In choosing an East End sports hall known for staging boxing matches, Damon Albarn had doubtless envisioned a venue that would complement the dark, broody mood of his latest music. Inside the old, strip-lit building, however, it was easier to imagine people playing badminton than beating each other up. The Good, the Bad & the Queen were the first band to play York Hall. The dreadful sound alone suggested that they should be the last.

Yet while there was little atmosphere in the audience, it was oozing from the stage, albeit in a rather contrived manner. Albarn’s cartoon act Gorillaz has clearly sharpened his ideas of image and the Good, the Bad & the Queen’s funereal uniform of black suits and top hats gave the performance a suitably spooky feel. The singer froze in odd poses in clouds of dry ice, crept to and from a piano at the back and had entirely extinguished the bouncy, pop-star persona that he brandished in Blur. His most prominent sidekick, the bassist Paul Simenon, occasionally took centre stage, but kept his head down throughout.

Already high in the charts, the group’s eponymously titled debut album is heavy on slow, beautiful tunes bemoaning the state of the modern world.

Live, they were either hauntingly good or on the dreary side. “This is in part about the whale that came up the Thames,” noted Albarn on Modern Whale , revealing a new-found interest in the environment while leaving his hands dug deep in his pockets.

So unshowy was the singer that, after Gorillaz, it may be safe to assume that Albarn has lost his taste for the limelight. If so, he should hand more of his current project over to his illustrious collaborators. The Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, in particular, was woefully underused. When his part required playing with only one stick, he must surely have wondered if his new friends were worth it.

Kingdom of Doom was the first song upbeat enough to get the mostly male crowd moving, and Herculean was a drama-packed track with a film-score feel, but Behind the Sun sounded like clumsy, second-rate Massive Attack. Albarn played flute on The Bunting and a black-clad, all-female string section appeared briefly for A Soldier’s Tale , but should have stayed on longer.

Easily the oddest moment of the evening was when a man appeared with a large hand saw and played it like a cello. “The world’s greatest saw player!” cheered Albarn, proving that he is now famous enough to insist on working with only the best, even if he doesn’t really need them.

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