Review: Gorillaz don’t talk about a different vision of the world, they are a different vision of the world

My god – the kids love Gorillza and they love Damon Albarn!

Hands are swaying through the air in Leeds Arena to a shape-shifting outfit who released their first album 25 years ago as a ‘virtual band’ with animated members led by a man who enjoyed his first hit single with a ‘real band‘ 35 years ago.

Crucially they belong mainly to people under the age of 25 who aren’t here for nostalgia, don’t care about Albarn’s past or Blur’s, even if the latter did put the brains in Britpop.

At the age of 58, Damon Albarn has never been cooler or more relevant than in Gorillaz.

The setlist for this musically and visually stunning show is drawn predominantly from The Mountain, the Gorillaz’s Indian-inspired new album where global music meets hip hop and psychedelic spirituality meets Albarn’s trademark melancholy.

It may be their ninth album but the ‘bangers’ tonight which set the crowd alight in the 13,000 capacity venue hail mostly from the first two Gorillaz albums and the big upbeat dance electro rap singalong choruses of Dirty Harry and Clint Eastwood.

A truly multicultural sound with a multi-cultural cast, Gorillaz make good on the internationalist promise of old bands like The Clash and The Specials that influenced Albarn from his early days onwards.

Not that the packed crowd or, perhaps, Damon himself, care about any of that heritage as the storytelling animated visuals flash backwards and forwards from different eras of the Gorillaz career in Jamie Hewlett’s trademark anime art style.

This is the here and now.

After all these years of reviewing, Gorillaz at Leeds First Direct Bank Arena is the first concert I’ve seen by someone from a British indie rock background to share some of the same aesthetics as a Daft Punk or Air gig.

The difference is, where everything about these iconic French electronic acts is programmed with relentless precision, there remains something loose and natural and still very British about Gorillaz.

With at least ten musicians on stage at any one moment in this United Nations of music, Damon Albarn has the air of a genial academic letting the kids have their way.

As casual as it seems, he is still pulling the strings like a ramshackle circus master, skilfully creating the impression that all this glorious melting of music and cultural backgrounds is unplanned and happening spontaneously.

Guest acts wander on and off the stage for most of the gig with little fanfare to add emotive vocals or killer rapping to tracks such as The God of Lying, Stylo, Kids with Guns, Orange County and The Manifesto.

It’s often only afterwards you realise with a start what an incredible cast list this is.

These are genuine rap legends such as Posdnuos of De La Soul, Bootie Brown of The Pharcyde and Yasiin Bey, formerly Mos Def, and powerful female vocalists like US-based Kara Jackson or the band’s own gospel singer Michelle Ndegwa, and, in a rare nod to the world of indie and punk, Joe Talbot of Idles.

The latter may be looking neat in a surprisingly stylish suit but Damon and the rest of the band are dressed in matching olive green military-style shirts with a CND badge pinned to their chests as if they were thinking of ex-Beatle John Lennon in the days of radical politics in the early 1970s

But there are no overt politics tonight, the entire dazzlingly brilliant show is about feeling and smiling, rather than preaching.

There is no discernible message, no big statements about Gaza or Iran, climate change or poverty, no peace and love cliches.

But the very choices Albarn makes with Gorillaz in terms of the attitude, the line-up and the musical sounds are, in themselves, political in a troubled world of rising right wing thinking - liberal, positive, tolerant.

They also explain why the band remains so popular with young people internationally like some unspoken beacon of hope.

The show ends with another banger, the crowd-pleasing Clint Eastwood, which is blessed with a brilliant piece of freestyle rapping in Spanish by Trueno, a 24-year-old Argentinian from Buenos Aires.

Gorillaz don’t talk about a different vision of the world, they are a different vision of the world.