Damon Albarn

by Martin Roach

  Lamacq: Where did the idea come from? Is it something which has been there for ages and ages?

  Damon: Jamie and I were living together, sharing a flat, and they came to a party where, actually I think Murdoc did with 2D … two-dimensional people at a party, they stand out, don’t they?

  Lamacq: Oh yeah, very much.

  Damon: And we got talking to them, and then we all kind of came up with the idea it’d be great to have an animated band.

  Lamacq: Why?

  Damon: Because, everything seems so manufactured these days, even the kind of, well, the kind of tradition that I come from, indie, even that’s manufactured now, you know? So, I think we just felt that, let’s just sort of play everyone at their own game, and make something better, that’s manufactured, that’s actually good.

  Lamacq: Have you seen some of yourself in 2D?

  Damon: Well, the funny thing is, my daughter, whenever she sees the video says “Daddy” to 2D.

  Lamacq: What about, now obviously being involved with the virtual band, the other band …

  Damon: Yeah, I mean, they’re not virtual, they exist, you know? I mean, have you heard the record?

  Lamacq: I’ve heard the record.

  Damon: Well, that exists doesn’t it?

  As far as Damon was concerned, he barely existed in the context of the Gorillaz’s eponymous debut album. All tracks are credited to 2D/Murdoc/Russel/Noodles and the various ‘real life’ collaborators who guest on them. Damon’s name is in the fine print as an additional vocalist appearing courtesy of EMI. From the off ‘Re-Hash’ – all sweet sliding acoustic chords, basslines a la Clash and clitter clatter drums – this innovative record is a winner. It has all the looseness of 13 with a world-view extracted from Damon’s travels. It doesn’t sound like Damon Albarn perhaps because there’s vocal distractions from Miho Hatari, singer with New York group Cibo Matto. ‘5/4’ and ‘Tomorrow Comes Today’ skip through on a similar vibe with each track’s vocal a little more ‘Albarn-esque’ than the last. ‘Tomorrow Comes Today’, with Damon’s beloved melodica and a subterranean bass sound sums up the vibe – it’s an easy listen … dinner party dance music – and is in danger of sliding by unnoticed. Things get a little muddier with ‘New Genious (Brother)’ with its murky, soundtrack, falsetto vocal and old school scratching; then it’s ‘Clint Eastwood’, the album’s first stab at rap. Damon’s too wise an owl to fall for doing it himself; San Francisco rapper Del Tha Funky Homosapien does the honours brilliantly. ‘Man Research (Clapper)’ is all squeaks and random generator noises as Albarn’s vocal stays in the upper register; those looking for the kind of insights into the state of Damon’s mind and domestic situation available on 13 will be disappointed. This track, like all the others, uses words in largely the same way as ‘oohs’ and ‘la la’s’. Words are here for texture, punctuation and rhythm, not for soul-bearing. Remember the good old days when Blur used to provide an ultra-short punk song to cleanse the palate? There’s one here too. Just to make this clear, it’s even handily called ‘Punk’. ‘Sound Check (Gravity)’ kicks in with a serious ‘Guns of Brixton’ bass only to be outdone for the following track, ‘Double Bass’, an instrumental mood piece with an ultra-posh spoken word drop in by Albarn.

  ‘Rock the House’ has the unlikely combination of John Dankworth and Del Tha Funky Homosapien thanks to its sample from the veteran jazzman’s score for Joseph Losey’s modish 1960s movie Modesty Blaise. ‘19-2000’ is also rich on collaborations, with Miho Hatari joined on vocals by Talking Head Tina Weymouth. The second Gorillaz single release, the song was a handy No.6 hit for the cartoon funsters. ‘Latin Simone (Que Pasa Contiga)’ is the most ‘World Music’ track on offer, with a vocal by the late Ibrahim Ferrer, the Cuban performer who found fame in the film Buena Vista Social Club in his 1970s. Albarn takes the back seat, supplying background ‘aahs’. Synth skank ‘Starshine’ and the lover’s rock ‘Slow Country’ keep up the reggae quotient – it’s a nonsense to classify this as a hip-hop album – until we return to soundtrack territory with ‘M1 A1’ which samples John Harrison’s score for George A. Romero’s 1985 zombie movie, Day Of The Dead, and upsets the dinner party vibe again with its pinging rock drums and squally guitars. ‘Dracula’ is the revved up faster version of ‘Clint Eastwood’ that’s since become more familiar than the super slow version and the album tails out with ‘Left Hand Suzuki Method’ which is ‘19-2000’ revisited; if anything it contains even more cool shoeshine than the version earlier in the album.

  This is music making on an international scale – it was produced in London, America and Jamaica – and has far more to do with ‘Mali Music’, Ravenous and Ordinary Decent Criminal than 13 or Blur. Even if it is fronted by a group of cartoon monkeys, it just works. Not everyone knew exactly how or why, but it worked nevertheless. Even those directly involved struggled to make sense of it: “Hip-hop has a lot to do with story-telling and therefore it has that with cartoons,” producer Dan the Automator – aka Dan Nakamura – told The Guardian. “With hip-hop you get to say a lot more words than you do in a rock record. You can paint a picture.” If it was no more than a post-modern prank, it was a highly effective one and Damon’s plan to be incognito hadn’t distracted from the music one bit. “You’ll never see who the musicians are because it doesn’t matter,” Albarn offered to CDNow. “It’s funny. There’s no actual proof that I’m on the record at all. People just assume it’s my voice. And you assume that you are talking to me. But it always strikes me that using the telephone or the internet is a similar kind of mind-fuck as driving down a road and assuming that no one is going to crash into you.”

  Such a high risk project – pop star hides behind cartoon characters to produce accessible World Music album – could have been taken out into the car park and given a righteous critical kicking. Amazingly, it wasn’t. L.A. Weekly labelled it as, “hands down, this is one of the best-produced albums of the year.” Rolling Stone saw it as, “inspired by the punky reggae parties of Sandinista!-era Clash, tracks like the dub-rap-rock mutation ‘Clint Eastwood’ and its catchier two-step Rasta remix bring back the exuberance missing from Blur’s last album, 13, while running with its anything-goes avant-aesthetic.” It would have been difficult for Damon to find a duff review of the project, but there were conscientious objectors: Village Voice offered this: “It’s what you might expect from a bunch of musos playing with Cubase or ProTools: sampled loops, Brixton dub, trip-hoppy tangents. U.N.K.L.E.’s bratty nephew, really, though the album sounds like the group locked the metronome on ‘heavy funk groove’ – chugging and satisfying at first, it feels exhausted by the fifth or sixth track.” Regardless of the few dissenting voices, the album was critically lauded and – crucially – note how all of the above are American publications.

  Several events of 2001 would also have a direct and indirect impact on the fortunes of Damon, Gorillaz and Blur. In June, Tony Blair was returned to 10 Downing Street with the lowest turn out of voters since 1918. Since keeping his distance from the Blair government in the 1990s, Albarn had become increasingly disenchanted with the apathy of the UK electorate and an apparent lack of ability or desire on behalf of other performers to tackle political issues. Both these problems seemed to be thrown into sharp relief by one unlikely source that year. First, Popstars in February had shown the other side of using a made-up band to sell an awful lot of records. Damon was appalled, but as ever it brought out his competitive streak. “It’s quite timely,” he said of Popstars when interviewed by Metro. “[It’s] almost part of this weird zeitgeist in pop, but at the opposite extreme to what we’re trying to do. I bet we sell more records in the end.” Hear’Say, the group created for the ITV show, sold a million copies of their debut single ‘Pure And Simple’. This feat was outdone by the next big reality winner Will Young, who hit big with Pop Idol which came on air in October of the same year. Nearly nine million people voted in the pop battle of Young and his arch rival Gareth Gates – turnout in the 2001 election had d
ropped to a dismal 59 per cent. More people voted for Will and Gareth than for the Tories.

  The terrorist attacks on New York on September 11, 2001, had undoubtedly focused the world’s attention on the religious and ideological gulfs that had opened up across the world, but at that stage it remained to be seen whether it would invigorate any response from voters. Attention was soon shifting to Iraq and claims that it was purchasing uranium from Africa with a view to furnishing itself with so-called ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ Politics and popstars. A mix that Albarn had resisted in the past – his ‘inner Sting’ as he once described it – was a mix that Damon would find increasingly difficult to ignore.

  With Gorillaz’s ‘Rock The House’ charting at a useful No.18 in November 2001 and the album starting to open up territories that had previously been resistant to Blur’s charms – even the Germans were buying it – things couldn’t be going better for Gorillaz. For a cartoon collective playing zombie hip-hop funky ska, they’d been chillingly effective and tellingly successful. They would even have the pleasure of having the album nominated for a Mercury Music Prize, be designated as the bookie’s favourite, only to peevishly withdraw from the competition. Satanic bass man Murdoc was given the task of band spokesman, explaining why they were pulling out: “Mercury award? Sounds a bit heavy, man! Y’know sorta like carrying a dead albatross round your neck for eternity. No thanks, man! Why don’t you nominate some other poor Muppet?” he said in a statement. The award ended up with PJ Harvey. Gorillaz were then promptly nominated for six MTV Awards – notably with not a murmur of protest from Murdoc or anyone else connected with the band. When it was possible for interviewers to get a statement out of Damon as himself – and not as some form of Gorillaz spokesman – he was vague to the point of evasive on the subject of Blur. “It’s sort of part of my life still, you know,” he said when pressed about his ‘day job’ on Radio 1. “I’ve been working on a lot of other stuff … I’ve done this record in Mali which is coming out fairly soon. Blur … I’ve been writing songs, I’ve got loads of songs. I sort of hang out for a couple of hours and I go in and record in my little studio at home for a couple more hours each night. So, I dunno, I’ve got about fifteen songs now, I’ve got enough for a record but I wanna keep working on that. I think, what I can say is that we’ll definitely be putting out a couple of singles this year. I like the idea of putting out singles with Blur at the moment, and not albums.”

  Unsurprisingly, as the buzz around Gorillaz grew, so did the rumours about the status of Blur – and particularly that of their mercurial guitarist Graham Coxon. On September 20, 2001, Blur came out of the shadows to play an unusual gig at the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane. With the addition of a female keyboard player and backing vocalist, the band performed ‘Beetlebum’ and ‘Song 2’ at a music industry bash to honour their manager Chris Morrison, who’d previously worked with everyone from Thin Lizzy to Dead Or Alive. Albarn made a short speech from the stage: “This is a very brutal business we’re in and anyone who has lasted deserves credit. Chris has definitely got us through a lot of weird things.”

  Morrison’s ability to deal with weird things that year was being severely tested by Graham Coxon. During the Gorillaz campaign, the guitarist was battling personal issues on several fronts. “2001 was a funny year for me,” he understated to Q magazine. “I was in two different mental hospitals in March and then November. There were problems with booze and depression.” Coxon began toying with yet another solo album – his fourth in as many years. By the time it was released, however, he was an ex-member of Blur. The final crashing chord of ‘Song 2’ – played from the stage of the Hilton Hotel – would be his last live noise as a member of the band for a very long time.

  Chapter 16

  GRINDING TO A HALT?

  Blur – all four of them – initially returned to the studio for a week in March 2002, reconvening in May for more recordings, this time for just four days. And then, suddenly it seemed, Coxon was gone. “Our manager Chris Morrison told me my services weren’t required anymore,” Coxon informed Q magazine. “It was something to do with my attitude. Although I felt I was going about my work honestly, perhaps they mistook honesty for attitude. There is a total problem with honesty and communication in Blur at times.”

  Although rumours of Coxon’s status swirled around London throughout the summer, it wasn’t until September that the guitarist confirmed what had happened. In a cat and mouse interview to promote his latest solo album – Kiss Of Morning – with veteran music journalist Phil Sutcliffe, he revealed that he had been ousted from the group. Much was made of one track on Coxon’s album – ‘Song For The Sick’ – in which the guitarist wishes death on a character called ‘Taylor’ … a ‘fuckin’ fake’ who stabbed him in the back. Coxon insisted that there was no connection between Taylor and any members of Blur – the break was based on purely professional differences. No big bust ups. No screaming matches. No punches thrown. Fair enough. The series of photos to accompany the piece are of Coxon spotting his way out then clambering over a wall, next to the inevitable heading “The Great Escape”. “They certainly can carry on without me,” Coxon told Sutcliffe. “When we started we needed each other an awful lot, but now sometimes I don’t think it matters who is involved as long as there are songs and sounds to make. I have no idea if anyone’s taken over from me.”

  Initially, no one did replace Coxon. Technically speaking, that remained the case. The key was diplomacy, with kind and measured words being the order of the day. “I’ve known him since he was 12, so I would sincerely hope that at some point we’ll be talking again, otherwise that’s a lifetime friendship wasted,” Albarn graciously said to the NME. “Graham just genuinely wants to pursue a far more low-key life in every aspect – the way he records, where he lives, how he conducts his life. He’s been through a very tough time, and hopefully he’s coming out the other end now.” Drummer Dave Rowntree – in a surprising claim made to technical musician’s website OTWS – played down the guitarist’s departure: “[Coxon had] kind of absented himself for the past two or three records, so it was business as usual. We didn’t make much of a play of it at the time, as you can imagine, because we were still hoping we could patch things up. My best guess is that now there are only three of us, there’s one less name for people to have to remember and that’s going to make it slightly easier for people to see the band as three individuals.” Despite the apparent bluntness of Rowntree’s words, a door was left open. A door that would remain resolutely unclosed for the forseeable future. “None of this precludes us getting back together with Graham at some point in the future,” said the drummer. “Who knows whether that will happen?”

  Some fairly good money was on Albarn going solo. With notable timing, just after the aborted sessions with Coxon, came the release of Mali Music, the final result of Albarn’s musical travels with a melodica two years earlier. The heavy broadsheet press were largely supportive but music journalists were slightly cynical; John Robinson in the NME suggested that the album was a vehicle for proving Albarn’s adaptability and suffered from being too “right on” in its use of the Mali musicians. “The album feels ever-so-slightly like a compromise. Obviously determined not to have the whole thing come across as a tawdry bit of cultural tourism, Albarn is painstakingly faithful to much of the material he recorded. Which is fine, of course, but his largely hands-off approach deprives us of what might have been a more engaging fusion of the parties involved.” To be fair, NME perhaps wasn’t the album’s natural constituency. World music magazine fRoots, on the other hand, definitely was and journalist Jamie Renton had this to say: “Apparently the aim was to create a musical travelogue of Mali, but it’s one filtered through a particular laid-back west London sensibility. Albarn mainly contents himself with orchestrating the whole thing and playing simple melodica melodies, with just the occasional understated vocal thrown in. All in all, Mali Music is pulled off with just the right mix of respect and inventiveness.”
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br />   Going through the London session tapes that Coxon had taken part in before his departure, a couple of days’ worth of work was deemed usable. What followed was a ‘first-come, first-served’ series of sessions, with British engineer and producer Ben Hillier overseeing a grab bag of ideas created with whoever was available. “If you’re there, you get to play on it, if you’re not, you miss out,” was how Hillier described it. “Everyone was really hungry to play on the record. If Damon wasn’t there and we wanted to record a vocal, then Alex would sing, or if Alex wasn’t there then Damon would be desperate to get on the bass. It was quite competitive but really exciting. Everyone had this real drive to play.” Damon took on the daunting task of filling in for Coxon on guitar and the prospective sound of the album was further morphed with input from The Dust Brothers – Michael Simpson and John King – who’d already worked with everyone from Beck to Hanson – as well as Norman ‘Fatboy Slim’ Cook and a return fixture for William Orbit.