It wasn’t my idea, my city or my band.
It wasn’t my trip, basically.
Of course, I went because it was still a trip, albeit short, and it was live music.
Back in the spring, Feng got tickets for Gorillaz. Mark loves Gorillaz. He walks around life with light blue earbuds in his ears—they were mine, by the way!—and 90% of the time, he’s listening to Gorillaz or saying “WHAT?” because he didn’t hear what you just said, because he was… yeah, listening to Gorillaz.
“I was listening to them too,” I confessed one night in a desperate attempt to prove to Mark I wasn’t just a killjoy with no life.
“Huh. Don’t think so.”
“Clint Eastwood came out the year I graduated from high school!” I protested. “Dude, I was an Oasis girl but Blur is my generation, not yours!”
Mark shook his head. I wasn’t getting it. Or maybe he hated Clint Eastwood. The song, obviously. I don’t think he knows who Clint Eastwood is.
Fine. Gorillaz is his band, then.
He still needed two parents to drive him to Montreal and take him to the concert.
What do you pack for one night? Argh. It’s easier for me to spend months living on the road than to travel two hours from Ottawa for a night. What should I take, what do I need? Change of clothes, toothbrush, money, phone…
And food. The logistics were a bit complicated this time. We were staying in a hotel by the airport and for $200 a night (!), you don’t get a microwave like in most Airbnbs. Bye bye takeout. Eating before the show? Meh… I’ll never be Canadian enough to get hungry at 7 p.m.
I remembered my 2023 Cancún noodle hack so I packed instant noodles, nori, two boiled eggs, sandwiches, a banana and some chocolate—cheaper and much better than any late-night dinner in downtown Montreal or by the airport.
The trees were still leafy and green when we left Ottawa. Fall colours started to show about halfway through the drive and by the time we arrived in Montreal, it was definitely cold. Cooler, I mean. Cold means something else in this country.
Feng decided to drive up to Mount Royal, which was a great idea unfortunately shared with half the city. The woods and the belvedere are where tourists and locals go on a sunny Saturday afternoon.
“You can walk down. It’s going to be jammed all the way,” Feng suggested.
Feng was still stuck up there by the time I reached Sainte-Catherine where, inexplicably, everybody was walking around wearing shorts and T-shirts (guys) and tiny skirts (women, and a few guys too)—not that I’m the fashion police but hey, people, it’s 10°C.
By the time I was in Chinatown getting sticker shock at the price of food I wasn’t going to buy anyway, Feng was finally reaching downtown.
We met up on Sainte-Catherine. I spotted Feng and Mark before Feng even got a chance to call me.
They grabbed pasta, then pizza while I was nursing my milk tea, confident I could “cook” my noodles in the hotel room later.
Little Simz was still onstage when we found our way to the floor of the Bell Centre. Music, lights and thousands of silhouettes moving to the beat. I smiled. My kind of place and moment—someone doing something magical and people feeling feelings together because of it.
The floor—which is the ice where the Montreal Canadiens pass the puck for half the year—filled up fast.
Holy shit, Quebecers are tall.
Soon there were people in front of us, behind us and pressed against us on both sides. Then the lights went down and Murdoc, Russel and Noodle appeared on the giant screens, reuniting in a cartoon sequence as the show started. Very Gorillaz: the musicians were right there, but so were the punky avatars, the animation and all kinds of stuff happening on the screens above them.
And the crowd wasn’t just a dark mass bouncing in front of the stage. I kept noticing hands. A fist shooting up here, two open hands there, hundreds of arms suddenly waving in unison, then one lonely lighter held above somebody’s head among all the glowing cellphones. Same idea, different century.
I kept looking everywhere. The stage, the screens, the crowd. There was always something happening somewhere.
Eh, with only my cellphone as a camera, I couldn’t exactly gaze into Damon Albarn’s eyes through a Nikon lens. Can’t sneak one of those in these days. And Mark was very reluctant to go into the mosh pit—I offered and dragged him halfway there!—so watching the crowd turned out to be half the fun anyway.
The concert ended with Clint Eastwood, taking me back to being 18 in 2001 (and probably sending Mark back to the Stone Age).
Then we all left the Bell Centre, looking for rides, the parking spot we’d found four hours earlier and promptly forgotten, or the next party.
My noodles were good, thank you for asking.
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