Albarn’s high-concept supergroup coalesces in a vibrant and cameo-filled multimedia performance
Gorillaz | Co-op Live Arena | 20th March 2026
Reviewed by Peter Wild
All the way back in 1998, Gorillaz was conceived as a virtual band by Blur’s Damon Albarn and Tank Girl creator Jamie Hewlett, as a comment on the lack of substance in music TV. In the beginning, live dates saw the band hidden away in favour of what you might call animated spectacle. Over the intervening years, Gorillaz have largely become famous for two things – the breadth of their musical appetite (dipping their toes in everything from trip hop to hip hop to dub to punk rock to Latin-influenced music) and the strength of their collaborations (ranging from Manchester royalty like Shaun Ryder to the likes of Little Simz, Slowthai, and Snoop Dogg). All of which is on show as they come to the stage of the Co-op Live.
There are three huge screens which occasionally function as brilliant red curtains, sweeping forth and back, calling to mind the Monkey theatre show Albarn was involved with back in 2007 as part of the inaugural Manchester International Festival. Monkey itself was a kind of forerunner of both the Gorillaz themselves as a unit but also the most recent album, The Mountain. The musicians troop in, and there are about ten of them on the stage, including backing singers, when Albarn enters to rapturous applause.
Kicking off with the title track from the new album, ‘The Mountain’ very much sets the tone for what follows: we have sitar played by Anoushka Shankar, bansuri (Indian bamboo flute) played by Ajay Prasanna, a sarod (fretless stringed instrument) and, of course, the tanpura, which creates a lovely background drone. All of this unspools with shots of the virtual Gorillaz characters – 2-D, Murdoc, Russel Hobbs and Noodle – peering out from the screens alongside a recurrent triangular image of the mountain itself. The track culminates with Dennis Hopper (his vocals recorded as part of ‘Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head’, a track used on the album Demon Days back in 2005) and Ajay Prasanna, Anoushka Shankar, Amaan and Ayaan Ali Bangash repeating the word ‘Mountain’. All of which sets the precedent for what follows: exotic instrumentation and a mixture of live and recorded performers, some of whom are no longer with us.
Next up is ‘The Happy Dictator’ featuring Sparks, lead single from the new album. Although the song was inspired by Albarn’s trip to Turkmenistan and the late Turkmen leader Saparmurat Niyazov, who established a dictatorship requiring citizens to be happy and banning negative news, you don’t have to look far from the headlines to find parallels with (ahem) other world leaders. 2-D and Russell Mael sing ‘If you’re empty and abstracted and your heart is full of rage’ as the backing singers sweetly intone, ‘Oh what a happy land, o yeah’. Alban is centre stage at the song’s close, gurning like Blakey from On the Buses. He wishes everyone a Happy Eid – it’s the first of many such grace notes across the course of the show.
We skip across the albums – ‘Tranz’ from 2018’s The Now Now, ‘Tomorrow Comes Today’ from their first ever EP (upon which Albarn plays the bewitching Samick Melodica which he’ll pick up again and again throughout the night), ’19-2000’ from their 2001 debut album and ‘Rhinestone Eyes’ from 2010’s Plastic Beach – and the vast crowd laps it up. Joe Talbot, lead singer of British post-punk band Idles, joins Albarn on the stage for ‘The God of Lying’, the kind of skanky cod reggae track that wouldn’t be out of place on a Tricky album. It’s the first time in the evening when the thought coalesces that Gorillaz are the spiritual grandchildren of The Specials. It’s a gig of highs – a beautiful rendition of ‘On Melancholy Hill’, a resurrected Mark E Smith on ‘Delirium’, and the satisfying double-whammy that is ‘Stylo’ and ‘Damascus’, the former fronted by Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def), the latter a collab between Bey and Syrian singer Omar Souleyman (who also supported Gorillaz). ‘Damascus’ is a plea for community at a time of war, and couldn’t be more prescient. “We’re all one community,” Albarn says at the song’s close and, once more, you can’t help but feel this is the kind of message that puts Albarn on the right side of history at a time of division and variously stoked hatreds.
On my way into the gig, as I made my way along the twisting queues of people making their way into the enormo-dome that is Co-op Live, I was swept up momentarily by a gang of drunken lads who were all keen to learn how many times I’d seen Gorillaz before and who I liked best out of Blur and Oasis (some arguments will run on forever it seems). In a moment of drunken clarity one of the lads admitted that The Mountain was “a bit out there for me” and yet he’d come along to the gig because his mate’s girlfriend couldn’t make it. You can’t help but hope that Gorillaz work their magic on some of those 23,000 people whose tastes aren’t yet broad enough to encompass what Albarn is doing. Even if that’s too much to hope for, the quartet of songs they close with – ‘The Hardest Thing’ and ‘Orange County’ from The Mountain (both of which hark back to the melancholy of Blur’s recent The Ballad of Darren), ‘Feel Good Inc’ (featuring Pos from De La Soul) and ‘Clint Eastwood’ – bring the house down.
Reviewed by Peter Wild