The Moon Cave

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  Seven Songs for the Week #153 - 11th Mar 26

  Jason Carty

  The new Gorillaz album (number one in the UK, Number 7 in the USA) is a rich thing that is rewarding multiple dips in and out of. They were on SNL last week and I was curious as to what songs they would play from the record. As it turned out, the first track they did was Clint Eastwood. Of course... OF COURSE. It's quite old fashioned of me to assume that they would only play stuff from the new album. With a national TV platform and an international online platform, why not play a song that is still present in the culture? Over a billion views on YouTube, over a billion streams on Spotify. It's not 100% uncommon that the SNL musical guest does an old song, maybe happens once a year, but it's usually a treat as their second song of the evening. Here though, bam, Clint Eastwood and the studio audience demonstrates their absolute delight at hearing the introductory bars of the song. https://youtu.be/pMKA0ahftME

  When they got to doing their second song on SNL, it was The Moon Cave. The audience was now on their side and the performance is spectacular. Asha Puthli (81!) is there, as is Anoushka Shankar and then Black Thought appears to deliver the song's third act. The more I listen to this song the more I get.

  I am very deep in a Gorillaz rabbit hole right now, prepping for seeing them in three weeks. I really hadn't paid much attention post Plastic Beach, nor was invested when they last played Dublin in 2022. It is remarkable at how huge they are compared to blur. 42m monthly listens on Spotify compared to 12m for blur. Top four Gorillaz songs on Spotify have 5bn streams, blur: 1.7bn, and most of those are Song 2. 13m YouTube subscribers compared to 640k. Numbers!