Gorillaz are halfway through their four-night residency at London’s Copper Box Arena and Damon Albarn and his creative partner Jamie Hewlett have been doing the press rounds, talking about their project’s now 25 year history.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Albarn also let slip a puzzling nugget about their 2001 self-titled debut album. “I can’t quite believe I can still hit the falsetto,” he said. “That first record has a crazy amount of falsetto.” It was, he says, “definitely… related to the drugs I was taking. I was a much more irresponsible human being. I was hitting some notes I really didn’t think coming back I’d be able to hit again.”
Which of course, begs the question: what drugs? Was Damon boshing helium canisters around the turn of the millennium? It is, after all, hard to think of any other intoxicant that would alter the male voice in such a way..
He doesn’t elaborate. As for Hewlett he says of that first album: “When we made it, there was this feeling that it was kind of a joke, or it was for kids, or no one was really taking it seriously.
The music industry liked the music but weren’t really buying the cartoons, whereas young kids were really enjoying the cartoons, and through the cartoons getting into the music, and then through the music, discovering artists that they would never have discovered otherwise, like your Bobby Womacks, or your Ibrahim Ferrers, or your Becks.”
“Twenty five years later, we’re at a point where animated characters and avatars are such a huge part of our lives, especially for the younger generation who live through computer games and wear skins and go to cosplay. Whether or not that’s a good or healthy thing,” Hewlett jokes, “it’s better than taking drugs.”
Anyway, the band play their 2010 album Plastic Beach album in full at the Copper Box. The final gig is on Wednesday. For that one Albarn has already teased that they may play new material from their next album, which will be released in 2026.
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