Damon Albarn: Four years; four projects. Snapshot of a polymath.
Damon Albarn is 50 today. I think he’s the greatest British songwriter of his generation. He might also be the most versatile and prolific one too. Between 2007 and 2010, I interviewed him four times for four different projects. Here are those pieces.
2007: THE GOOD THE BAD & THE QUEEN
Dolly Parton and Michael Jackson had to go to the trouble of building theme parks in their images. But as long as there’s a Westway over the market stalls of Ladbroke Grove, Damon Albarn won’t have to go to the trouble. He’s been living amid these reggae and bric-a-brac emporia, among the African and Asian groceries of W11 for so long that the view outside Café O’Porto has come to resemble the one inside his head. Or, at least it is if the dubwise Dickensian jazz of his current project The Good The Bad & The Queen is anything to go by.
The point is compounded within seconds of his first sip of coffee. Paul Simonon pulls up to the pavement on his Harley Davidson, but Albarn has already slipped across the road in pursuit of something he has just spotted in a nearby antique shop. It’s a sign bearing the original Victorian imprint of The Royal Empire Society (since renamed The Commonwealth Club). When he returns, Albarn holds up his new purchase for Simonon’s inspection. “It’s nice,” nods the sometime Clash bassist. “But where are you going to put it?” Albarn doesn’t know yet, but that doesn’t matter. “Old London’s disappearing,” he smiles, “but I’m doing my bit to try and buy what’s left.”
He’s trying his best, but in a few days, even he won’t be able to save Hammersmith Palais — the venue immortalized in song by Simonon’s old band — from the developers. This weekend, The Good The Bad & The Queen will be the penultimate band to grace the stage at the 88 year-old venue. If they raise the house lights for a moment during History Song — it might even be possible to spot a few eyes misting over. Three white men and a black man in Hammersmith Palais, urging us to understand the present by seeking recourse to our history.
That Albarn should hold such sentiments close to his heart is not so surprising. In the years since his feud with Oasis, it’s a dictum which has helped him to find a measure of contentment. Certainly, he seems happier than the last time we met. That was in 1999, just after the release of 13 — the Blur album on which Albarn mourned the demise of his relationship with Elastica’s Justine Frischmann. It’s easily forgotten now, but back then, before he made records with Toumani Diabate (Mali Music) and De La Soul and Ike Turner (Gorillaz’ Demon Days), the notion of a multiculturally savvy Albarn was amusing enough to attract the derision of his own bandmates. When Albarn flew to Jamaica to gather ideas for the project that he and Jamie Hewlett turned into Gorillaz, Blur’s bassist Alex James memorably referred to his singer as “the blackest man in West London.” For Simonon, who was on mere nodding terms with his near-neighbour, Albarn’s authenticity was no more an issue than that of The Clash when they recorded Junior Murvin’s Police & Thieves. “I was at Gorillaz’ first show at the London Scala, when the musicians were silhouetted behind a curtain. I thought it was a great idea.”
But, of course, even at the outset of Gorillaz, hindsight had yet to decide what Albarn — and, more to the point, the Gallagher brothers — would become famous for. His hubris in taking on Noel and Liam before they went supernova was still clearly a source of embarrassment. “Every day, wherever I went,” he told me, “I’d be walking down the street and people would open their windows and turn the speakers to face out so that I could hear…” He couldn’t bring himself to say it, but it was pretty clear that he wasn’t referring to Shed Seven.
Eight years on, much has changed — a seven year-old daughter, over seven million sales in America; a gold tooth to replace the one he knocked out with a broom — but Albarn still doesn’t refer to them by name. In every other respect however, the subject of Oasis appears to be causing Albarn a lot less distress. Did he read about the Gallaghers’ reasons for accepting their Lifetime Achievement Award at the Brits last month? “What was it [Liam] said?” ponders Albarn, launching into rather good impersonation of the Oasis singer, “’I’d rather fuckin’ have it while I’ve got all me fucking hair, not like that cunt from Blur.’”
No pangs of envy then, from a singer who feels it should have been him up there collecting a similar prize? Apparently not. “That award, that’s it, isn’t it? It’s the end. A gold watch at 39 and thanks very much. And with a medley?! Come on guys! We can do better than medleys.” There he goes again, winding up Oasis, when you think he would have learned the first time. In fact, the longer you talk to him the more you realize that it’s not the Gallaghers themselves he takes exception to, but their willingness to bask in the comfort zone of their own success. The scorn he reserves for Oasis is identical that he heaped upon the character in Blur’s Country House, who cashes in his chips in exchange for a life of leisure. If you’re not going to work, what are you going to do?
It’s a question to which Albarn has found no satisfactory answer. Most of the money accrued from Gorillaz’ Stateside success has already been spent on converting a nearby factory into an animation and recording studio. Work on an opera — “not a rock opera, though”, he emphasizes — inspired by 16th century Chinese tale Journey To The West has begun. “It’s actually the story that anyone of our generation recognizes as Monkey,” says Albarn, referring to the Japanese teatime staple of our TV yesterdays. “Building the studio in Eastern Europe or East Asia would have been cheaper,” he continues, “But this way, I get to go home at night.”
“One thing Damon and I have in common is that we treat it like a job,” says Simonon. Unlike his old frontman Joe Strummer, who seemed happy to live out his final years as semi-retired chum of Keith Allen, 55 year-old Simonon has thrown himself into his art, painting his locale in all sorts of different ways. “London, for me, might be a plate of bacon and eggs or it might be the gasworks.” His apocalyptic depiction of the burning capital graces the CD booklet of The Good The Bad & The Queen. “You can’t sit around waiting for a good idea,” he continues, “The true test is the days when you don’t feel like working, that’s when you should be there anyway, pushing into new territory. Someone put out a box set of Clash singles last year and what struck me was how we didn’t repeat ourselves. You could listen to it and trace our journey as people. I see that in Damon and what I also recognize in me — a reluctance to repeat myself.”
Possibly on account of that reluctance to repeat himself, Albarn never imagined he would want to follow in the footsteps of Parklife with another London album, albeit one as different as The Good The Bad & The Queen. His guitarist Simon Tong recalls how he accompanied Albarn to Nigeria where the two hooked up with sometime Fela Kuti accomplice Tony Allen — with a view to making an Afrobeat record. “Looking back,” remembers Tong, “[Damon] was confused. He couldn’t find a lyrical angle.” The sometime Verve guitarist says the turning point came with the arrival of producer Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton — who junked one of the songs for sounding like “something off The Lion King.” Ouch. “Well, quite,” smiles Tong. “But honesty is what you want from a producer.”
With Simonon on board, Burton suggested that Albarn forsake some of Allen’s rhythmic assault in order to make room for something a little more homegrown. Albarn responded with a cache of dreamy requiems to changing London — among them Green Fields and The Bunting Song. Great, but it must have taken guts to erase so much input from a drummer described by Brian Eno as “the greatest drummer who ever lived”. On the phone from his home in Paris, however, Allen is modesty itself. “The way Damon makes sounds, it’s genius,” he says “You give him something and he always wants more. I don’t mind, because I am the same with my own musicians. You don’t want to show your hot side, but sometimes you have to.”
In fact, there’s something reassuringly predictable about Albarn’s “hot side”. For all the life lessons learned after Britpop, the same things that were pissing him off then are pissing him off now. Having written about the deleterious effects of the National Lottery with 1995’s It Could Be You, he says that everything he feared it would do to Britain has come to fruition. “You only need to turn the television on to see it. If you just win that ticket, everything will be all right. If you just get on that talent show, then it’s all sorted, but life is not like that. It’s actually shocking that Simon Cowell is one of the most recognisable Englishmen in America — this self-styled Nero of trash culture.”
But it’s not all bad, is it? I suggest to Albarn that the knock-on effect of those shows is a good one. By co-opting post-boy band pop and cabaret dreck into the world of prime time television, the space left vacant can be filled by groups like The Good The Bad & The Queen. This, it turns out, was the wrong thing to say. Having put up with me (and the rest of the world) calling his band The Good The Bad & The Queen, Albarn can stand it no longer. “Actually, you can’t call us The Good The Bad & The Queen. It’s just the name of the album we made.”
Apologies are duly dispensed and accepted. Nonetheless, I put it to Albarn, a Freur-style problem remains. “A what?” he spits. I remind him about an early incarnation of techno pioneers Underworld, who had a special squiggle for a name. Swiftly realizing that radio DJs who couldn’t pronounce their name were unlikely play their record, they hastily called themselves Freur.
“Personally,” contends Albarn, “I don’t think it is a problem. “I just think it’s perceived as a problem.”
“Trust me,” I say, “It’s a problem. I’ve got no idea what to call you.”
“The problem is,” explains the singer, “That having a band name makes you feel like, ‘Oooh! We’re a band! I’m a bit over that really.’”
There’s no doubting the sincerity of his intentions, but at the same time, you can’t help wondering if his band would be in the Top 75 if they had bothered to think of a name. A simple marketing ploy, but one that appears to have worked wonders for even rubbishly-named bands like Keane. Albarn momentarily looks at his phone, which tells him there’s a Chinese choir outside his studio, awaiting further instruction. But as he rises to leave, inspiration strikes, in the form of his new purchase. “All right then, how about next time, we call ourselves that?” It fits, I say — and off he goes, running down Golborne Rd with his Royal Empire Society sign. At that point, he’s never seemed more like himself.
2008: AFRICA EXPRESS
“Now, that has totally ruined my day,” says Damon Albarn, staring at his last cigarette, just broken in half as he pulls it out of the box. In a few moments though, the day is decidedly back on course. A stray rolling paper is used to conduct emergency surgery on the cigarette. Its owner lights up and confides a misgiving concerning the ever-expanding coalition of African and Western musicians he helped originate. “Do you think Africa Express is a rubbish name? I dunno… I’ve struggled with it. But then, I struggle with names in general.”
Sometimes, in the nicest possible way, you just have to tell Albarn to shut up and give himself a break. The fact that things need to be called something has been a recurrent source of unease in Albarn’s life. Blur got their deal on the condition that they change their name from the preferred Seymour. Last year’s Good The Bad & The Queen album was, he insisted at the time, merely the title of the record. Apparently, the group, featuring afrobeat icon Tony Allen and The Clash’s Paul Simonon, didn’t have a name. And Africa Express? Well, what’s not to like? It does the job, doesn’t it? “All right,” says Albarn, “I guess it does emote a certain sense of movement.”
Four weeks before he turns 40, what does and doesn’t bother Damon Albarn bears interesting comparison. He’ll sweat the tiniest details with a control freakery that you suspect has magnified in the post-Blur years. Yet your attention turns to next month’s Africa Express get-together at Liverpool’s Olympia theatre, in particular the bands booked to take part and he responds with a shrug and a smile. “Well, I know I’ll be there. We’ve had assurances from various parties. Apparently Baaba Maal and Franz Ferdinand are doing something. It’ll be fine.”
Seven years after his old bassist Alex James drily referred to him as “the blackest man in West London”, the incongruity that made the joke funny has slowly evaporated. Africa Express — as many of Albarn’s associates feel inclined to point out on his behalf — isn’t about one person. But it’s hard not to see his drive and determination in its growth from a series of conversations in 2005 between some like-minded Londoners to last year’s mythical five-hour Glastonbury superjam.
If Albarn isn’t especially worried about the finer details of the Olympia show, it’s probably because at the beginning of the Glastonbury get-together, he — along with Africa Express co-organiser and Wrasse Records head, Ian Ashbridge — were pondering the prospect of a five hour spectacular with only one artist in attendance. “For the first half-hour, only Amadou & Mariam had turned up,” recalls Ashbridge. “What you have to remember,” adds Albarn, “is that musicians are night people. They only get going when the sun goes down.”
Indeed, an hour later, with the sun still very much up, the scale of the event started to become apparent. If you were unlucky enough not to be there — well, the list of performers tells its own story: assorted members of Tinariwen assisting Terry Hall as he sang Message To You Rudy alongside other Specials for the first time in 25 years; Algerian raï king Rachid Taha and Damon Albarn sharing the mike on Rock The Casbah; Fatboy Slim phasing and fiddling around a version of Fela Kuti’s Zombie while Tony Allen unleashed his original rhythm over it. “With half an hour to go,” says Ashbridge, “The problem was giving everyone a turn. It was surreal having to tell Damian Marley that there was no time for him to do a song.”
“There was definitely a sense that something special was happening,” says Taha, “By Rock The Casbah, there were 25 musicians on stage. I didn’t know who half of them were, but it didn’t matter. It was the greatest show I’ve seen or been part of.” Talking to The Times just before Christmas, even Paul McCartney declared that he planned to take part in the event at this year’s Glastonbury.
But there will be no return to Glastonbury. “The idea behind Africa Express,” explains Ian Ashbridge, “is that it will pop up where you least expect it to. Sandwiched between two huge housing estates in the deprived Everton locale (unemployment: 47.6 per cent), The Olympia fits the bill. One hundred years ago, it was a dedicated circus venue with elephants and lions living in the basement. Recent spectacles beneath the venue’s Edwardian proscenium there range from cage fighting to Chico & The Cheeky Girls. “That makes it a perfect venue for Africa Express,” says Ashbridge, who adds that — at £10 a ticket — the show ought to attract a sizeable local audience.
Inclusivity and affordability are key to the Africa Express ethos. At the same time, it can’t be cheap to freight rumoured attendees like Amadou & Mariam, Hard-Fi, Souad Massi and Baaba Maal to the same place. It’s a beautiful idea, but it’s hardly going to pay for itself, surely? “Well, a lot of beautiful things don’t pay for themselves,” says Albarn, “But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t happen, should it? If bands can afford it, we ask them to pay for their travel. What I don’t want is for people to think of this as a charity. Because there are enough people who see Africa itself as a charity.”
If Senegalese superstar Baaba Maal didn’t agree, he wouldn’t have been among the first singers to fly over and seek a personal audience with Albarn. Speaking from his mobile in Paris, Maal, explains, “Music is a kind of education. It is impossible to have any understanding of African life by watching stories about poverty on the news. If this is all you see, then people think Africa is just a crisis that needs [people] to make [it] better.”
Albarn is reticent to criticise the good intentions Live Aid and Live 8 — he’s been here before. He lambasted Live 8 for herding African musicians off to a separate show at the Eden Project. His remarks didn’t go unnoticed. “After that, I was approached to do a sort of event in Hyde Park the year after Live 8 and I said no way — that would have been like doing the same thing all over again but putting a better flavour to it. People might have a nice day and get on well, but it’s no way near enough to form a meaningful relationship with a continent.”
It’s a job, he argues, to be undertaken in smaller but longer-term increments. When he, Ashbridge and a band of other like-minded souls got together in the wake of Live 8, they knew that much — but beyond that, Africa Express amounted to little more than the good intentions of its originators. “Some of us — myself, Jamie T, Scatch [from The Roots] and Martha Wainwright were roped into a trip to Mali,” says Fatboy Slim’s off-stage alter ego Norman Cook. “I would describe it as a sort of travelling think tank. We met with Amadou & Mariam, went to Salif Keita’s club, watched a band rehearsing in their front room.”
Did anyone know what they were there for? “We did and we didn’t,” laughs Cook. “Damon’s essentially a bully. But a charismatic one. He’s the kind of person you follow off the edge of a cliff because it would be a laugh on the way down.”. A second trip in the wake of last year’s Glastonbury saw Albarn leading more musicians to the sprawling Congolese city of Kinshasa. Massive Attack’s Robert del Naja says he remembers the “energy and beauty of the people” which blew away all the “clichés of poverty and disease” mediated by the television.
The Aliens’ John MacLean found the trip more hard-going. Recalling a typical day, he says, “We would jump in a van and drive to the centre of Kinshasa. Then we’d finally arrive at a party with a bunch of Kinshasa musicians playing. Day after day, it felt intense, because in Africa, nothing is scheduled. You’re told you’re about to do something — be it eat or leave or whatever — and nothing will happen for two more hours. ‘Africa time’, they call it. But while you wait, you see amazing things.”
As the man with the tape recorder, waiting accounts for much of what Albarn does on these trips. “Once in a while, there’s a moment of pure magic — being on an open air stage in a little yard on a Saturday afternoon, with two Soviet-looking concrete buildings behind us that had bulletholes all over them. We’re all playing, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, De La Soul start doing (A Roller Skating Jam Called) Saturday over the rhythm of all these musicians.”
Just as important as knowing what you want, says Albarn, is what you don’t want. Not for Africa Express the Peter Gabriel/Real World-sanctioned notion of African music as something subject to the same pristine production and presentation mores of, well… a Peter Gabriel record. Collaborating with Toumani Diabate and Afel Bocum in 2002, Albarn’s feeling that “African records sound best when they’re recorded in Africa, with the smell and the heat and the people” was borne out by the resulting Mali Music album.
While Ashbridge talks of Africa Express doing the work that John Peel once did — “breaking down the barriers between genres, so that people are open to all sorts of good music” — Albarn’s love of African music seems to have radicalised him. “For the last 150 years, the West has been screwing equilibrium wherever it can. We’ve got to get out of this ‘saving Africans mindset’ because…” He emits a mildly delirious chuckle, “we’re the ones that need to be saved!”
If any of this rhetoric fails to manifest itself at the Liverpool Olympia next month, that’s as it should be. “People won’t care about a continent and the problems it faces if they have no sense of orientation around its culture,” says Albarn. “But music can give them that. It gave me that.” If he speaks with the zeal of an idealist, that’s probably because he has become one, thus completing the opposite of the career-long transition that most pop stars undergo — in which wide-eyed idealism gives way to hard-bitten pragmatism. At this point though, idealism — at least the ideal of bringing Africa and the West through music — is yielding remarkable results.
Albarn beckons me down to the main studio at his West London HQ and plays a 30 minute sound-collage — assembled for possible CD release — assembled from the trips to Mali and Congo. The hubbub of crowd noise is the only constant as the smoggy syncopations of Kinshasa’s indigenous musicians and — on this occasion, De La Soul — mutate into moments of collaborative synergy. Pedals slam down on makeshift FX boards that make the guitars attached to them sound utterly otherworldly. Genres instantly invent themselves according to the noise being made. “It sounds like the future doesn’t it? That’s what we need to get our heads around. They’ve got nothing to learn from us. We’ve got everything to learn from them.”
2009: BLUR
It takes some doing to accommodate all four members of Blur in the dressing room at Cliffs Pavilion, high up over the Southend coast. Whilst bassist Alex James enjoys the luxury of a chair, drummer Dave Rowntree is crouched atop a counter. Guitarist Graham Coxon makes do with a small cushion. Damon Albarn also has a chair, but no available floor space. “I know!” says the 41 year-old frontman, “I can go here!” Within seconds, he positions himself perfectly inside an empty white wardrobe and ascertains his bandmates’ plans for Glastonbury.
After a string of warm-up dates such as the one they’re here to play tonight, the reconvened Blur are headlining on Sunday. Albarn has set aside the entire weekend, as has Alex James. “By the time we walk on stage, I’ll be transformed,” says the bassist, “I’m heading for the healing fields to have every form of complementary therapy going. Last time we played Glastonbury, I had a sonic massage. A man with a cymbal came up to me and did something with it that cleaned out my bad energy. It was like an enema.” Albarn’s eyeballs practically pop out of their sockets. An enema? What did he do with that cymbal?”
It would be all too easy, at this point, to let a sort of false memory syndrome take over. As the rest of Blur titter at their foppish bassist, it’s tempting to say that it’s just like old times. In fact, throughout their pop star years, Blur — four people with four very different ideas about what fame was for — were rarely this relaxed in each other’s company. In the six months since they announced their return by way of a Hyde Park show that sold out in two minutes (another was subsequently added), they’ve been systematically running through all their albums — all, that is, with the exception of 2002’s Think Tank, the one they made as a three-piece, having decided that Coxon’s alcoholism had made him impossible to work with. Touchingly, Albarn says that the record that resulted “doesn’t count, because it isn’t part of our real story.”
As Blur refamiliarised themselves with each album, what struck them, continues the singer, was “the way the music stood on its own merits without the rubbish that came with it. Fashion and hype can distort things massively when it comes to shaping your view of a record.” Though not immediately apparent, the record he’s talking about is The Great Escape. If all these years later, an older, wiser Blur set about re-learning the swiftly-recorded successor to 1994’s all-conquering Parklife with some trepidation, you could hardly blame them. It was the album that featured Country House — the single which pipped Oasis to number one, but quickly became synonymous with Albarn’s hubristic goading of the Gallaghers. “I’m enjoying playing Country House again,” says Albarn, of the song.
Surprisingly, it’s a view with which the now-teetotal Coxon — yes, the same Coxon who wanted the ground to swallow him up as he donned milkman uniform for Damien Hirst’s Carry On-style video — has some sympathy. “People don’t think I like that song?” He smiles mischievously. “Yeaaah, well… there’s no proof of it. Actually, I think the lyrics are fucking brilliant. In my head, there was a sort of novel to accompany the song, but the video replaced all that. Now I’ve reverted back to this grotesque tale.”
August 21st 1995 was the day Country House reached number one. By a fluke of circumstance, Albarn and I happened to be in the same place. Every Sunday, the singer would ride his scooter from the house he shared with Elastica’s Justine Frischmann and turn up to Regents Park for a kickabout with assorted Camden indie types. As if it didn’t already feel like a song from Parklife, there, in his full Chelsea away strip, was Albarn too — living the Britpop dream. That August day, his label boss arrived at the park with several cans of lager. Everyone ambled off in their football gear to a nearby pub and began a celebration that would prove to be premature when Oasis released What’s The Story (Morning Glory?).
“The proper party began that night in [private members club] Soho House. I think you came for that,” he tells Coxon, who, in turn, gazes up from the floor, with no tangible memory to tell him that he did. Albarn remembers “having our publicist coming up to me saying, “Oh Damon! Graham’s really not happy! I’m worried about him.” When Albarn found the guitarist he had known since their Colchester schooldays, he was attempting to jump out of the sixth floor window. “Damon talked me out of it,” he remembers. “People have talked about that incident a lot, but the main thing I remember is being fucking knackered, you know? Knackered and drunk. And when people feel like that, they just get a flap on and cry. Being number one was fine. It was just everything that went with it.”
It says a lot about the difference in Albarn, Coxon and James’ personalities that, from hereon in, they all negotiated their changed circumstance with the help of different mood-enhancers. Albarn smoked the occasional joint in the attempt to manage his intensely driven personality. The shy Coxon became ever more reliant on dutch courage. And James, the rakish bon viveur, used cocaine. He assumed a character and fastidiously set about turning into it. During the two years or so he spent hanging out with Keith Allen and Damien Hirst in the Groucho Club, he appeared to saying absolutely nothing that wasn’t ironic. He was also immense fun to be around. In the early hours of the Sunday morning after Blur played a low-key seaside show in Eastbourne, copies of the infamous Observer interview — in which Noel Gallagher famously wished Albarn and James “catch Aids and die” — were circulated around the bar. James issued a typically offhand aside about the Gallaghers’ repressed homosexuality. Then he went for a swim. As the sun rose over Eastbourne, you could just about make him out bobbing up and down the English channel, champagne glass in one hand and cigarette in the other. With no pun intended, his recollection of the time is decidedly more sober. “To tell the truth, I think we were all quite adrift in one way or another.”
Had they not already used the title on the previous album, Blur’s eponymous 1997 record could have been called The Great Escape. They killed Britpop and its cocky new chums in Cool Britannia at a stroke by getting to number one with Beetlebum — a hair-raisingly affecting elegy to Frischmann’s heroin addiction. For someone so frequently profiled as a calculating character, Albarn could be disarmingly frank – both in music and in conversation. By the I met him in 1999 for an interview in an American magazine, he would no longer be drawn on the subject of Oasis. On this occasion though, he knew he would have to rake over much of what had happened for a readership that wouldn’t necessarily know who he was. “The whole thing [with Oasis] had become something I never want to go through again. Every day, wherever I went — I’d be walking down the street and people would open their windows, move their radios [to the windowsills] and turn up…” At this point, he couldn’t bring himself to even say their name.
The whirlwind of pop stardom may pick you up as one, but when it’s finished with you, it scatters you all over the place. It’s taken Blur six years to find each other again. In the interim, they’ve all — in James’ words — been “learning to work out who we are”. Albarn lives with feted wildlife artist Suzi Winstanley, with whom he has had one daughter, nine year-old Missy. Coxon also has a nine year-old daughter, by former girlfriend Anna Norlander in whose care he remains actively involved. Over on the Gloucester farm where he supplements his cheese-making operation with a steady stream of media work, he and his video producer wife Claire Neate have found time to bring four children into the world.
The one member of Blur not to have had children, Dave Rowntree, has found plenty of other passions to fill the vacuum. Currently at law school training to become a defence solicitor — he says his ultimate aim is to fight on the behalf those with dependency problems, the homeless and people with mental health problems who Rowntree says “the courts spend much of their time prosecuting.” Come the next election, he has been chosen to represent Labour in the newly-created Cities of London and Westminster constituency.
“A politician is the least sexy thing to be, isn’t it?” observes the drummer, currently immortalized on the Blur t-shirt stand in a red “Vote Dave” garment. Glancing back at Alex James, I suggest that many might deem the life of a professional cheese maker less sexy still. But before James can react, Albarn shoots forth from his wardrobe, mock-affronted. “There’s nothing uncool about making cheese. How can you say that?” James finally speaks up for himself: “After you’ve had kids [James is father to four] I don’t think you discover anything new about life. But the things you do know you can explore further.” Pause. “I dunno. I just fucking like cheese.”
Approving noises concerning James’ Blue Monday cheese — yes, of course he named it after the New Order song — resound around the room. “I have gorged upon it late at night,” says Coxon, reliving the with the noise of a mildly aroused pig. “I discovered it was really good with honey all over it. That’s when I discovered it had psychedelic qualities.”
Albarn’s curiosity is now piqued. “You’re committed, aren’t you, Alex? It’s not a dilettante pursuit?” James nods. “Well yes. I talk to people about cheese a lot. And still there comes a point every day where I fancy a piece of cheese.”
Despite it all, James says that not a day passed when he didn’t think about playing more music with Blur. Of the four, it’s James who seems the most changed. Having cut down on his porklife and got some exercise, the slimmed-down bassist is the least abashed about telling the others how much he missed playing with them. Playing on stage later, he looks eye-mistingly grateful to be back in Blur. “Maybe we didn’t see each other very much, but actually being on stage and playing in front of people, it just suddenly… I went, oh God, this is what I missed.”
Much as James and Rowntree missed being in Blur, both knew that nothing could happen until Coxon and Albarn put their differences behind them. Having enjoying almost uninterrupted success with Gorillaz, The Good The Bad & The Queen and — in Monkey Goes To The West — even a Chinese opera, Albarn’s stock was at its highest when he and Coxon met last year. It was the first time they had spoken since 2002. The guitarist — who has amassed a formidable canon of eight solo albums — remembers feeling nervous as he strolled to meet Albarn at Camden Palace, where the singer was presiding over one of his Africa Express global get-togethers. “Not that I felt that way for very long,” he adds, “We came out of there and the first thing he did was spill coffee on his chinos, then break an Eccles cake in half and hand me a bit. And it’s just like, yeah… that’s totally Damon. It made me laugh.”
Talk once again turns to this weekend’s Glastonbury set. What’s shaping up well in rehearsals? Girls And Boys? Parklife? Song 2? Tender? In Southend, two hours from now, I’ll watch them play all those songs and several more, with a ballistic brio that portends one of Glastonbury’s all-time great headlining sets. Damon Albarn can’t wait. “I want to start the weekend somewhere. I want to make my way towards the site from behind a hill. And I want to walk up it. And when I get to the top, I’ll see all those people and walk down. Preferably as the sun is in transition.” Dusk, then? “Or dawn. Either will be fine — unless something truly cosmic happens.”
2010: GORILLAZ
“I say! They’re fancy!” exclaims Jamie Hewlett when Damon Albarn strides into the pair’s West London headquarters. The object of his fascination? Albarn, his sidekick in Gorillaz, is breaking in a new pair of shiny brogues just like the ones favoured by well-loved Mr Men character, Mr Noisy. Far from noisy, however, Albarn is a slightly subdued version of his normal combative self. It’s the morning after the general election. With his long-term partner Suzi away, Albarn never made it to bed. He spent the entire night on the sofa, glued to the emerging chaos until it was time to take his daughter Missy to school.
“These,” he explains, “are my hung Parliament shoes.” Asked about the result — or, rather, the lack of one — the 41 year-old is a picture of careworn ambivalence. “How do I feel about a hung Parliament? I wanted it.” Did he vote? “Yes, but I’m not going to tell you who.” Despite the fact that “there’s no way on Earth” he would vote Tory, most of his irritability over the election is focused on Gordon Brown. “He should have stayed fucking Chancellor,” says Albarn, as he waits for the kettle in Hewlett’s office to boil. “He should have never had that stupid ambition [to be Prime Minister]. His strength is doing the maths. He would have achieved far more by staying out of the limelight.”
That Albarn feels qualified to comment on people’s suitability to the limelight tells you a lot about where the “virtual” group he formed with Hewlett finds itself right now. Gorillaz was, of course, the band that the two created precisely because a fame-weary Albarn no longer wanted us to look at him — the Trojan horse which carried the singer out of Blur, seemingly never to return. Billed as a “a lo-fi thriller event with 2D, Murdoc, Noodle and Russell”, Gorillaz debut live show in 2001 had the musicians silhouetted behind screens. The one who sang the stoned, dubby hip-hop of future hit Clint Eastwood sounded awfully like the singer out of Blur, but when asked about his involvement with Gorillaz, Albarn coyly kept his counsel.
These days, of course, Gorillaz offers a solution to a problem that no longer exists. If 2009’s Glastonbury triumph with a briefly reunited Blur reminded Albarn just how much he had missed performing, last month’s extraordinary Gorillaz shows at the Roundhouse — no facades, no silhouettes — saw the singer go full circle. In between a stellar array of guest vocalists such as Bobby Womack, Mos Def and De La Soul, Albarn chipped in with the air of a child who had found a way to make the toys in his playroom magically come to life. With a band that also had The Clash’s Paul Simonon and Mick Jones playing together for the first time in over two decades, it wasn’t hard to fathom the reasons. Why have a cartoon band when you could have a real one of this calibre?
Hence, the last thing that Hewlett, also 41, did before going home yesterday was finish work on a poster for the group’s upcoming tour, which depicts the group’s real-life members alongside their reprobate alter egos. But if the real musicians who played on the group’s recent third album Plastic Beach are reclaiming Gorillaz’ where does that leave Hewlett’s animated creations? The sometime creator of Tank Girl seems unperturbed by the tenor of the question. Quite aside of the fact that there a videos to work on and interactive web content to oversee — all of it keeping Murdoc, 2D et al very much alive — Hewlett points out that “all my favourite bands are really just a function of the friendships within them.”
In that respect, Gorillaz is no different. Albarn and Hewlett happened upon each other at a time when both had separated from long-term partners. When the time came for Albarn to move out of the flat he had shared with Elastica’s Justine Frischmann, it was Hewlett he called to help him go househunting. “I wasn’t really doing much at that point. Tank Girl had been made into a shit film, but no-one was offering me work because they thought I was now too busy to do it. Damon asked me if I could come and give a second opinion on a flat he was thinking of getting, so I came along. I told him it was great and that he should get it. Then he went…” — Hewlett mimics Albarn’s faintly surly version of friendliness — “…‘Do you want to live here?’”
Tales of the pair’s dissolute six months together have acquired a level of apocryphal infamy over the ensuing years. Can either elaborate? “Heh-heh! I’m not sure we can,” says Hewlett. “We partied hard, but then there was no reason not to. There was one night when we had an awful lot of people over who were in the public eye. You’d have paparazzi waiting outside the whole time. One night, we accidentally left the door open. Only one person with a camera would have needed to come in for it to have been all over the papers the next day. God knows why, but they didn’t.”
“It was fortunate,” echoes Albarn, “In many ways, Jamie saved me because he was so irreverent… and maybe I didn’t take myself so seriously when I was hanging out with him.”
Success has a way of normalizing the most improbable ideas. We refer to Albarn and Hewlett’s “virtual band” like such things have always existed. But at Gorillaz’ outset, there was no existing template for what Hewlett and Albarn were trying to achieve. A decade may have elapsed but the initial scepticism which greeted the duo’s brainchild — especially from his American label — still rankles. “They said it’d be lucky if the first album sold 25,000. It was just all negativity: ‘there isn’t a band; we don’t know who it is; it’s a cult thing…’ Just on and on.”
Albarn remembers that it was the same when the completion of Modern Life Is Rubbish — the Blur album that lit the touch paper on Britpop — met with bewilderment when he delivered it to Parlophone. “Every time I do something different, I go through the same process. It does my head in. Twenty years, I’ve been doing this. It’s now gotten to the point where now I almost rely on that sort of bewilderment to gauge whether what I’m doing is interesting.”
After all this time, you’d think that it would get easier, so it’s surprising to hear that, even in the wake of Demon Days and the pair’s acclaimed opera Monkey Goes To The West, new ideas have had to be jettisoned when the necessary funding has failed to materialise. One such project, Carousel, was due to comprise a series of interlinked films set to live music. “The story was going to play out alongside this 100 mile long Victorian pier,” explains Hewlett.
Albarn interjects: “The pier was basically birth, childhood, adulthood and so on, until, at the very end you had this carousel with creatures on it, and the carousel was the flashback of your entire life. We’d got pretty far along with that.” While Carousel ground to a halt, real life gathered apace. Albarn and Hewlett took their families on holiday to Devon, where the eureka moment that spawned Plastic Beach happened. “There were these worn-down bits of plastic in the shingle. Setting aside the effect of their being there, they looked quite beautiful. When I came back I said, ‘Why don’t we do an album?”
“When he said he wanted to call it Plastic Beach,” says Hewlett, “it was instant. Those two words opened the door. We googled it. Point Nemo is the furthest point from any land mass on the planet — and there, you’ll find islands, some as big as the British isles, made of plastic densely stuck together. So then, it all became about this place that you can escape to, both a symptom of the problem and a sanctuary from it.”
Faced with the job of making a genre-trouncing fin de siecle party album like Plastic Beach, a traditional band — like the one for which Albarn is still (just about) better known — would have been constrained by their personnel. Seven million sales of Demon Days meant that, when Albarn assembled his wishlist of guest musicians, he suddenly found that he had minimal explaining to do. Even if Barry Gibb did have to pull out with an ear infection, Lou Reed, Snoop Dogg and Bobby Womack were among those who stepped up to the plate. The famously crotchety Reed, says Albarn, was “very Lou Reed-ish” when he came to record his part — “nice to me, though not necessarily to everyone else.”
Not so Bobby Womack. Speaking from his Los Angeles home, the 66 year-old soul legend, who numbers Sam Cooke and Ray Charles among a lifetime of collaborators, was long retired when Albarn sent him a demo of the song that became Stylo. “My daughter is 23. She loves me, but she’s never reacted to what I do the way she reacted to that track.” Sweetly, he seems intent on referring to the group in the singular: “Here I am thinking that I’m hip and I’m saying, ‘I ain’t never heard of Gorilla!’ I spoke to them on the phone, and they were like, ‘C’mon! We heard of you, though!’”
If Albarn’s face pinkens when I tell him that Womack compared the experience of working with him to Sly Stone (both apparently, have a “back to front” way of working) you can hardly blame him. “That’s praise indeed,” he says somberly, before adding, “The sessions with Bobby were like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I played him the track and told him to just improvise. After 45 minutes of amazing singing he passed out. I can’t tell you how worrying it is to see Bobby Womack lose consciousness on your watch. It turned out that he’s a diabetic.”
Albarn wasn’t the only worried one. Whilst he ran off to get an energy-restoring banana, the semi-conscious Womack was convinced he had blown his chance to become part of Gorillaz. Far from it. “I remember eating a banana and when I woke up I was a Gorilla!”
What could it be about a Gorillaz show, you wonder, that can inspire such a disparate range of artists to put their careers on hold and cross oceans for what amounts to no more than ten minutes on stage? Longtime Gorillaz collaborator and De La Soul cohort Posdnuos has a simple answer. “It’s what we take from it as well as what we give. The dressing rooms are always open. At the Roundhouse, we were swapping stories — Bobby Womack with Mos Def; ourselves with Little Dragon — and right there, from the soundcheck, you had Damon making sure everyone was happy. It’s the reason you always dreamed of running off to join the circus.”
Albarn is tickled by the analogy. “Well, that’s exactly what you hope everyone will get out of it. We put more into a single Gorillaz show than most bands do playing a lifetime of shows whilst making ten times as much in the process. But it’s not about balancing the books. I’ve no interest in that. It’s about making you feel like you’re watching the greatest show on earth.” Finally, the subtext of his election tirade makes itself explicit. Damon Albarn doesn’t have very much in common with Gordon Brown. Lousy at sums, but a natural in the limelight, Gorillaz’ ringmaster has finally accepted who he is.