This week, Gorillaz launched new music, a great track featuring Sparks, and album and a tour.

This is following the brilliant House of Kong exhibition that has been running throughout August at the Copperbox Arena in London’s Olympic Park, which, in itself hinted at new work in the pipeline.

But this reminded me of a show I did back in 2017, I’m guessing around the time the Plastic Beach Tour was touching down in Brighton. I nearly got a pass to go and do the sound whilst the 1BTN, or 1 Brighton FM as it was then, head guy Mickey interviewed Damon Albarn. That didn’t happen sadly, but the missus and I did have tickets to the show anyway, so all good.

So I put together a show, featuring their big hits but also trying to unlock some deeper album cuts and rareties the casual listener might not know about.

The sound quality isn’t great, this was the broadcast feed and had limiters etc on it, which back then, no-one really knew what they were doing at the station, so forgive that please.

Obvioulsy, Gorillaz, have dropped loads of good music since then as well, so it is only a screenshot of where they were at that time, just in case you wonder where some of their newer stuff has gone…

I hope you enjoy this, I do sometimes like to deep dive on an artist, there was that time I played a whole Nils Frahm album from start to finish. Maybe I lost a listener or two on that one, but then I did get messages saying they loved it, so I’ll continue to do things like this.

Putting a show out on Substack means I can do that. Which I love.

See you next week for the usual radio show, stay safe, sane and as always, fuck facism. x

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chriscracknelldj.substack.com