Gorillaz have finally stepped out from behind their animated personas. But the transition into a full live band has not been without its pitfalls.
The band’s co-creator and main creative force, former Blur singer Damon Albarn, revealed the bad news. Gorillaz’ performance at Denmark’s Roskilde Festival on July 7th was abruptly canceled after member Del the Funky Homosapien suffered a fall. Now, it looks like the charismatic rapper has suffered a series of severe injuries.
In a recent interview with Beats 1, Albarn revealed that the set at the festival had been expected to last longer. But his collaborator had fallen off the stage soon after his portion of the show had begun.
Albarn initially urged the MC to continue with the performance, as he did not wish to disappoint the 80,000 fans attending the festival. The Blur frontman explained that he himself had fallen offstage on a number of occasions and did not feel the fall would have caused major injuries. After all, it looked like a light fall.
“Del is in hospital still in Roskilde,” Albarn said. “He’s got seven fractured ribs, and he punctured his lung on one side, lacerated it on the other.”
“He’s gonna be fine,” Albarn continued. “It was just a stage fall, and I’ve fallen off stage several times, off stages way higher than that and I’ve been so fortunate. When he fell down, I was looking at him like, come on get up there’s 80,000 people out there and we need to finish.”
“I thought I was going to able to carry the song on. I thought he was going to be okay. But he really wasn’t.”
In fact, Del the Funky Homosapien had been severely injured and remains in hospital as of July 12th due to the extent of the damage to his ribs and lungs.
Del the Funky Homosapien took to Twitter to reveal he would return to the current tour in support of their The Now Now album.
Damon Albarn went on to explain he was struggling with both the incident and his own reaction, which he now regrets. Albarn revealed that he keeps replaying the incident in his head, as he still struggles to believe such an innocuous looking fall could have resulted in such serious injuries.