And for their next act ...

PAY no attention to the man behind the curtain.

That’s the underlying premise of Gorillaz, the highly successful “virtual band” made up of four semi-simian cartoon characters whose strings are pulled from behind the scenes by musician Damon Albarn and illustrator Jamie Hewlett.

But now the man -- Albarn himself -- was in front of the curtain, literally, pacing the stage at the Apollo Theater here and telling the audience that a technical glitch, of all things, meant there would be no visuals that night.

The five-night engagement this month was a rare live manifestation of Gorillaz, and Albarn’s apologetic welcome was an even rarer break from the core premise. It was easy to think of the moment in “The Wizard of Oz” when the illusionist must give up his fiction.

As it turned out, no harm was done. Even without the vivid Hewlett animation that would enhance the music during the rest of the run, the opening show was a powerful trip through the dark but enticing music of the latest Gorillaz album, “Demon Days.” And Albarn slipped easily into the background, just another anonymous silhouette at the back of the stage.

The whole idea of Gorillaz seemed like an odd little novelty when the two Englishmen came up with it six years ago, but after selling more than 4 million albums, drawing critical acclaim and getting a record-of-the-year Grammy nomination for the hit song “Feel Good Inc.,” the Gorillaz have done more than exceed expectations. They’ve invented a whole new way of rock presentation.

You can see the appeal for Albarn. The singer and songwriter had led the rock band Blur to the pinnacle of British rock in the 1990s, but the group had bogged down in personal tensions and he began looking for an outlet for his diverse musical interests. He enjoyed brainstorming with his friend Hewlett, who had found his own fame in the comics world as the creator of “Tank Girl.”

Voila! If you can reinvent yourself in the form of, say, four feisty pen-and-ink characters, give them a distinctive funk-rock-rap musical vocabulary, bring them to life in elaborate videos and websites, and even figure a way to get them on the concert stage, well, it’s a whole new world.

And at a time when reality television and celebrity media are giving us more than we want to know about both the famous and the obscure, there’s something satisfying about losing yourself in a reality of your own making.

“It certainly is a model for the right to experiment, and it’s evidence that if you experiment you can be just as successful,” Albarn said the day after opening night here. “But you can’t do what we do if anyone wants the limelight, if anyone wants to be a celebrity. It doesn’t work like that. It has to have that neutrality to be able to move....

“Bands inevitably sort of nurture a star, don’t they? They can’t help it, most of them. There’s always one or two people, to the detriment of everyone else. That’s a shame, but that’s the way it goes. So I suppose in that sense that’s a great model that we have, that you don’t have to have a star.”

Albarn, balancing a container holding a chicken dinner on his lap, looked around the empty Apollo Theater from an orchestra seat a few hours before the week’s second show.

“Without being overly romantic about it, it’s sort of in the walls, isn’t it?” he said, explaining the choice of the famed black music showcase in Harlem for this Gorillaz show.

Billed as “Demon Days Live,” it featured Albarn joined by a rock band, string section, gospel choirs and some of the album’s odd assortment of guest artists, who were brought in as much for vibe as strict musical distinction -- star-crossed figures with colorful pasts such as Ike Turner, actor Dennis Hopper and the Happy Mondays’ Shaun Ryder.

It wasn’t a “real” Gorillaz concert, the kind they toured with in the U.S. in 2002 with the musicians hidden and the cartoon characters projected on a screen. But it was all there would be for now and it sold out quickly -- just like a similar staging last fall in Manchester, England, that was recently released on DVD.

As it turns out, that might be all there is for Gorillaz. Official word had been circulated about an ambitious 2007 tour with 3-D projection and developing story lines, but now that’s off.

“We’ve knocked that on the head. We don’t feel like it’s going to work,” said Albarn. He also insisted that “Demon Days” is the final Gorillaz album.

This band that’s not a band might be a boon for EMI stockholders and an involving diversion for fans, but for Albarn and Hewlett it’s just a passing -- if prominent -- stopover.

“Even though it’s a very successful thing, it’s just a component of what we do, it’s not our career,” said Albarn, 38. “If we have a career, we’ve made a career out of being mates. Everything about Gorillaz is natural. We try a lot of things, some of them never see the light of day, and the things that do are the things that are sort of born out of this natural spirit that we have.... Our friendship and our shared sense of humor and general take on the world we live in.”

“We hang out together, we’re friends, really,” added Hewlett, also 38, from his seat behind Albarn’s. “He’ll bring over demos of songs and I’ll be at his studio, he’ll be at my studio, we’ll just show each other stuff. It’s not forced.... It just seems to have an uncanny knack of fitting together.”

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Going global

ALBARN has a deep voice and droll slant on the world, and there’s also a trace of rock-aristocrat haughtiness in his manner when he dismisses a subject that he finds uninteresting. But he loosened up as he talked, and occasionally broke into booming laughter.

These are good times for this artistically restless musician, because he’s pulled off one of the most remarkable reinventions in recent pop-music memory -- breaking free of the gravity of rock-business conventions to become a free-flying experimenter and a sort of world-music savant.

With Blur in a state he calls “partially dormant,” Albarn has indulged his love for African music, releasing a 2002 album called “Mali Music” that he recorded in that country, and following it with an album he recorded with Nigerian musicians that will come out later this year.

He’s also establishing a program that will send young British rock musicians to Africa to mix and mingle with artists there, and he owns a small record label, Honest Jon’s, that has released music from Africa, Jamaica, Cuba and other locales.

Of course Gorillaz has demanded a lot of attention as it grew. When Virgin Records released the debut album, “Gorillaz,” it was an immediate success, and “Demon Days” has sold even better, nearing the 2 million mark in the U.S. Hewlett now has eight employees to help him maintain full control over the project’s imagery, from the website and video games to magazine ads and album packages.

It’s a tech-savvy, high-concept operation, keeping fans involved with its sophisticated, interactive website and the self-generated mythology centered on Hewlett’s four Gorillaz.

Rendered in a style that evokes the apocalyptic feel popular in graphic novels, the salacious bass player known as Murdoc, the street-kid singer 2D, enigmatic 10-year-old Japanese girl guitarist Noodle and rotund hip-hop drummer Russel Hobbs enact an unfolding, complex back story.

But now other challenges beckon Albarn and Hewlett. They’re set to collaborate on an opera based on the Chinese legend of the Monkey King, with Albarn writing the score and Hewlett designing the sets, costumes, puppetry, animation and other elements.

“Next year isn’t it?” said Albarn, turning to his partner. “Better get a move on with that.”

They’re still planning at least one more Gorillaz project, an animated theatrical film. And maybe one more engagement for “Demon Days Live.”

“It might be Las Vegas,” Albarn said. “I think it would be a lovely end to it. Just blow up Las Vegas on the last night.”

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An iconoclast

ALBARN tends to cast a hard and wary eye on commercialism and convention. Over his decade with Blur, he was variously described as a commentator and curmudgeon in the British rock tradition of Ray Davies, Pete Townshend and Paul Weller.

For “Demon Days,” Albarn and the album’s producer, Los Angeles-based Danger Mouse, conjured a heady mix of genres, including Britpop (for melodic wistfulness) and some black music styles that had no outlet in Blur: hip-hop (for immediacy), reggae’s atmospheric dub style and American gospel (tribulation and transcendence, respectively).

“He’s relentless in working to make sure that it is the best stuff,” Danger Mouse, whose efforts earned him a Grammy nomination for producer of the year, said in a separate interview. “He’s there every day, we worked all day long. I never worked with anybody who was as into what I was working on as I was....

“There’s an unspoken soul about what he does, more of a soul music kind of thing in his voice. When we get to that point it’s all coming from the real place.”

In his lyrics, Albarn surveys a world in the process of disintegration, and the music often has the feel of transmissions from a troubled front where dark forces are gathered. “Are we the last living souls?/Are we the last to get away to sing a song another day?” he wonders in a wounded warble, one step ahead of the deluge.

The Hewlett animation that accompanied the songs on a screen during the concert here included both original work and newsreel footage depicting human conflict and cruelty.

“It came from what happened after the first album and the start of the second album. What happened in the world got very dark,” Hewlett offered, attributing the tone of “Demon Days” to Sept. 11 and the Iraq War.

Albarn nodded.

“Pop music is such a castrated medium these days that people don’t even believe that there is any message in it anymore,” he said. “Yes, that’s a lot of strange stuff, you know, getting kids to sing something like, ‘I need a gun to keep myself among the poor people who are burning in the sun, they ain’t got a chance.’ It’s quite provocative, but it’s what I’ve seen out there in the world.

“What both Jamie and myself try to do is really make uplifting dark things. There is no way forward unless we start to turn the darkness in our lives into something that’s an inspiration. . . . That’s what I always responded to in music, that dark power.”