The brutal way Del the Funky Homosapien fractured his ribs and punctured his lung
For all the glitz and glamour associated with being a performer, the work itself can be gruelling. It’s hardly the same as a day down the mines, but it can nonetheless be physically and mentally taxing—and even risky at times, as Californian rapper Del the Funky Homosapien learned the hard way.
Del was playing a gig with Gorillaz in 2018, joining them on stage at Denmark’s Roskilde Festival that July, when things went badly. During a performance of their classic collaboration ‘Clint Eastwood,’ Del took a tumble and fell off the stage.
This was a bad fall, with the band forced to kill their set before its time. Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn tried to keep things light, thanking the crowd for “a beautiful evening.” But Del, in actual fact, was badly hurt.
The organisers of the festival later gave an update of Del’s condition, stating that he was “conscious and talking to his team.” The fact they felt compelled to confirm that indicates how nasty a fall it had been.
For his part, Del took to Twitter the following day to reassure his fans. “I’m doing alright,” he posted, “but will be in the hospital for a bit, the care here is outstanding though.”
Not long after that, Albarn appeared on Beats 1 for an interview, during which he gave an update on Del’s condition. It was here that the extent of Del’s injuries were revealed.
“Del is in hospital still in Roskilde,” Albarn said. “He’s got seven fractured ribs, and he punctured his lung on one side, lacerated it on the other.”
The fall had been a truly damaging one, but Albarn insisted that the rapper was doing okay. “He’s gonna be fine,” he said. “It was just a stage fall, and I’ve fallen off stage several times, off stages way higher than that and I’ve been so fortunate.”
All the same, Albarn did elaborate on how it felt to witness the fall. At first he thought Del was fine, but it quickly became clear he was anything but. “When he fell down, I was looking at him like, come on get up there’s 80,000 people out there and we need to finish,” he said. “I thought I was going to able to carry the song on. I thought he was going to be okay… But he really wasn’t.”
Albarn admitted that the fall was “an awful, awful thing” and that he kept “playing it through [his] head” since it had happened. Thankfully, Del recovered and has since begun performing with Gorillaz again, as he did during a recent appearance on Saturday Night Live.