You could tell this wasn’t going to be a normal gig before you even got through the doors, not in Manchester anyway, where even the queues feel like they’ve got a bit of personality to them. The queue alone looked like someone had accidentally merged four different nights out into one, kids on shoulders, teenagers reliving 2005, dads in Stone Roses tees, and at least one person dressed like they’d taken a wrong turn on the way to a cabaret. It didn’t feel like one crowd, it felt like all of them. Which, in hindsight, is probably the only way Gorillaz ever works, a bit like this city on a good night, messy on paper, completely coherent in practice.

This was my first time seeing them, which always carried a bit of curiosity. How does a fictional band actually translate live without feeling like a very expensive screensaver? The answer, it turns out, is by leaning all the way into it.

The stage at Co-op Live doesn’t just host Gorillaz, it becomes them. Jamie Hewlett’s visuals dominate everything, bold, strange, occasionally a bit unsettling, especially with the newer Mountain material where the world feels more hand-drawn, more textured, more human. Characters loom, disappear, reappear, and at times it genuinely feels like the band are just visiting their own creation rather than controlling it.

And then there’s Damon Albarn, stood in the middle of it all like a slightly dishevelled ringmaster who’s not entirely sure how the circus got this big. One foot on the monitor, camo jacket on, looking like he’s either about to sing or gently explain something quite profound to a room of 20,000 people. Possibly both.

The big question going in was The Mountain. When those early singles started landing, it felt at risk of being a self-indulgent, me and my favourite peers, collaboration-heavy record, which, historically, can be a bit hit and miss. There’s always that risk it turns into a playlist rather than an album. But this one never really does. Somehow it holds together, threads of different languages, different scenes, different voices all pulling in the same direction.

Live, that gamble pays off more than expected. One of the standout moments comes when the newer material leans fully into that tension between celebration and loss, a track like “The Hardest Thing” framing grief not as something to sit with quietly, but something that loops, repeats, and insists on being lived through in public, turning personal absence into something almost communal. They don’t shy away from it either, there’s a decent chunk of the set pulled from the new record, which felt like a statement in itself. No easing people in gently, just straight into it. And crucially, it works. The songs don’t feel like guest spots stitched together, they feel like part of a bigger movement, helped massively by the band behind Albarn who glue everything together with a kind of quiet authority.

There’s a point early on where you realise this isn’t going to be a greatest hits run with a few new ones bolted on. Night two brings a few tweaks from the opener, swapping in deeper cuts and shifting the balance slightly, less of a straight nostalgia hit, more of a proper tour show finding its feet. It keeps you on edge in a good way, never quite settling into autopilot.

And then, of course, Omar Souleyman, who feels like the perfect bridge between the small rooms this city thrives on and the kind of scale Co-op Live is still figuring out.

I’d clocked him properly back in 2022 at Kitchen Street in Liverpool, one of those gigs where you walk in vaguely aware and leave wondering how you’ve missed this entirely. Here, on a stage this size, it’s a different beast. Same energy, same hypnotic pull, but scaled up to something that somehow still feels intimate. He barely moves, which if anything makes it more compelling, while the entire floor bounces like it’s been collectively possessed. It’s one of those moments where Gorillaz’ whole global, collaborative thing stops being a concept and just becomes reality in front of you. At times it edges into something that feels almost familiar if you’ve ever seen Tinariwen live, that same warmth, that same hypnotic, cyclical rhythm where the groove does the talking and you just sort of give in to it rather than try to follow it.

The set moves constantly, sometimes almost too quickly to fully take in. Older tracks drop in not as nostalgia, but as release valves. When they hit, they hit properly, the kind of communal moments where you remember just how embedded these songs are. But they never fully take over the night. This isn’t a backwards-looking show.

What stands out most is how cohesive it all feels. Gorillaz shouldn’t work live, too many voices, too many styles, too many moving parts. But here, it clicks. The band anchors it, the visuals elevate it, and Albarn floats somewhere in between, occasionally looking as surprised as the rest of us that it’s all holding together.

By the time the encore lands, everything starts to line up thematically as well as musically, and you can feel the room shift slightly, like even the lads who came for “Feel Good Inc.” are suddenly a bit more locked in than they expected. The quieter, more reflective threads from The Mountain, grief, memory, legacy, sit underneath the bigger moments without dragging them down. It never gets heavy, but it does get weighty, which is a tricky balance to pull off in a room this size.

And then, like all good Gorillaz shows, it lets itself off the leash again. Big moments, big reactions, the kind of ending where analysis goes out the window and you’re just another person shouting along, slightly hoarse, slightly deaf, and fully aware you’re having a better time than you probably expected.

Which, in a way, brings it back to that queue, back to Manchester doing what it does best, turning something that shouldn’t quite fit into something that absolutely does. A completely mixed, slightly chaotic group of people who shouldn’t all logically be here, somehow leaving feeling like they’ve shared the same night.

Gorillaz might be fictional, but this felt about as real as it gets, a room full of people, from Kitchen Street regulars to arena first-timers, all buying into the same strange, brilliant illusion.

A bold, collaborative, slightly chaotic, and ultimately brilliant live show from a band that continues to make the impossible feel oddly natural.

Photo gallery courtesy of Luke Dyson