Gorillaz

SSE Hydro, Glasgow

Mark McLaughlin, two stars

IF prog rock was the moment rock music jumped the shark – are Gorillaz prog hip-hop? It’s hard to believe it’s 20 years since Damon Albarn set aside his guitar to turn his attention to cartoons, canned beats, knob-twiddling and guest rappers.

He has obviously tapped into a lucrative and receptive market, selling albums by the bucketload and packing out Glasgow’s SSE Hydro at nearly £50 a ticket in the fastest selling world tour of his musical career.

However, it’s hard to know where Gorillaz fit in. One can’t imagine hip hop purists digging beat pioneers like De La Soul, Jamie Principle and Bootie Brown being compered by a pasty English dude.

Equally, judging by the number of over-stretched Fred Perry polo shirts, most of the middle-aged Glasgow audience looked like they would be happier if Albarn just played Parklife.

The crowd swayed along politely but there were no big anthems to sing along to, while there was none of chest popping, arm waving and rain making one sees in a devoted hip-hop crowd either.

Some early Gorillaz tracks still have that Britpop shuffle like Clint Eastwood, 19-2000, and Feel Good Inc with Albarn’s melodic melancholy vocals, although for some reason he feels the need to shout through a megaphone for half the songs. When he veers into hip-hop himself his delivery resembles William Shatner, and once you see it you can’t unsee it: “Are WE…the last…living SOULS?”

On the sample-heavy new album, Humanz, Albarn is relegated to a bit part in his own band behind a vast array of guest vocalists.

I guess that was always the point of Gorillaz, though, a place for Albarn to hide from Britpop megastardom behind a surrogate band, although in the latest tour the cartoon projections also play second fiddle behind a massive band of two drummers, six choir singers, guitar/bass duo and the aforementioned guest rappers, none of them used to particularly exhilarating effect.

Gorillaz was conceived as a side-project but it ended up swallowing the main attraction, with Blur only returning periodically to bang out their back-catalogue.

Blur’s last attempt at new material, The Magic Whip, was sabotaged by Albarn’s half-arsed contribution, leaving guitarist Graham Coxon and producer Stephen Street to stitch together a few demos and jams into something vaguely coherent.

However, Albarn’s cartoon mistress doesn’t quite satisfy either leaving his most loyal fans wading in lukewarm ink. Not that Albarn cares, though. As he once said: “I've just sold millions of albums, thank you very much.”