Uncle Acid Slam “Soft As Baby Shit” Gorillaz For Forcing Early End To Their Roskilde Set

There's always some kind of drama when Damon Albarn plays Roskilde. In 2015, the Blur and Gorillaz leader was forcibly removed from the stage at the Danish music festival after refusing to end his set with the Africa Express collective. (They even covered "Should I Stay Or Should I Go" for the occasion.) Then, in 2018, Gorillaz's set was cut short when Del Tha Funky Homosapien fell off the stage. Now there's been a conflict that led one musician to declare Albarn "soft as baby shit."

Thursday at Roskilde, Gorillaz's headlining set at the Orange stage had been underway for about 15 minutes when the English psych band Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats began their performance on the Legune stage. Uncle Acid's set was clearly audible at the Gorillaz show, which led to some perturbed comments from Albarn. "Is it supposed to be possible for me to hear the other music so clearly?" he reportedly asked. "We can just stop playing and listen to the other thing instead, that's fine with me." According to the news outlet Politiken, he was right to be annoyed.

As a result of the sound bleeding over, Roskilde shut down Uncle Acid's set after half an hour. In an email to Soundvenue, here translated from Danish to English, the festival calls it "an incredibly unfortunate situation for everyone affected" and explains that Uncle Acid's music was audible from the Gorillaz area due to "an interaction between wind conditions and technical conditions, which affected the sound performance in an inappropriate way." The fest added, "When hosting a large live event outdoors, changes in weather and wind can create challenges," and said it was making changes to today's program to account for the circumstances.

At least one member of Uncle Acid was highly displeased with getting shut down early. Drummer Jon Rice (pictured above) shared extensive thoughts on his Instagram story:

Apologies to everyone who attended Roskilde Festival with the intentions of watching the full Uncle Acid set last night. We were forced to cut our set short by Gorillaz due to what they called 'technical difficulties,' when in reality they could faintly hear the sound coming from our stage in between their songs and decided to throw a bitch fit, threatening to pull their gig entirely if we didn't stop playing. We can't apologize enough for the premature end of our set but it wasn't our call to make. Funnily enough, The Cure (who headlined the festival on a previous day) played at the same time as Monolord and could faintly hear the sound from the same stage we played on, but powered through like professionals. Our Front of House sound engineer was 2db below the festival mandated decibel limit for the entirety of our gig as well, so the 'we were playing too loud' excuse doesn't hold water.

In addition to all of this, Gorillaz put the entire staff organizing Roskilde Festival in a horrible position, firstly having to deliver the news to us that we wouldn't be able to play the remaining 30 minutes of our set and then having to tell thousands of very agitated fans who paid good money to see ALL of the bands that our set would not continue. They didn't deserve the very loud 'SHAME ON YOU' chant the crowd leaned into when receiving the final verdict, but Gorillaz sure as fuck do.

Rice offered a more succinct summation of the situation in one last IG story: "'Cartoon band,' indeed. All in all, @damonalbarn and @gorillaz are soft as baby shit. FUCK 'EM."

The band's official Instagram account later added the following statement:

Apologies to everyone who came to Roskilde festival hoping to see us play a full set last night. Pop diva Damon Albarn of the novelty cartoon act Gorillaz threw a hissy fit while we played, threatened to storm off stage before finally getting our set shut down because we were "too loud." They were the only headliner for the whole weekend who couldn't cope with playing at the same time as other artists. Unfortunately we only managed 25 minutes of assaulting his precious ears from our stage half a mile away before his goons came over and pulled the plug. Despite us being below the festival dB limit and offering to turn down FOH to continue the show, they wanted us off.

Thanks to the Roskilde crew and stage manager who tried their best to intervene but it was ultimately out of their hands. Orders from above.

ps to our Danish fans....we love you and we'll see you next year in Copenhagen.

Check out Albarn singing "Feel Good Inc." below.