![\"Damon](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/5025950_8_articleinline_WhatsApp_20Image_202026-04-01_20at_2023.29.27.jpeg\" "\\"Damon")
Damon Albarn and Gorillaz at the 3Arena, Dublin. <\/p>\nGorillaz may have started off as two men\u2019s idea for a cartoon band, but they\u2019ve become a world orchestra. Damon Albarn, a genius who can turn his hand to everything from unlikely sports anthems to operas about monkeys hatching from stone eggs, left the meat-and-potatoes rock of his peers behind years ago.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s proven it again with Gorillaz\u2019 superb new album\u00a0The Mountain,\u00a0their best since 2010\u2019s\u00a0Plastic Beach,\u00a0and at 3Arena\u00a0\u00a0in Dublin on Wednesday produced a suitably spectacular show that Irish fans will again get a chance to see on Thursday, before they return for Electric Picnic in September.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Genres to him are just ingredients to be gleefully shoved in the blender. Take any of the songs played tonight, from Indian-influenced cuts like The Moon Cave, to Albarn getting the melodica out for Tomorrow Comes Today, a title that could serve as the Gorillaz manifesto, to the syncopated shuffle of El Ma\u00f1ana before the yearning chorus breaks through. They all laugh in the face of attempted categorisation.<\/p>\n
You could also pick any song for a highlight but I\u2019ll go for the sequence that began with Stylo. On the three-screen spread across the back you had Bruce Willis speeding down the highway firing off a .45, out front you had a brilliant Yasiin Bey (or Mos Def as he was formerly known) leading the crowd, and then the ghost of Bobby Womack to complete the avalanche of sound and vision.<\/p>\n
Damon Albarn and Gorillaz at the 3Arena, Dublin. <\/p>\n
Yasiin, in a fetching pearly kings hat, then set off another explosion with Damascus from the new record with Syrian star Omar Souleyman adding his recorded contribution over the screaming bazaar sounds of several pungis (the wind instrument beloved of snake charmers).<\/p>\n
A knock-out Dirty Harry kept it going. Jamie Hewlett\u2019s cartoon visions in a glorious wide-screen desert should take up permanent residence in the Las Vegas Sphere. The crowd, in the venue as rammed as I\u2019ve ever seen it, went suitably delirious, giving it a bit of the Naughty By Nature \u2018Hip Hop Hooray\u2019 chant.<\/p>\n
Albarn was more bandleader than frontman for a lot of the show, even standing aside when Bootie Brown ( Dirty Harry) or Argentine rapper Trueno (a superb The Manifesto) took over. If you\u2019ve put together a gang as marvellous as this, you might as well let them shine.<\/p>\n
He excused not introducing everyone onstage by saying he wouldn\u2019t have time to get through them all. Fair enough as there were multiple percussionists, four backing singers, at least three keyboard players and out front the spectacular mullet and shape throwing of guitar player Jeff Wotton and the equally admirable moustache of ace bass player Seye Adelekan.<\/p>\n
That wasn\u2019t the extent of the cast either as Dennis Hopper, Mark E Smith, Snoop Dogg, Paul and Mick from The Clash, and even Wile E Coyote turned up on the screens amongst Hewlett\u2019s creations that took in everything from Disney\u2019s The Jungle Book to a giant version of virtual drummer Russel Hobbs throwing a whale at a jet fighter.<\/p>\n
Now that is what you call a show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gorillaz may have started off as two men\u2019s idea for a cartoon band, but they\u2019ve become a world…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":378097,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[93,61,60,278,6405],"class_list":{"0":"post-378096","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-music-movies-reviews-munster"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378096\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}