Gorillaz regret their 'hologram band' past

While UK cartoon collective Gorillaz made their presence felt at this year’s monster Coachella festival just last month – check the photos for all the action including a larger than life appearance from Snoop Dogg, yo – fans of the bands will still remember Gorillaz’s much maligned early live show experiments as a ‘hologram band’ where the cartoon protagonists of Gorillaz would appear as holograms on a screen whilst Damon Albarn and a ring of musos would play behind the scenes.

As it turns out, Albarn and Gorillaz co-creator Jamie Hewlett would much rather forget those initial live outings, as the pair opened up about their regrets surrounding the hologram concept in a recent interview on Zane Lowe’s BBC radio show.

“We said to each other we can play every major city in the world at the same time…except 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,” Hewlett explained of their perilous experience with a holographic live show.

Albarn was quick to admit that he and Hewlett got “kind of carried away with that idea”, going on to point out a particular point of bitterness stemming from their shared performance with Madonna at the Grammys.

“Although you couldn’t see it on the television, in this huge, great arena we opened the Grammy’s…but it was really quiet. So 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. Do you know what, the funny thing was, that I’d said to the guy who was doing the transition, ‘cos there was a transition in the mix, listen I’m only going to do this if you promise me, you give me your word, that you’re not going stitch me up. And he went, no no course not we’d never do that. 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.”

Frankly we’re glad Gorillaz are burning their hologram band past, and hopefully we’ll get to see the real deal out here soon enough.