When you’re basically not a real band

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  1. Gorillaz began as a joke at the expense of the thing it became. Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett were watching MTV in 1998, decided mainstream pop had gone hollow, and reasoned that a cartoon band would be no more artificial than the real ones.
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  2. Collaboration was the structure from the start. Dan the Automator produced the debut, which pulls alternative rock, hip hop, reggae, electronic and funk together with Del the Funky Homosapien, Miho Hatori and Ibrahim Ferrer.
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  3. The debut sold over 7 million copies, which is more than Blur's entire output, and earned a Guinness entry as the most successful virtual band.
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  4. Touring the concept never worked. The technology could not deliver the vision, so musicians played behind a screen, Albarn disliked it, and budget limits cut the voice actors out of the European leg.
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  5. Demon Days came out of Albarn's train journey through poor rural China, was produced by Danger Mouse, and turned the project toward global politics and the end of the world.
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  6. Even at their commercial peak the live model lost money. The ten Demon Days Live shows, the first with the band in full view, ended up costing them.
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  7. The Fall was recorded entirely on an iPad during the Plastic Beach tour, with no additional production or overdubs, and the video treats it as the point where the method outran the songs.
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  8. Hewlett left in 2012 feeling his contribution was being diminished, and he and Albarn did not speak for three years before reconciling at a Christmas party in 2014.
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  9. Humanz was built as the soundtrack to a party at the end of the world, using a Trump win in 2016 as its working premise before the election happened.
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  10. Song Machine started as an episodic series of singles and became an album because the tracks held up, assembled remotely over email and Zoom during the pandemic with Elton John, Robert Smith, Beck, slowthai, St. Vincent and JPEGMAFIA.
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