GORILLAZ - Brief Article

Interview, August, 2001 by Dimitri Ehrlich

THE BOLDFACE BANDMATES BEHIND THIS SEASON'S BEST SURPRISE

In a world where pop music is 99% artifice and 1% art (and that's on a good day), Gorillaz offer an interesting spin: the fakeness is real and it's right up front. For starters, despite having recently released a musically ambitious album on Virgin Records that fuses Jamaican dub, hip-hop, punk and even Cuban elements, the band doesn't exist.

What does exist is a loose collective of musicians (including Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto, Del the Funky Homosapien, Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads, Buena Vista Social Club singer Ibrahim Ferrer, producer Dan the Automator and Damon Albarn of Blur) who can be heard on the band's self-titled album. Gorillaz' videos, all of which were animated by Tank Girl creator Jamie Hewlett, depict a cartoon foursome that includes a 10-year-old female Japanese guitarist named Noodle; an American rapper named Russel; a bassist named Murdoc, who dabbles in Satanism; and 2-D, a spiky-haired lead singer with a fondness for tracksuits. In concert, several of these musicians perform behind a screen, upon which animated Gorillaz images are projected. Any similarities between the four cartoon members of Gorillaz and persons living or dead, we are winkingly asked to believe, is coincidental.

"We were so sick of all the manufactured rubbish that was on the charts we decided to manufacture our own band," says Hewlett, who conceived the project while sharing a London apartment with Albarn. "Gorillaz are more realistic than *NSYNC," he adds. "Marilyn Manson and Eminem are cartoon characters, but there's a point where they stop being who they are in the press and start having to be real people. But with Gorillaz, their job is to be pop stars."

Dimitri Ehrlich is Interview's Music Editor at Large.