“I was supposed to carry on”: Damon Albarn remembers the worst gig of his career
A bad Damon Albarn gig has become something of a recurring presence in my life recently.
I recently wrote a pretty scathing hit piece on Coachella. Watching what looks like the influencer Olympics take place in the Californian desert sparked a fury in me that simply needed to be put to paper, so I went about outlining exactly why this festival feels contradictory to music purity.
Lost in my own anecdotal biases, I dug deeper into the archives to find a moment, more specifically, a gig that confirmed my suspicions. It didn’t take me long to get the proof I needed, for a clip surfaced of a forlorn Albarn, playing the main stage and frowning at the sheer lack of engagement he got from the crowd. In the aftermath, he cited a driving social media obsession as the root of the festival’s problems.
It didn’t help that I was a Blur fan either. Having seen them twice now, I can confirm that their shows rarely warrant such a damp response, and so the problem must have been the Coachella crowd, not Albarn.
But that’s not always been the case. Like any rockstar, Albarn has had his troubles, and at the worst of times, they have spilt over into the live shows where the fans bore the consequences. In fact, there was one show in particular that made Albarn’s skin crawl in that regard.
“A really, truly epic one was in Madrid, he remembered, “It was that period when Graham wasn’t in the band. We went on tour, and I think that was a really difficult time. I think I didn’t realise that I was over-medicating before gigs, but I clearly was. It was a combination of Red Bull and vodka, like multiple ones before I went, and then all the way during the gig. So it was all right to the point, you know, of feeling right to go on stage, but then it just deteriorated.”
However, it got worse for Albarn, who, in his inebriated state, entered the crowd and lost a personal memento, a price he paid for his sloppiness, but in his anger, was quick to blame the crowd.
“Anyway, I had this necklace that my mum had made me, a bead necklace,” he added. “So it was a very precious thing. And at some point, I was like, there in the audience, and someone just ripped it off. And I was very upset, but because I was so drunk, I forgot that it was kind of a gig and that, you know, I was supposed to carry on.”
Albarn continued to admit that he woke up the next day, riddled with shame and realised the blame for losing his necklace was solely on him, and the root cause of it was the apathy that laced his entire approach to the show. But he was never able to truly rectify the situation, for clips of the event soon surfaced online and Albarn’s mishap was then immortalised on the internet. So maybe his hopeless rage at a phone-obsessed Coachella crowd makes more sense than we all realised? At least that’s what my editorial bias would like to believe.
