Watch Damon Albarn join Beck on stage to cover Gorillaz’ ‘The Valley Of The Pagans’

“This is a song we wrote together during COVID times,” said Beck, as Albarn walked onstageto thunderous applause, which gave way to a spontaneous, prolonged crowd chant. “We don’t need to play the song,” Beck quipped. “This is called ‘Valley Of The Pagans’.”

Watch the pair’s performance of ‘The Valley Of The Pagans’ below:

Beck’s set at Primavera Sound Buenos Aires preceded that of Blur, whose performance not only headlined the same stage on the same day, but also served as the quartet’s final tour date of the year in support of their 2023 full-length, ‘The Ballad Of Darren’.

‘The Valley Of The Pagans’ is the second track from Gorillaz’ seventh studio album, ‘Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez’. Besides Beck, it featured a star-studded lineup of guest features, from The Cure’s Robert Smith, to New Order’s Peter Hook, St. Vincent, Slowthai, and Elton John.

The pair would later collaborate again on ‘Possession Island’, the final track from Gorillaz’ 2023 LP, ‘Cracker Island’. They performed the song together in an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, following Gorillaz’ appearance in this year’s edition of Coachella.

‘Cracker Island’, which also featured a host of A-List guests from Stevie Nicks to Bad Bunny, earned four stars from NME, with Thomas Smith highlighting Gorillaz’ consistency in delivering quality material: “Albarn and his team appear unburdened by living up to a concept, and instead turn in a consistently enjoyable record that shows why they remain relevant so far into their career”.

Beck has spent most of 2023 on tour and collaborating with other artists. Besides his appearance on ‘Cracker Island’, Beck also appeared on The Chemical Brothers’ latest LP, ‘For That Beautiful Feeling’, on its fourth single, ‘Skipping Like A Stone’. He also collaborated with Phoenix on their latest, one-off single, ‘Odyssey’, which was released before the pair’s joint tour throughout the summer, where they were joined by Japanese Breakfast, Weyes Blood, and Jenny Lewis.

Albarn has been reportedly keeping busy aside from his albums with Blur and Gorillaz. In his appearance on Rick Rubin’s The Broken Record podcast, he not only confirmed that he was already working on a new Gorillaz album, but also revealed that he was developing an opera based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1807 work The Magic Flute Part II.

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