Following a much-criticised Glastonbury show in the summer, Damon Albarn promised to “humanise” the Gorillaz live experience for the current world tour, and when anywhere up to 30 band members arrived on stage on Thursday night at the O2 it looked like a renegade West End musical set-up.
Anchored by two Clash expatriates, Mick Jones and Paul Simenon (still the coolest man in rock), Albarn – never the best front man going – kicked out the jams as he oversaw a travelling road show that could have been recruited from either The Wireor Mad Max.
There was no Lou Reed, Shaun Ryder or Snoop Dogg, but Bobby Womack and his still-impressive deep soul
vocal stylings were a regular enhancement. The other vocal cameo slot, Mark E Smith, came and went in a blur of incoherent indifference.
The band drew mostly from the current Plastic Beach, with the beautiful On Melancholy Hillstanding out. The music was jollied along by an overhead animated video film, which this time added to, rather than distracted from, the main event.
For all the album’s central theme of a post-ecological-disaster landscape, the Gorillaz ensemble provide a joyful swirl of syncopated beats, staccato keyboard work and dub-bass lines a go-go (courtesy of Simenon). With added De La Soul.
By melding post-Britpop with hip-hop inflections over an electro-soul template, Albarn et al are always in danger of becoming an elaborate
pastiche act, but there’s a unity of purpose at work here, and when the string section, brass section and backing vocalists all chime in with the core band the effect can be exhilarating.
This may be post-apocalyptic sturm und drang, but I like it, like it, yes I do.
