London —

“It’s been a very long time since this record,” Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn reminisces, while performing the once-virtual band’s eponymous debut album in its entirety for the first time in London. “Some of you weren’t born … and all that bollocks.”

It’s a rare and almost embarrassed moment of onstage nostalgia for Albarn as he steps back to the turn of the millennium, when the band’s first album became a worldwide hit.

The success of that record — featuring established stars like Del Tha Funky Homosapien and Tina Weymouth from Talking Heads — turned Gorillaz into the “most successful virtual band,” according to the Guinness Book of World Records. Initially, Albarn and a backing band performed around the world from behind screens on which artist Jamie Hewlett’s distinctiv

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