The story of Gorillaz

Two flatmates and a cartoon band

The Gorillaz story begins with two men who did not like each other much. In 1990 the guitarist Graham Coxon, a fan of the comic artist Jamie Hewlett, asked him to interview his new band Blur for Deadline magazine, where Hewlett drew the strip Tank Girl. Hewlett's first impression of the singer, Damon Albarn, was blunt. He thought Albarn was arrogant and rude, and he used a much ruder word for it. Things got frostier when Hewlett started dating Jane Olliver, who had been Coxon's girlfriend. Yet by the late nineties both men were single again. Hewlett had split from Olliver, and Albarn's long relationship with Justine Frischmann of Elastica was over. So they moved into a flat together on Westbourne Grove in west London.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In that flat, the two of them spent a lot of time watching MTV, and they did not like what they saw. Hewlett said watching it for too long felt a bit like hell, with nothing of substance on screen. Albarn remembered it as the start of the boy band boom, when pop felt completely manufactured. Their answer was a joke with a serious edge. If pop bands were manufactured anyway, why not make a band that was openly invented, and make it interesting? Albarn would write the music. Hewlett would draw the members. The band would be a comment on celebrity culture, and nobody would ever have to see the real people behind it.[1] [2] [3]

The four members they invented have been the face of the band ever since. There is 2-D, the vacant eyed singer and keyboard player, whose singing voice is Albarn's own. There is Murdoc Niccals, the scheming Satan worshipping bass player, partly modelled on Keith Richards in a 1968 photograph by David Bailey. There is Noodle, a ten year old Japanese guitar prodigy and martial arts expert. And there is the drummer Russel Hobbs, a New Yorker who, in the story, is possessed by the spirits of dead musicians. That last idea mattered. It gave the band a built in excuse to bring in guest singers and rappers, and collaboration became the heart of Gorillaz.[1] [2]

At first the project was simply called Gorilla, and the first song they recorded was Ghost Train, which later turned up as a B side. Albarn has said one of the very first Gorillaz tunes was actually the Blur single On Your Own from 1997. He recorded the debut album between 1998 and 2000 at his new Studio 13 in London and at Geejam Studios in Jamaica. The first release was the Tomorrow Comes Today EP on the twenty seventh of November 2000. Its video, directed by Hewlett, introduced the four cartoon members to the world. It was made on such a tight deadline that it is mostly still drawings laid over real photos of London streets.[1] [2] [3]

Clint Eastwood and the debut album

Albarn made more than half of the first album alone, then called in the American hip hop producer Dan the Automator to help him finish it. The two had just worked together on Deltron 3030, a project with the rapper Del the Funky Homosapien and the turntablist Kid Koala, and both joined in. The guest list set the pattern for everything that followed. Ibrahim Ferrer of the Buena Vista Social Club sang in Spanish. Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto voiced Noodle. Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz of Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club turned up too. Albarn later said the project freed him to use rhythms he never thought he could use with Blur, from hip hop to dub to Latin music.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The single that launched it all nearly had a different rapper. The British group Phi Life Cypher had already recorded verses for Clint Eastwood. Then Dan the Automator asked Del to stay on after a Deltron 3030 session and write his own. Del did it in about thirty minutes, using a book called How to Write a Hit Song. The beat came from the very first preset on an Omnichord, a cheap electronic instrument, with Albarn's melodica on top. The title came from recording in Jamaica, listening to dancehall, and loving the Sergio Leone westerns. Released on the fifth of March 2001, Clint Eastwood reached number four in the UK and went double platinum there.[1] [2] [3]

The album Gorillaz came out on the twenty sixth of March 2001. It went on to sell more than seven million copies worldwide and earned a Guinness World Records entry as the most successful virtual band. The follow up single, 19-2000, reached number six in the UK, and a remix of it became the theme of the video game FIFA Football 2002. On tour, Albarn and the band played hidden behind a giant screen showing Hewlett's animations. For a man who had spent a decade as a frontman, it was strange. He later said that on some nights he wanted to take a knife, cut through the screen and stick his head out.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Gorillaz were political from the start. At the MTV Europe Music Awards in Frankfurt in November 2001, weeks after the United States invaded Afghanistan, Albarn went up to collect an award wearing a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament T shirt. He told the audience to forget the music for a moment, and said that bombing one of the poorest countries in the world was wrong. The attacks of September the eleventh also left the Detroit rap group D12 stranded in London. Albarn invited them to his studio, and without Eminem they recorded a song called 911 with Albarn and the Specials singer Terry Hall. It was released that December.[1] [2] [3]

At the Brit Awards in 2002 the cartoon members performed for the first time, in 3D animation on four giant screens, a production reported to have cost three hundred thousand pounds. They were nominated for four Brits that night and won none. A dub remix album called Laika Come Home followed that summer, along with a DVD of all their visuals, Phase One: Celebrity Take Down. Albarn and Hewlett also flirted with making a Hollywood film. Hewlett said they lost interest as soon as they met the studio executives, and decided to wait until they could do it themselves.[1] [2]

Demon Days

After touring with Blur in 2003, Albarn went back to Gorillaz. Hewlett said they had to make a second album to prove the band was not a gimmick. This time the producer was Danger Mouse, who had become famous for The Grey Album, a mash up of Jay Z and the Beatles. The mood was much darker. Albarn had taken a train from Beijing to Mongolia with his partner and their six year old daughter, and passed through a poor, forgotten region turning to desert. He woke from nightmares to that landscape. He described the new record as the world in a state of night, with each song a personal demon.[1] [2]

Demon Days was released in May 2005 and went straight to number one in Britain. Its lead single, Feel Good Inc., featured the New York hip hop trio De La Soul. Albarn wrote the chorus about windmills after driving through the wind farm valley on the way to play Coachella with Blur in 2003. The famous cackling laugh belongs to Maseo of De La Soul, who was fooling around in the studio. Dave of De La Soul, known as Trugoy the Dove, wrote his verse the night after first hearing the track. The song topped the American modern rock chart for eight weeks and turned up in an iPod advert.[1] [2] [3]

The guest list on Demon Days was even stranger than the first time. The Happy Mondays singer Shaun Ryder sang on Dare, which became the band's only UK number one single in September 2005. The actor Dennis Hopper narrated a dark fable about greed. Albarn was so shy about asking him that he hid behind a pillar at an awards night, then stepped out and accidentally bumped into him. Ike Turner played piano, and the masked rapper MF Doom appeared too. Kids with Guns was sparked by a boy in his daughter's class who brought a knife to school. Albarn called it part of the brutalisation of a generation.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Instead of a world tour, Gorillaz played five nights at the Manchester Opera House in November 2005, and later five at the Apollo Theater in New York. The band was on stage but lit so that only silhouettes showed, with life size puppets of 2-D and Murdoc made by Jim Henson's Creature Shop. Hewlett said the shows actually cost the two of them money. In February 2006, at the Grammys, the cartoon band appeared to perform live alongside a virtual Madonna, using a projection trick based on the old Victorian stage illusion called Pepper's ghost. Feel Good Inc. won the Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals, the band's only Grammy to date.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Ghosts and side roads

Behind the cartoons there were real losses in these years. Ibrahim Ferrer, the Cuban singer from the first album, died of multiple organ failure in Havana on the sixth of August 2005, aged seventy eight, and Gorillaz played his song live as a tribute. On the eleventh of April 2006, Proof of D12, who had rapped on 911, was shot dead during a fight that broke out over a pool game at a club on Eight Mile Road in Detroit. The club's bouncer, Mario Etheridge, fired the fatal shots. Authorities ruled that he had acted lawfully in defence of another man, whom Proof was reported to have shot.[1] [2]

The fictional story kept growing. In 2006 the band published Rise of the Ogre, an autobiography supposedly written by the four cartoon members. It was really written by Cass Browne, the band's live drummer, who for years also wrote every interview the characters gave to magazines. A documentary called Bananaz, filmed behind the scenes from 2000 to 2006 by Ceri Levy, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2008. There was sadness here too. Ike Turner, who had played on Demon Days and joined the band in Manchester, had relapsed into drug use, and he died of an overdose in 2007.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Albarn and Hewlett's next big project was not officially Gorillaz at all. With the Chinese director Chen Shi-zheng they created Monkey: Journey to the West, an opera based on the classic Chinese novel. It opened the first Manchester International Festival on the twenty eighth of June 2007, with Chinese acrobats and Shaolin monks. Albarn joked that it was really Gorillaz, but they could not call it that for legal reasons. The following year the BBC used their Monkey character for a two minute animation introducing its coverage of the Beijing Olympics. Every one of its three thousand frames was drawn with pencil on paper.[1] [2] [3] [4]

After Monkey, the pair started a strange project called Carousel, about the mystical side of Britain. It was meant to be part film, part stage show, and Albarn wrote around seventy songs for it. Hewlett, meanwhile, admitted he was bored of drawing the same four characters. Carousel was eventually dropped, but its songs and its melancholy flowed into the third Gorillaz album. Albarn said the band was no longer really four animated characters. It had become an organisation of people doing new projects.[1] [2]

Plastic Beach and the fall out

The idea for Plastic Beach came while Albarn was on the beach near his home in Devon, picking out all the plastic hidden in the sand. The album imagined a secret floating island in the South Pacific made of humanity's rubbish. Albarn produced it himself, recording from 2008 to 2009 in London, New York and Damascus, with the Syrian National Orchestra for Arabic Music. It paused only so he could reunite with Blur for the summer of 2009. The cast was huge, with Snoop Dogg, Mos Def, Little Dragon, Mark E. Smith of the Fall, Gruff Rhys, and Mick Jones and Paul Simonon of the Clash. Albarn called it the most pop record he had ever made.[1] [2]

Two legends were hard to catch. Bobby Womack, the soul singer, had never heard of Gorillaz, but his daughter liked them and talked him into it. On Stylo he was told to sing whatever was on his mind, and he went on for an hour about love and politics. Womack was diabetic, and at the end of the take he started to pass out. They sat him down, gave him a banana, and he came round minutes later. Lou Reed turned Albarn down three times by email. On the fourth try he liked the demo, and wrote his lyrics in a taxi ride uptown before recording.[1] [2] [3]

Plastic Beach came out on the third of March 2010 and reached number two in both Britain and America. For the first time Gorillaz toured as a real band in full view, the Escape to Plastic Beach Tour, dressed in naval uniforms and joined by guests like Womack, De La Soul and Lou Reed. They headlined Glastonbury in 2010. It was glorious and ruinous. Albarn later said he made about twenty pounds from the whole thing, and called it an economic disaster. On the American leg he recorded a whole album on his iPad, one song a day, as a diary of the tour. The Fall was released free to fans on Christmas Day 2010.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The tour was also where the friendship cracked. With the band now front and centre, Hewlett felt his animation was being pushed aside. He later joked that the screen behind the musicians seemed to get smaller every night. In April 2012 Albarn told the Guardian that he and Hewlett had fallen out, and that more Gorillaz music was unlikely. He blamed a knot between them that had not been untied, which came to a head when Hewlett's visuals were no longer central to the show. Earlier that year they had released one last track, DoYaThing, a thirteen minute jam with James Murphy and Andre 3000, commissioned by Converse.[1] [2] [3]

Silence, reunion and Humanz

For several years Gorillaz went quiet. Albarn made his first solo album, Everyday Robots, and returned to Blur. Hewlett held art exhibitions and worked on a film that never happened. Grief visited again. Bobby Womack, whose comeback album Albarn had co produced, died at his home in California on the twenty seventh of June 2014, aged seventy. The reunion itself was almost comically casual. After one of Albarn's solo shows in 2014 the two had a few drinks, and Albarn asked if Hewlett wanted to do another one. Each asked the other the same question until Hewlett said yes. He spent the next eight months learning to draw the characters again.[1] [2] [3]

The fifth album, Humanz, was recorded from late 2015 to 2016 with the producer the Twilite Tone and Remi Kabaka Junior, who had voiced the drummer Russel since 2000 and now became a permanent producer. Albarn gave his guests a strange brief. Imagine the night Donald Trump wins the American election, he told them, and make the soundtrack to a party at the end of the world. At the time that seemed a remote fantasy. The rapper Pusha T later wondered what kind of crystal ball Albarn had. When a track called Hallelujah Money was released in January 2017, it came out on the day of Trump's real inauguration.[1] [2] [3]

Humanz arrived on the twenty eighth of April 2017, the first Gorillaz album in seven years, and went to number two in Britain and America. The guests ranged from Grace Jones to Mavis Staples. Jones sang over one track for four hours, and Albarn covered his studio floor with scraps of paper to piece her song together. Most surprising of all, Noel Gallagher sang backing vocals on We Got the Power, two decades after the Battle of Britpop with Blur. Albarn called him fantastic in the studio. The song Andromeda, named after a soul club in Colchester from Albarn's youth, was dedicated to the late mother of his partner Suzi Winstanley.[1] [2]

The comeback was a success. The video for Saturnz Barz, with Popcaan, was made for 360 degree viewing and reportedly cost eight hundred thousand dollars. In February 2018 Gorillaz won Best British Group at the Brit Awards. There was darkness on the road too. Mark E. Smith, who had sung on Plastic Beach, died of cancer in January 2018. And on the seventh of July 2018, at Denmark's Roskilde Festival, Del the Funky Homosapien fell off the stage during Clint Eastwood. The set was cut short. Albarn said Del had fractured seven ribs and punctured a lung, and called it an awful thing he kept replaying in his head.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Now Now, Song Machine and Cracker Island

Albarn kept writing on the Humanz tour and finished a new album with the producer James Ford in February 2018. He said he did not want to wait seven years again, because they were getting on a bit. The Now Now came out on the twenty ninth of June 2018. It had only a handful of guests, George Benson and Snoop Dogg among them, and Albarn said it was pretty much just him singing, in the world of 2-D. In the storyline Murdoc was in prison, so the bass was played by Ace, borrowed from Cartoon Network's The Powerpuff Girls. Hewlett's son Denholm filmed the era for the documentary Reject False Icons, released in December 2019.[1] [2] [3]

In January 2020 Gorillaz threw out the album format. Song Machine was a web series, releasing a new song with new guests roughly every month as episodes. The first, Momentary Bliss with Slowthai and Slaves, marked Murdoc's return. Then the pandemic hit, and loss followed. The Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, Albarn's great mentor, died in Paris on the thirtieth of April 2020 aged seventy nine. Two days later Gorillaz released How Far?, featuring Allen and Skepta, with no video, as a tribute. MF Doom, who had rapped on Demon Days, also died that year. The season became the album Strange Timez in October 2020, with Robert Smith of the Cure and Elton John.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In August 2021 Gorillaz played the O2 Arena in London, with the first night free for National Health Service workers and their families. Earlier that year the band had teased selling NFTs for its twentieth anniversary. Fans pointed out that it clashed with the green message of Plastic Beach, and none were released. An animated Gorillaz film was announced at Netflix in 2021, but by February 2023 it had been cancelled. In April 2022 Albarn appeared as a surprise guest at Coachella with Billie Eilish, who sang Feel Good Inc. with him and said Gorillaz had changed the world.[1] [2]

The next album grew out of a scrapped second season of Song Machine. Cracker Island, produced with Greg Kurstin in Los Angeles, was about conspiracy theories and online echo chambers. It featured Stevie Nicks, Thundercat, Tame Impala and Bad Bunny, whose song Tormenta was the first finished. Released on the twenty fourth of February 2023, it went to number one in Britain, their first chart topping album since Demon Days, and earned a Grammy nomination. It came out days after another loss. Trugoy the Dove of De La Soul, the voice of Feel Good Inc., died on the twelfth of February 2023, aged fifty four, after years of heart failure.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Mountain and twenty five years

The ninth album was shaped by grief. Albarn and Hewlett had planned a creative journey to India together. Between their two trips, both of their fathers died within about ten days of each other. Albarn's father Keith, an artist who had once briefly managed Soft Machine, died of cancer in July 2024. Hewlett also lost his mother in law. The second trip became a pilgrimage, and Albarn scattered his father's ashes in the Ganges. Hewlett said being there made them feel there was a reason for it all. They took comfort in how Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism approach death, and set out to make an album about death that did not feel frightening.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Albarn had a bold idea. If he was going to sing about death, he said, he needed some people who were dead to help him. So The Mountain includes unused recordings of late collaborators, never previously released. Dennis Hopper speaks on the title track, from outtakes of his Demon Days session. Bobby Womack, Trugoy the Dove, Tony Allen and Mark E. Smith all appear. So does Proof, through a freestyle left over from the 911 session in 2001. Not everyone could join. Lou Reed had left strict instructions that his voice must not be used after his death, so his lyrics were sung through a voice synthesizer instead.[1] [2] [3]

The living guests stretched across the world. The Indian playback singer Asha Bhosle, then in her nineties, sang on The Shadowy Light, recorded at her flat in Mumbai with Albarn on harmonium. Sparks, Johnny Marr, Anoushka Shankar, Black Thought, Idles and Omar Souleyman also joined. Gorillaz celebrated their twenty fifth year with an exhibition in London called House of Kong, playing their first three albums in full. On the third of September 2025 they played the new album complete as a mystery show, before anyone knew its title. The Mountain came out on their own label, Kong, on the twenty seventh of February 2026, and went to number one in Britain.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the seventh of March 2026 Gorillaz finally made their debut on Saturday Night Live, performing Clint Eastwood with Del the Funky Homosapien, twenty five years after it first came out, alongside The Moon Cave from the new album. A month later came sad news. Asha Bhosle died in Mumbai on the twelfth of April 2026, aged ninety two, and The Shadowy Light was among her final recordings. In June Gorillaz played their first ever stadium show, at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London, where her granddaughter Zanai Bhosle sang in her place. The night ended, as the band began, with Clint Eastwood.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

As of 2026 The Mountain Tour is still running, with shows across North America in the autumn and the band's first ever concerts in India planned for January 2027. The critics have been kind to this late chapter. NME called The Mountain arguably their richest and most complete album since Plastic Beach. What started as a joke about manufactured pop in a shared flat has lasted a quarter of a century and gathered something like a hundred guest artists, linking Lou Reed to Bad Bunny and Shaun Ryder to Asha Bhosle. The cartoons have barely aged. Their creators have, and Gorillaz has become the place where they work through it.[1] [2] [3]

The people around Gorillaz

Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett. They started out disliking each other, then shared a flat and invented Gorillaz there. Albarn makes the music and Hewlett draws the world. The balance between sound and picture has always been delicate, and it broke on the Plastic Beach tour, leading to a public falling out in 2012. A tipsy conversation at a party in 2014 brought them back. In 2024 they lost their fathers within days of each other, and grieved together in India making The Mountain.[1] [2] [3]

Jamie Hewlett and Graham Coxon. Coxon was the Blur guitarist who admired Hewlett's comics and brought him in to interview the band in 1990, which is how Hewlett met Albarn. Relations soured when Hewlett began dating Coxon's former girlfriend Jane Olliver. Without Coxon's fandom, Gorillaz might never have existed.[1] [2] [3]

Damon Albarn and Danger Mouse. Albarn chose Danger Mouse to produce Demon Days after hearing The Grey Album. Danger Mouse said they never argued and even finished each other's sentences, though they were competitive. Albarn called him one of the best young producers in the world. They worked together again on The Good, the Bad and the Queen.[1] [2] [3]

Damon Albarn and Del the Funky Homosapien. Del was a late addition to the first album, rapping on Clint Eastwood and Rock the House as the ghost who lives inside the drummer Russel. He has returned again and again, from Albarn's solo tour in 2014 to Cracker Island. After his serious stage fall at Roskilde in 2018, he was back on tour within months, and in 2026 he joined Gorillaz on Saturday Night Live.[1] [2] [3]

Gorillaz and De La Soul. De La Soul gave Gorillaz its biggest hit, Feel Good Inc., and won their first Grammy with it. They returned on Plastic Beach, Humanz and Cracker Island. When Trugoy the Dove died in 2023, Albarn later wove his unreleased vocals from the Plastic Beach sessions into The Moon Cave, and he appears animated in the 2026 film.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Damon Albarn and Bobby Womack. Womack agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to sing on Stylo in 2010, then toured with Gorillaz and appeared on The Fall. Albarn co produced Womack's comeback album The Bravest Man in the Universe in 2012. After Womack died in 2014, his memory shaped the song Andromeda, and his voice returned on The Mountain.[1] [2] [3]

Damon Albarn and Tony Allen. The Afrobeat drummer contacted Albarn after hearing the Blur song Music Is My Radar, which mentions him. They played together in The Good, the Bad and the Queen and Rocket Juice and the Moon, and Allen featured on the Gorillaz song How Far? When Allen died in 2020, Albarn called him his number one musical teacher.[1] [2] [3]

Damon Albarn and Noel Gallagher. They were the rival faces of the Battle of Britpop in 1995, and Albarn has said the Gallagher brothers mocked him relentlessly. Two decades later Noel sang on the Gorillaz track We Got the Power in 2017. Albarn praised him warmly, saying he was fantastic in the studio.[1] [2]

Jamie Hewlett and Emma de Caunes. Hewlett married the French actress Emma de Caunes at Saint Paul de Vence in September 2011. She has occasionally been part of the band's news cycle, confirming the release of The Now Now on Instagram in 2018. Hewlett's son Denholm, from an earlier relationship, directed the Gorillaz documentary Reject False Icons.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Damon Albarn and Remi Kabaka Jr.. Kabaka provided the speaking voice of the drummer Russel from 2000, worked with Albarn in Africa Express, and became a full producer for Gorillaz from 2015. In 2019 he was credited alongside Albarn and Hewlett as a core member of the team, and he co produced every album since Humanz.[1] [2] [3]

Damon Albarn and Suzi Winstanley. Albarn began a relationship with the artist Suzi Winstanley in 1998, just as Gorillaz was being born. Their daughter Missy, born in 1999, was named after Missy Elliott. It was on a train journey through China with Suzi and Missy that Albarn found the dark mood of Demon Days, and the Humanz song Andromeda honours Suzi's late mother Ethel.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Gorillaz

• Hewlett's first impression of Damon Albarn in 1990 was that he was arrogant and obnoxious. When Hewlett interviewed Blur for Deadline magazine, he found the young singer arrogant. The two often clashed for years afterwards, before ending up as flatmates.[1] [2]
• Murdoc was partly inspired by a 1968 photo of the Rolling Stones taken by David Bailey. Hewlett modelled the villainous bass player on Keith Richards, with touches of Victor Frankenstein and the Creeper from Scooby Doo.[1]
• Noodle almost did not exist. The band's first guitarist was a seventeen year old called Paula Cracker. Albarn felt Paula looked too much like the characters Hewlett usually drew, so Hewlett redesigned the guitarist as a ten year old Japanese girl named Noodle.[1] [2]
• The beat of Clint Eastwood comes from the very first preset on an Omnichord. The song's backbone is the Rock 1 rhythm from a cheap Omnichord, with Albarn's melodica playing a riff based on the yell from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.[1] [2]
• Clint Eastwood's original rap was by the British group Phi Life Cypher, not Del. Phi Life Cypher recorded the first verses. Their version appeared as an alternative on some singles, and they performed it with the band at the 2002 Brits.[1]
• The Clint Eastwood video opens with a quote from the zombie film Dawn of the Dead. The line about the dead rising to kill was thought offensive in some countries, so a censored version of the video cut the intro.[1]
• Banksy graffiti appears in the very first Gorillaz video. The Tomorrow Comes Today video, mostly still drawings over photos of London, includes Banksy artwork and a glimpse of Trellick Tower.[1]
• A downloads loophole got Feel Good Inc. into the UK chart before its full release. Chart rules still needed a physical product, so the band issued just three hundred picture discs. On those alone it would have entered at number one hundred and ninety seven.[1]
• The laugh on Feel Good Inc. was Maseo of De La Soul simply goofing around. De La Soul arrived trying to make each other laugh. The band recorded most of it, and Trugoy suggested keeping the laugh on the track.[1]
• Albarn got the Beach Boys sound on Demon Days by singing three harmonies smiling and one looking miserable. He reasoned that the Beach Boys all grinned while Brian Wilson looked glum, so he copied the faces as well as the voices.[1]
• Dennis Hopper did Demon Days partly because his son Henry was a fan. Albarn was so shy he hid behind a pillar before asking. He thinks Hopper said yes because Henry liked the band.[1]
• The Dirty Harry video was the first Gorillaz video filmed on location, in the Namib Desert. They planned a computer generated desert but found it cheaper and easier to film in a real one in Namibia.[1]
• The Grammys performance in 2006 used a variation on a Victorian stage illusion. The Pepper's ghost technique projected Madonna alongside the cartoon band on stage. Albarn found it frustrating because the bass had to be kept low.[1] [2]
• Gorillaz' life size puppets at the Manchester Opera House were made by Jim Henson's Creature Shop. The Jim Henson Company later gave Gorillaz its Jim Henson Creativity Honor.[1]
• Rise of the Ogre was released as the world's first audiobook singles. The four part audiobook, narrated by Joss Ackland, came out one part a week on iTunes from December 2006, but was never completed there.[1]
• The Murdoc voice belongs to Phil Cornwell, who also played DJ Dave Clifton in I'm Alan Partridge. Cornwell is an impressionist from Dead Ringers. He also voiced Mick Jagger and David Bowie for BBC Radio 1.[1]
• Bobby Womack nearly fainted while recording Stylo. After an hour of singing, the diabetic soul star started to pass out. A banana brought him round within minutes.[1] [2]
• Lou Reed would only let Albarn into the studio, not Hewlett or Kabaka. At Chung King Studios in New York, Reed refused entry to the others, drank tea with Albarn, then wrote his lyrics in a taxi.[1]
• Albarn recorded seagulls at a landfill outside London for Plastic Beach. He later visited a landfill in Mali and was struck by snakes living in the warmth of rotting plastic bags, a strange kind of optimism.[1]
• The Fall was recorded in thirty two days on an iPad. Albarn made it on the North American tour in 2010, one track a day, with no later overdubs. Critics called it the first iPad album.[1] [2]
• The full version of DoYaThing lasts thirteen minutes. Andre 3000 just kept improvising on the last day of recording. Albarn said the song finished on its own.[1]
• Morrissey, Sade and Dionne Warwick all turned down Humanz. Warwick declined because some lyrics clashed with her religious views. Rick Ross said no as well.[1]
• Grace Jones sang over one Humanz track for four hours. Albarn covered his studio floor with scraps of paper holding her lines to build Charger. The final mix had ninety separate tracks.[1]
• Graham Coxon once sang on We Got the Power, but his vocals were removed. Albarn said the song with Coxon, Gallagher and himself was getting too rocky and retro, so he stripped it back and brought in Jehnny Beth.[1]
• The Now Now's bass player was a Powerpuff Girls villain. Ace of the Gangreen Gang stood in for Murdoc, who was in prison in the storyline. Albarn said they knew creator Craig McCracken.[1] [2]
• The Valley of the Pagans video was the first major studio production filmed in Grand Theft Auto Five. The video, featuring Beck, was set to private days after release, and a version without game footage came out in 2021.[1]
• The Happy Dictator is about a Turkmen dictator who wanted everyone to think happy thoughts. Albarn learned in Turkmenistan that the ruler known as Turkmenbashi had tried to ban bad news. Sparks joined after leaving a note in his dressing room.[1]
• Albarn lost his gold tooth in a waste container in Miami while making The Mountain. He left it on a table after eating burritos and had to dig it out of a large bin. Black Thought mentions it on The Empty Dream Machine.[1]
• A guru in India had researched Albarn and Hewlett before they met. Their ashram visit ended with them beside him at a ceremony broadcast across India. It inspired The Plastic Guru.[1]
• Albarn wanted Terry Hall's unused vocals for The Mountain, but they had been deleted. The engineer of the 911 session in 2001 had removed the spare takes. MF Doom's material had already been used by Danger Mouse.[1]
• Each cartoon member picked a favourite film for screenings in 2026. Russel chose Sweet Charity, Noodle Britannia Hospital, Murdoc Bad Santa, and 2-D the Wim Wenders film Perfect Days.[1]
• Albarn was once credited on other records as 2-D. His backing vocals on songs by Massive Attack and Nathan Haines in 2003 were credited to the cartoon singer rather than himself.[1]
• Noodle became a global ambassador for Jaguar Racing in 2016. The cartoon guitarist fronted a short commercial for the electric racing team.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.