Gorillaz Live At Glastonbury

In June 2010, Gorillaz's Escape to Plastic Beach World Tour Live Band played a headlining show at Glastonbury festival. Originally, Irish band U2 had been scheduled as the headline act for the festival but had to pull out suddenly due to their lead singer, Bono, injuring his back. Gorillaz were called in last minute to perform in their place.

Backlash[]

After the performance, there was a lot of unfortunate backlash/criticism from many newspapers/ media companies like The Guardian and The BBC. They criticized this performance for not igniting the crowd enough with Damon stating the show lacked "Human interaction". A reason for the criticism was due to the Gorillaz live band now taking centre stage, unlike before in the Demon Days Live and Gorillaz LIVE shows where they were masked as the cartoon band performing. Due to this new way of performing, as described in this 2019 Interview, Damon and Jamie Hewlett had discussed that Damon would sit at his instrument and that he was to not talk to the audience, hence a "lack of interaction". In later interviews, it's been mentioned that this inspired the band to work on most flaws as can be seen in the Humanz Tour and Song Machine Tour/Gorillaz World Tour 2022.

Glitter Freeze Performance[]

When the time came to perform Glitter Freeze with Mark E. Smith there were multiple issues. Upon entering the stage, Mark approached several wrong microphones before finding the correct one where he then started speaking gibberish. While finding his correct microphone, he started tampering with the settings on Mick Jones' guitar amp. This meant the roadies had to rush on stage to quickly change the settings to the original.

During the performance, drummer Cass Browne also lost count of the song, adding a few extra bars of drums when there wasn't supposed to be. Seconds later the camera caught Damon shouting at Cass from his keyboard, before Damon noticed the camera and started to calm down. It is worth noting that even Cass himself stated that Damon was overall stressed around this time. Seconds later the camera caught Cass, notably annoyed at this point, accidentally brake the handle off a siren to the left of his drum kit. In response, Damon kept an eye on Cass for the rest of the performance before ending on a happy note as the song ended. He can be seen smiling but we never see what Cass’ reaction was

Set List[]

The Setlist itself was a mix of songs from the self-titled debut album, Demon Days and Plastic Beach.

Encore[]

Band / Personnel[]

Damon Albarn – lead vocals, keyboards, piano, acoustic guitar, melodica
Paul Simonon – bass guitar, background vocals
Mick Jones – rhythm guitar, background vocals
Jeff Wootton – lead guitar (Certain dates)
Cass Browne – drums, drum machine
Mike Smith – keyboards
Gabriel "Manuals" Wallace – drums, percussion
Jesse Hackett – keyboards

Guest collaborators and additional musicians[]

Bashy – vocals on "White Flag"
Kano – vocals on "White Flag"
Lou Reed – guitar and vocals on "Some Kind of Nature"
Bobby Womack – vocals on "Stylo", "Cloud of Unknowing"
Bootie Brown – vocals on "Dirty Harry" and "Stylo"
Yukimi Nagano – vocals on "Empire Ants" and "To Binge"
De La Soul – vocals on "Feel Good Inc." and "Superfast Jellyfish"
Mark E. Smith – vocals on "Glitter Freeze"
Roses Gabor – vocals on "Dare"
Members of Syrian National Orchestra for Arabic Music – orchestration on "White Flag"
The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble – brass on "Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach", "Broken"
Demon Strings – strings
Snoop Dogg - vocals on "Clint Eastwood"