Adelaide goes ape as Gorillaz deliver a show for the ages

Damon Albarn’s cartoon-meets-real life passion project Gorillaz rocked a packed Entertainment Centre last night in what’s got to be a frontrunner for gig of the year.

Gorillaz

Adelaide Entertainment Centre

July 28

*****

Damon Albarn is one of rock’s great style agnostics, an artist determined to take everything he loves and throw it all into the blender in an attempt to make musical magic.

And magic is exactly what he made on Thursday night in a packed-to-the-rafters Entertainment Centre, leading his Gorillaz through a high-energy two-hour set that’s going to be hard to top as gig of the year.

Kicking off, appropriately, with the Jonathan Richman-meets-Sex Pistols punk rock of M1A1 and its opening refrain of “hello, hello, is anyone there”, Albarn then led his charges through Strange Timez from the recent audiovisual project Song Machine.

The song is a collaboration with The Cure’s Robert Smith, who appeared as a giant moon on the spectacular video backdrop.

Gorillaz at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre. Picture: Saige Prime

And that’s the beauty of Gorillaz, which is as much an art project as a band. The fact that Smith wasn’t there in person didn’t matter, this has always been an act that seamlessly blended music and video into something clever and unique.

Albarn, a man clearly not content with spearheading nineties Brit-pop as the frontman of Blur, was an engaging presence who was clearly enjoying himself.

He chatted about his Australian encounters with drop bears (mythical) and swooping magpies (very real) and recounted a story about how he’d met a bloke on an Adelaide jetty chanting OM, before leading the crowd through a group OM chant of their own. It was all great fun, which is very much the point of Gorillaz.

Fun as it is though, it’s still underpinned by remarkable musicianship and Albarn’s collective was perfectly on point last night, as were the backing singers who would have been worth the price of admission alone.

Musical magic was made at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre on Thursday. Picture: Saige Prime

Tomorrow Comes Today, with its deep dubby bass lines, was followed by the joyous 19-2000 and Rhinestone Eyes, a song that prompted my 14-year-old Gorillaz-loving son to exclaim “this is definitely my favourite song!”. It wasn’t the first time he’d said it, and I think he went on to say it at least two more times before the show finished.

The multi-talented Albarn sat at the piano for O Green World, with its rather sobering accompanying visuals of whale hunting, before bringing the mood back up Pirate Jet, On Melancholy Hill (“no, this is my favourite”) and El Manana (“no, wait, this is my favourite”).

Opening act Moonchild Sanelly came back on stage for the deeply funky With Love to an Ex while Atlanta hip hop duo EarthGang brought incredible energy to Opium.

But it was hit song Dirty Harry, featuring an absolutely incendiary guest rap from Bootie Brown, that really got the crowd heaving.

A full house for Gorillaz. Picture: Saige Prime

The energy was maintained with the ever-slinky Feel Good Inc. before Momentary Bliss, punk banger Momentary Bliss and Plastic Beach closed out the main part of the show.

An encore featuring the hilarious cop caper video of Stylo from Plastic Beach and, of course, the band’s beloved first single Clint Eastwood ended, the night on a high.

Adelaide, a city used to missing out on big acts, was lucky to secure one of just four Australian Gorillaz shows – three if you take into account the fact that the Splendour in the Grass show was cancelled – as a key event in the Illuminate festival.

We said thanks by showing out in force on a school night, an effort that was rewarded with what was frankly a pretty special show.