongside The Roots’s loquacious Black Thought. Then Little Dragons singer Yukimi, splendid in a blue ballgown, gives way to twerking, helium-voiced soul star Moonchild Sanelly and, on the thrumming Casablanca, a prowling Johnny Marr and Paul Simonon.
Mortality and loss are major themes of The Mountain, and on Delirium the guttural bark of the late Mark E Smith bounces around a stadium full of both greying first-generation Blur fans and their excited kids. Both generations get off on effervescent Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara’s keening harmonies and gorgeous traditional attire.
There’s a strong rap presence, from the urgent Yasiin Bey (trading rhymes with Syrian icon Omar Souleyman) to Bootie Brown appearing on the verge of self-combustion and Little Simz spitting words like bullets. When the focus shifts back to India, singer Zanai Bhosle fills the shoes of her grandmother, Asha, who recently passed away.
For the encore, Gogglebox’s own Shaun Ryder materialises to growl through Dare before the charismatic Posdnuos from De La Soul ignites the giddy delirium of Feel Good Inc. The night ends as Gorillaz began, 25 years ago, with the sly, loping melodies of their insouciant debut single, Clint Eastwood.
The evening has been an extraordinary triumph and you can be sure that, as soon as he got backstage, Damon Albarn will have been planning what he will do next.
