A We Love Green, Gorillaz and Jorja Smith launched the 2022 edition in style

Gorillaz killed two birds with one stone on Thursday evening on the lawn of the Bois de Vincennes: the group both kicked off the We Love Green festival and launched the European part of its world tour. It started at the end of April in South America, after a remarkable passage at the American Coachella festival, to which We Love Green is often compared.

In fact, after two years of impediment due to the Covid, this edition marks a new rise in power of the eco-responsible festival, including this opening night on Thursday, although in reduced capacity to 25,000 people (against 40,000 planned Saturday and Sunday), gave a first glimpse. The site is no longer quite the same, although we find all the ingredients that made it successful, and announces one of those bulimic events where we no longer know where to turn and where the festival-goer is often condemned to follow the concerts by giant screens interposed so much the crowd overflows.

However, Gorillaz did not offer a half concert this Thursday evening on the grounds that it was a festival date: the group gave everything for more than an hour and a half. The impressive stage formation has grown in size in recent years and now numbers around fifteen people, including five singers, led by Damon Albarn. The troupe offered a joyful visual and musical show, the setlist of around twenty songs linking the hits, and sweeping in twenty songs the entire discography of Gorillaz, from the first eponymous album of 2001 to SongMachine released in 2020, including M1A1 in opening, Strange Timez, Tomorrow Comes Today, On Melancholy Hill, Last Living Souls, Kids with Guns Where Clint Eastwood in final. The opportunity to show a beautiful continuity over two decades and above all a freshness and an energy never denied for the group of the former Blur.

It must be said that Damon Albarn, 54, curious about all sounds, starting with the African ones he explored with his Africa Express project, is a tireless ferryman whose music is a reflection. In this regard, the appearance on stage of the Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara on the cheerful sorry was one of the highlights of the show. Other guests, now familiar with the group’s concerts and to whom Damon thus offers visibility and a non-negligible side job: Posdnuos from De La Soul, whose rhymes illuminate Feel Good Inc. and Superfast Jellyfishas well as former Pharcyde rapper Bootie Brown on Pen and dirty harry. Stranger, the arrival for a spoken interlude (which we understood nothing) from the Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn.

Long gone are the days when the “virtual” group made up of animated characters imagined by the designer and lifelong accomplice Jamie Hewlett gave a concert at La Cigale in Chinese shadows, hidden behind a sheet! Thursday evening, the Gorillaz show satiated the sight as much as the eardrums. The hyper-powerful sound system was perfectly tuned (the residents of the Bois de Vincennes may have enjoyed it less) and the visuals mixed colorful animated clips from our favorite virtual quartet (2D, Murdoc, Noodle and Russel), films and images in time real, for an euphoric result without downtime. Especially since Damon served as a common thread, multiplying with a smile, a hit on the keyboards, a hit on the microphone, a hit on the guitar, a hit on the melodica (a harmonica), without forgetting to shake a few hands with fans in the pit in the front row, in neon pink outfits.

Earlier, this same scene of La Prairie had been inaugurated by the bomba latina Nathy Peluso, star in South America. At the beginning of the evening, while the day had not yet fallen, the Argentine singer and musician, surrounded by seven musicians including two brass, entertained the lawn in salsa mode muy caliente with swings as lascivious as they are sporty. This Parisian halt of its Calambre Tower allowed us to discover an artist with an explosive personality who skillfully mixes several genres in her shaker high-energyfrom salsa to rap and pop.
We won’t forget it.

However, from 9:15 p.m., under the new marquee of La Clairière, we only had eyes for Jorja Smith. The new queen of soul, for whom it was the only date in France this summer, offered a voluptuous set, bewitching the audience with her powerful and ultra-expressive voice. The very first time we saw Jorja Smith on stage was in 2018 at We Love Green, on the adjacent stage, the modest Canopée, a week before the release of her acclaimed debut album Lost & Found. She was already making a lasting impression. The last time was at Rock en Seine in 2019. The Englishwoman of Jamaican descent had gained confidence and lost weight to the point of making us fear the start of formatting. Three years later, we note with relief that this is not the case.

Jorja Smith makes no concessions and seems to be maturing in grace. She has since set up her own label FAMM and signed the young singers Mychelle and Enny, but also released a very beautiful EP just a year ago, Be Right Back, made of eight new, slightly more experimental songs, which she described as “the waiting room” from her second album, which has been awaited for four years. Nothing can hurry Miss Smith.

On stage Thursday, radiant in her immaculate tight-fitting dress which contrasts with her long jet-black hair, shrouded in blue light, she waves voluptuously, moves little, but sings with commitment from every pore. Incarnation of sensuality, she is far from any artifice and her smiles also tell the trials. Surrounded by four musicians, including a drummer, and three singers, she puts on the nuggets of her first album such as Teenage Fantasy, February 3rd, Where did I go, or the inevitable political firebrand Blue Lights, taken up in chorus by the public to whom she hands the microphone, smiling. She also plays the most recent Addicted and ends on the energetic single On My Minda track from UK Garage from his debut, whose bass makes the marquee of La Clairière tremble for the last time.

After a break on Friday, We Love Green continues on Saturday and Sunday (full), with around fifty concerts and in particular the headliners SCH, Phoenix, Laylow, Angèle, PNL, Disclosure, Juliette Armanet, Charlotte de Witte, Selah Sue , Clara Luciani, Ibeyi and Dinos. Consult the program.