“TV was a win, but awful in the room”: 25 years of Gorillaz chaos

To celebrate a quarter-century of the world’s most famous virtual band, Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett sat down with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe to pull back the curtain on the technical disasters and triumphs that defined the Gorillaz legacy. From “vibrating” holograms to the “disadvantage” of being the face of Britpop, the interview serves as a candid “window into the process” of two icons who “haven’t quite mastered” the art of being cartoons.

While the world marveled at their early digital performances, the reality inside the venue was often “awful.” Reflecting on their Grammy performance, Albarn admitted, “TV was a win… but awful in the room.” The technology simply wasn’t ready for the “Pyramid Stage” scale. “The invisible screen vibrates when you turn the bass up,” Hewlett explained, “and then your animations go [vibrating sound].” At the Grammys, the volume was so low “people were talking; they didn’t even know the show had started.”

The band’s early refusal to step into the light was a deliberate attempt to “remove the idea of celebrity,” though Albarn admits they were “so bad at it.” He recalled their first U.S. interview where they tried to stay in character on separate phones: “I was being 2D, Jamie was being Murdoc… that side of things we haven’t kind of mastered yet.”

Albarn also felt a unique pressure compared to contemporaries like Daft Punk. “They had the advantage of not having a face of Britpop trying to hide,” he told Lowe. “I was at a disadvantage.”

Despite the technical hurdles, the heart of Gorillaz remains the “marriage” between Albarn’s tunes and Hewlett’s “350 drawings just to tell a four-minute video.” Hewlett described a “happy existence” where Albarn would play a song and Hewlett would “start drawing… every day.” It is this “freedom to do what we want” that has allowed the band to survive 25 years, proving that even if the holograms vibrate, the “electricity” of the collaboration remains steady.