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Gorillaz live. From Mojo magazine, cover date: January 2006 (but released December '05).
Review by Sophie Harris. Photos by Mark Allan.

"Let me tell you," says Ike Turner backstage, "people started asking me a month or so ago, 'Hey man, are you playing with the Gorillaz?' I said, I was thinking the Gorillaz were another group in Phoenix, Arizona that I went down to play a song with, I had no idea this was the group! But anyway. It's fun."

Rock'n'roll founding father Turner may be a little blurry on the whys and the wherefores of how he got involved with Gorillaz - but when he strides on stage two hours later dressed in glittering white jacket and slacks, to ringing applause, you know (just as well as he does) that something pretty special is going on.

Turner is just one of a list of artists who have contributed to Gorillaz' second album Demon Days, rubbing shoulders with such free-wheelin' talents as Dennis Hopper, Neneh Cherry and De La Soul - nearly all of whom are here at the Manchester Opera House tonight, for a five-night run of shows. Co-produced by DJ Danger Mouse (the force behind 2004's cult Grey Album), Demon Days has been a huge commercial success, even going Top 10 in America. There is, of course, just one hitch. Gorillaz, as we're used to seeing them in their videos, promos, posters and so on - don't actually exist. They're a cartoon band, the brainchild of British pop polymath Damon Albarn and celebrated Deadline artist Jamie Hewlett; an animated four-piece whose line-up includes a 10-year-old girl guitarist called Noodle. Having never done proper interviews, let alone toured, no one knows quite what to expect (least of all the usherettes selling the Fruit Pastilles). It's a shaky start: while the MTV Awards boasted cutting-edge 3D projections of the animated band, the Manchester International Festival has wobbly plastic puppets of Murdoc and 2D sitting in an opera box, cracking jokes Statler and Waldorf-style. A Daffy Duck cartoon is projected onto the Safety Curtain. It's all very panto, at least until the curtain rises.

On-stage, the band (including Albarn seated at a piano) are silhouetted against bright squares of colour while a huge screen blinks out a montage of newsreel brutality. Cue the spare, bassy grot of Kids With Guns, and tonight's first cameo from the perennially sassy Neneh Cherry. Current single Dirty Harry follows, and a choir of motley schoolkids shuffles on to its no-pop-no-style electro dub; The Pharcyde's Bootie Brown flings himself on-stage for his guest rap, and two kids start frantically breakdancing beside him. Of course, the biggest cheer of the night goes to local boy Shaun Ryder ("Go on son!"), toad-like and wiggling his toosh to the metallic fizz of DARE. Pop single of the year it may be, but it's Ike Turner who works the crowd into a delirious frenzy, hammering and pawing at the piano for his gloriously fiery solo spot on Every Planet We Reach Is Dead.

Is it strange that such stars appear on-stage for a maximum two minutes? Not when you consider that all the guests tonight are, in the best possible way, like cartoons themselves: both physically (the stripy-shirted, twistin', shoutin' De La Soul who appear for the melancholy bounce of Feel Good Inc.), and in terms of what these artists represent in popular culture. All the guests are mavericks; people who have followed their own vision, regardless of sales or acclaim, from Dennis Hopper (sadly just his voice piped in) to quickfire London rapper Roots Manuva and his angelically voiced singing partner Martina Topley-Bird. In that respect, they are superheroes, perfectly suited to this cartoon enterprise.

"Gorillaz have no boundaries about how they work," says De La Soul's Posdnuos before the show. "The way they see things, there's no set way of doing it. And now it's like, wow, the doors are open."

And what of Damon Albarn himself? Does he get his moment in the spotlight? As much as Gorillaz is a collaborative project, it is ultimately Albarn's music that lays down landing lights for Demon Days. Finally at the encore, Albarn comes out of the shadows and takes centre-stage to howling applause; he sings Hong Kong from the War Child album, with Chinese zither player Zeng Zhen. It is mournful, captivating. And dressed in scruffy black, gazing in awe at his instrumentalists, Damon Albarn has never looked so happy on-stage. Feel good, indeed.

Setlist: Intro / Last Living Souls / Kids With Guns / O Green World / Dirty Harry / Feel Good Inc. / El Mañana / Every Planet We Reach Is Dead / November Has Come / All Alone / White Light / DARE / Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey's Head / Don't Get Lost In Heaven / Demon Days / Hong Kong / Latin Simone (Que Pasa Contigo)