Damon Albarn: Madonna gate-crashed our idea!
by ZaCK, www.absolumentmadonna.frAfter Gorillaz performance at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival earlier this month, the group is now casting an eye toward a full-blown U.S. tour.
Albarn and Gorillaz co-creator, comic book artist and designer Jamie Hewlett sat down with MTV News yesterday and revealed that there would be no holograms of their cartoon alter egos on the tour, despite long fulminating plans to take the technology on the road, because of this performance at the 2006 Grammy Awards.
“We’re coming back, going to play all around America, if they want us, of course
You can’t at this point, do holograms.
This is what happened at the Grammys: We opened the Grammys - on television it looked great - but we had an invisible film pulled across our stage, and you project onto that, and put smoke behind it - it’s a Victorian technology, actually.
So Madonna manages to come and gate-crash our idea, as people like Madonna do, because that’s why they’re so deep. She gate-crashed our idea, so we couldn’t play with any bass or any sound, because it would vibrate [the film] so it was really quiet.
So we open the Grammys, but no one could hear us, in this huge, great arena, and we were crestfallen at that moment. And I’m trying to get Bono to move, because his huge, great Stetson is obscuring my view. And then our song stops, and she appears on the other side of the stage, with her inflated-ABBA riff, at full volume, and the place just goes insane. And at [that] point, I just thought, ‘You know what? Sometimes, just keep it simple.’”