Cartoon pop collective Gorillaz have spoken about their ambitious collaboration with Madonna.
Gorillaz are now pop royalty. On their first album the band worked with a tiny budget, begging guest stars to lend their vocals. Now the cartoon pop collective have a queue at their door of pop legends desperate to work with them.
Live, the band’s show is a lavish mixture of music and specially created visuals. Recently playing two spectacular nights at the Roundhouse, Gorillaz spoke to Radio 1 about the difficulties of performing with a backdrop.
Asked about a recent holographic adventure, Damon Albarn admitted: “We did get kind of carried away with that idea.”
Jamie Hewlett added that bass frequencies interfere with the screen. “There’s one fault with the holograms – apart from the fact it costs more money. As soon as you turn the bass up, the invisible screen starts vibrating.”
Gorillaz worked with a hologram of Madonna at the Grammy awards, with Damon Albarn revealing that the whole experience was less than thrilling. “Madonna’s kind of doing her thing as a bloody hologram, I don’t know how she managed to convince us to let her onto our stage! And no-one’s told us that as soon as she flips from one side of the stage to the other side to start her song with her flippin’ souped up super-charged Abba riff, the volume is 100 times more, and the place goes insane obviously.”
“So we got completely stitched up by that” he claimed. “What made it even worse was Bono had this huge great Stetson hat on, and I had a really bad hangover.”
“And if that wasn’t bad enough I went backstage afterwards to go and have a talk with Madonna about it – I wasn’t going to make a big deal about it – so I was going towards where she was and suddenly these huge great bouncers with earpieces came out of this door and pushed me to the side, and you know, her royal highness sort of floated past, and I was like ‘Madonna’, and nothing. I was already history.”
Gorillaz new album ‘Plastic Beach’ is out now.
