This town is big enough for the both of them: Sparks’ Ron and Russell Mael are bound for York Barbican. Picture: Munachi Osegbu
CULT pop-rock pioneers Sparks will play York for the first time since 1974 on their 2025-2026 world tour.
The Mael brothers, Ron (keyboards) and Russell (vocals), will take to the York Barbican stage on Tuesday, August 25 in one of two date added to a British itinerary already booked into London, Glasgow, Blackpool, Bournemouth and Bristol. Southend-on-Sea newly awaits too on an itinerary also taking in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Europe.
Returning to York after a 52-year hiatus, Sparks are lining up a euphoric, career-spanning set on the back of their 28th studio album, 2024’s MAD!, and companion EP, MADDER!
Ron, now 80, and Russell, 77, rose to fame with 1974 hits This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us and Amateur Hour, from the album Kimono My House.
Further chart success ensued with Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth (1974); Something For The Girl With Everything (1975); Get In The Swing (1975); Looks, Looks, Looks (1975); The Number One Song In Heaven (1979); Beat The Clock (1979); When Do I Get To Sing My Way (1994); When I Kiss You (I Hear Charlie Parker Playing) (1994); When Do I Get To Sing ‘My Way’ (1995) and This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Two Of Us, with Faith No More (1997).
Sparks formed in Los Angeles, California, where Ron and Russell were raised in the upscale Pacific Palisades neighborhood and established the band in 1968 while attending UCLA. Going on to be recognised as “your favourite band’s favourite band”, the duo inspired artists as diverse as Joy Division, Squeeze, Depeche Mode, Björk, Beck and latterly The Last Dinner Party. As producer Jack Antonoff once put it: “All pop music is re-arranged Sparks.”
In 2021, the Maels were the subject of Edgar Wright’s documentary The Sparks Brothers. That year too, the brothers conceived, wrote and scored visionary French filmmaker Leos Carax’s surreal, dark, meta-fictional rock opera, Annette, which charted the tragic romance between a provocative stand-up comedian and a world-renowned opera singer, whose lives are upended by the birth of their mysterious child.
Alongside this summer’s headline shows, Sparks will appear at Green Man Festival on August 23, preceded by supporting Gorillaz at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on June 20, having joined Damon Albarn and co on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on April 9 to perform The Happy Dictator, a collaboration featured on Gorillaz’s 2026 album The Mountain.
Extra tickets have been released for Sparks’ York Barbican debut at yorkbarbican.co.uk. Doors will open at 7pm.
The poster for Sparks’ concert at York Barbican on August 25
Gorillaz’ Damon Albarn with Argentinian rapper Trueno at Leeds First Direct Bank Arena. All pictures: Matt Eachus (The Manc Photographer)
THE last occasion CharlesHutchPress attended a Damon Albarn concert had been so different. York Minster, December 2 2021, 6.30pm, Damon in studious glasses on grand piano, with all-female strings attached and Covid masks re-attached among the 600-strong audience after a new Omicron variant reintroduced caution and uncertainty.
Albarn would play for 45 minutes precisely, to be followed by a second performance that night at 8.30pm, both hushed and wintry in tone, lit by candlelight, showcasing songs of fragility, loss, emergence and rebirth from that November’s pandemic-shadowed solo release, The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows, in the first ever York shows of his then 32-year career.
Roll forward to 2026, when fragility and, in particular, loss frame The Mountain, Gorillaz’ ninth album in 25 years – and third number one – in the wake of the death of Albarn and Gorillaz co-pilot Jamie Hewlett’s fathers within ten days of each other in July 2024.
“You know the hardest thing is to say goodbye to someone you love,” sings Albarn, on the sombre song of that title and the one that follows, immediately and irresistibly: Orange County. The one with the whistling and the cheeriest tune of all, the obvious single, the one with Anoushka Shankar on sublime sitar and American singer-songwriter Kara Jackson on divine vocals. The one that stood out among last season’s musical interludes on the Graham Norton Show.
As Orange County and On Melancholy Hill testify, Albarn never settles on the obvious path, unlike former Britpop sparring partners Oasis. Already whispers are surfacing that he is at work on a new opera project. Right now, The Mountain tour finds Gorillaz at their creative peak, embracing everything at odds with the rise in nationalism, intolerance, online poison and war-mongering.
Idles’ Joe Talbot performing The God Of Lying with Damon Albarn
Out of step with our grim political times, yet tellingly, Gorillaz pull in a crowd of all ages, the younger drawn to the cartoon band, the wit and anti-war imagery of Hewlett’s videos, others to Albarn’s chameleon pop skills, from Blur to The Good, The Bad And The Queen, who played Leeds Irish Centre in January 2007 with a line-up of Albarn, The Clash bassist Paul Simonon, the anthemic Nineties’ psychedelia of The Verve guitarist Simon Tong and the Afrobeat drumming of Tony Allen.
Gorillaz are even more expansive: multicultural, multiracial, multilingual, bursting with a panoply of colours, textures, moods, possibilities and blue skies, a feast for ear and eye alike, energised by the ebb and flow between live performance and the restless commotion and compassion spread over three kaleidoscopic screens.
Throughout, guitars, keyboards, percussion, tabla and Albarn’s melodica fuse English and Indian pop. Then add a constantly rotating roster of guests, beckoned to the already crammed stage by Albarn, the avuncular master of ceremonies, albeit in the somewhat ramshackle manner of The Rolling Stones Rock And Roll Circus TV special in 1968. The effect is dazzling, dizzying, delightfully diverse and daring: the apotheosis of what a concert can be in 2026.
From the Indian mysticism of the opening The Mountain, accompanied by Hewlett’s pastiche of Mowgli’s initiation in The Jungle Book, the screens flash with comic-book imagery, mixed with live footage, and the faces of Anoushka Shankar, Sparks (for The Happy Dictator) the late Dennis Hopper, The Fall’s Mark E Smith (Delirium) and Bobby Womack (The Moon Cave), and The Roots’ Black Thought (The Empty Dream Machine, The Moon Cave, The Sad God) in a set list dominated by the new album.
All the while, the spinning top of guest vocalists and rappers keeps whirling, first up the bleached blond Joe Talbot of Idles (The God Of Lying); then Yasiin Bey, formerly Mos Def, for Stylo and Damascus; powerhouse backing singer Michelle Ndegwa for Kids With Guns; Bootie Brown, from The Pharcyde, for Dirty Harry; Kara Jackson, glory be, for Orange County, and Trueno, from Argentina, for the Hispanic word-spinning of The Manifesto.
Gorillaz in a state of Delirium at Leeds First Direct Bank Arena with the trademark stare of the late Mark E Smith on screen. Smith’s recorded vocals feature on the song
Posdnuos, from De La Soul, urges the full house to their feet for the first time for encore fireworks of Feel Good Inc, before Trueno returns for more breathtaking, breathless improvised free-styling in Clint Eastwood.
A certain grouchy President would have given Gorillaz the “absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!” verdict that he bestowed on Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX half-time performance.
Instead, the future is indeed comin’ on in Gorillaz’ glorious, beatific vision of a better world. Albarn does not proselytize or preach or reach for polemic. Rather, he and his band adorn their military fatigues with CND badges, and when the Leeds crowd boo his mention of playing Bradford (in the tour warm-up gigs), he says, “No, there’s no need for that!”. Peace and love, indeed.
The perfectionist in Albarn still burns, in a sudden chuck of the microphone and dissatisfied demand to re-start a song, but that is testament to his drive at 58 for The Mountain to take Gorillaz to new heights.
All that’s missing is a closing credits list of the night’s cast to match the opening of The Mountain book in Hewlett’s first image.
Damon Albarn and Kara Jackson meet in Orange County at Gorillaz’ Leeds First Direct Bank gig
Gorillaz’ set list, Leeds First Direct Bank Arena, 25/03/2026
THE MOUNTAIN
THE HAPPY DICTATOR
TRANZ
Intro Dark Pop
TOMORROW COMES TODAY
19/2000
THE GOD OF LYING (featuring Joe Talbot, from Idles)
