March 25, 2010 15:38

Damon Albarn recruits Liam Gallagher's bandmember for Gorillaz

'I just thought that was quite funny', says Albarn

Damon Albarn has revealed that he has recruited a member of Liam Gallagher's new band to play with Gorillaz.

He told Australian radio station Triple J that he had signed up a man named "Jeff" to play with Gorillaz, who are set to go on a low-key tour of the UK later ths month, play live at the London Roundhouse next month then perform more shows later in the summer.

"We have a young lad called Jeff who funnily enough is in Liam's new band," he said – confirming that he did mean that Liam Gallagher. Albarn, who when in Blur in the 1990s had a rivalry with the Manchester band, added of his bandmate, full name [b]Jeff Wootton: "I just thought that was quite funny."

Albarn has also enlisted two former members of The Clash, Paul Simonon and Mick Jones, to play with the live Gorillaz set-up. He said that the band would make sure any visual effects they had didn't affect their sound too much.

"We have used holograms in the past," he said, "but to really successfully put a hologram on the stage you need so much smoke you can't see anything else, or you stretch a piece of very fine transparent film across the stage and project across that. But you can't have any bass, because the film starts rattling. This time we're going out al guns blazing, with the best bass sounds on earth."

Albarn also revealed that he had tried to get Engelbert Humperdinck and The Bee Gees' Barry Gibb to appear on Gorillaz's latest album, 'Plastic Beach'.

Speaking of Gibb, he said, "He was doing it then he wasn't doing it then he was doing it again. He was going into a studio, it was a studio in Miami, then he got to the studio and decided he had an earache and that was the end of that."