by Martin Roach
It was Albarn’s producer who suggested that the best idea might actually be to relocate back home in London. Since the days when Albarn had effectively killed off Britpop – and stung by criticisms of his writing as being one part Martin Amis to one part Dick Van Dyke – reflecting London life on record … reflecting English life … was deemed out of bounds. He’d spilled the guts of his shattered love-life on 13, shared his concerns for the world on Demon Days, but write about life in the capital? Gor blimey mate, leave it aaaht. “I started to feel embarrassed about being articulate,” he told NME a decade after the self-imposed embargo on London commentary, “I felt out of touch with what was going on.”
The answer wasn’t to be found in Lagos … but much closer to home in Ladbroke Grove. Paul Simonon – former bass player with The Clash but now concentrating on painting – had been at the audience for the first Gorillaz gig at the Scala in 2001, keeping an eye on the talent. Damon Albarn had been keeping an eye on Simonon for considerably longer. “I’d been a massive Clash fan since school. The first album I ever bought was Adam And The Ants’ Kings Of The Wild Frontier,” he bravely admitted to NME. “After that it was [The Clash’s] Combat Rock.” Damon met Simonon face to face at Joe Strummer’s wedding reception in Ladbroke Grove in 1995. When Albarn started forging plans for a new, three dimensional band, he called Simonon – London personified – only to discover that the bass player lived just two streets away. “I get asked to do a lot of things and 99 times out of a hundred I say no,” Simonon told Scotland on Sunday. “I prefer to stick to my painting. But when Damon asked me, I said yes. I really like his music and I knew he’d refused to go to 10 Downing Street when Blair invited him. I thought, ‘That’s my sort of person.’ It’s the first time I’ve made a record without any stress.”
Fortunately for Damon, Simonon had picked up a bass two months earlier after playing at a friend’s birthday party in the company of fellow ex-Clash man Mick Jones and Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie. It gave him ‘the taste for it’ again. “We spent a lot of nights drinking and discussing our experiences,” Simonon recalled to Time Out, “talking about how strange it is that in this part of town, what were once slums are now back to being one-family Victorian houses, but next door is a council estate that was Victorian houses that were knocked down. That weird eco-system where the rich are there, the poor are there and on the weekend they meet up.” If Joe Strummer was always seen as the brains of The Clash, then Paul Gustave Simonon was perceived as the beauty. Cutting a stern, yet glamorous figure through the punk years, his image is preserved in millions of homes the world over on the cover of the London Calling album, which featured Pennie Smith’s photo of him smashing his bass onto the stage in New York in 1979. He was also a talented artist and a musician beyond The Clash with his Latino rockabilly reggae outfit Havana 3AM, an early trailblazer for World Music. “I was the dark horse,” he told Melody Maker in the late 1980s. “I think they [journalists] thought I was an idiot. A thicko from South London.” His looks would add a scuffed up cool to the look of Damon Albarn’s new venture. This was only added to when he turned up to group photo session with a busted nose and a black eye. Damon must have been delighted. The photographer was … Pennie Smith.
Key sessions for the new band were recorded between the summer and autumn of 2005, the last was just a few weeks after the end of Gorillaz’s Demon Days run in Manchester; whoever juggles Damon’s schedule deserves a medal. The Albarn solo idea was heading towards a collective album. Tong described the early sessions that the band took part in to Pitchfork: “We just sort of played. We tried the songs in lots of different ways, and we weren’t afraid to just scrap a whole recording session, or scrap a song and try something completely new. It was just a matter of keeping that sort of magic, and capturing the essence of each tune. Damon would come in with some songs and we would just kind of play around and experiment, but we recorded everything right from the beginning. It pretty much stayed that way all the way through, to keep it fresh and slightly demo-ey.” Things were kept quiet and the project – to be called The Good, The Bad & The Queen – would stay under wraps for the best part of a year.
In early interviews, there was an insistence that The Good, The Bad & The Queen was a project title, not a band name. “I suppose when we were seventeen and we were a bit insecure and we needed a sense of identity, having a name was useful,” Simonon shrugged when asked about the lack of band name by London’s Time Out magazine. “It’s a bit embarrassing being in a gang when you get to our age,” Albarn added by way of further clarification. Not giving a name to the band was also a useful distraction from the knee jerk criticism that was levelled at the project before anyone had heard a note – that this was a supergroup – still a rock ’n’ roll war crime in many people’s eyes and for others an affront to someone who used to swing a bass in The Clash. “Usually supergroups are just super-rubbish,” countered Simonon, firmly. “I can’t think of a single one that’s been inspirational. I mean that’s part of the reason punk happened, because all the so-called ‘super-groups’ weren’t communicating to anyone except themselves.”
Albarn – with his farm in Devon – decided the county was far enough away from the potentially prying eyes of the capital to provide a gentle live debut for the project at the aforementioned Pig’s Nose. The band’s debut – with Albarn still insisting that the band had no name – was on October 20, in front of an audience of 150. “It’s good,” mused Simonon at the gig. “It’s the birth, and the egg has broken. It was great,” Albarn explained to NME.com. “We’ve done a lot of rehearsal and none of us have taken it for granted even though we’ve done a lot before. You know that everyone has performed in front of 100,000 people, so they’re not there to prove anything, they’re there to really make sure the music is as good as they can get it.” The pub also provided Albarn with a visual trademark to go with the project. One that would stick. “Yes, the top hat … in the back of the pub, they had a ‘dressing-up’ box and it was in that. I just put it on for laughs and people said, ‘Oh, it looks really good.’ I kind of got stuck with it. I think it helps with the mood of the story.” The Pig’s Nose outing was followed by similar low key affairs in Exeter and Ilfracombe, the latter being in a newly cool coastal town where Damien Hirst was busy ‘doing a Reykjavik’ by opening a bar and restaurant. All were essentially a warm-up for the band’s London debut at the Camden Roundhouse on October 26. Damon told the audience they intended to play the whole of the proposed album in order … Oh, and ‘The Good, The Bad & The Queen’ was the name of the album, not the band. With nothing familiar to get a grip on – no chance of a ‘Guns Of Brixton’ or a ‘Parklife’ tonight – the atmosphere in the venue was tense and the audience were often heard chatting during the songs, trying to get a grip on what they were hearing. The testiness leaked onto the stage too. At one point, Albarn turned on the band for playing like “shit” insisting, “we can play better than this.” At the time, Allen was asked by Pitchfork about whether he was happy to take orders – or even a bollocking – from someone like Albarn. “I must respect him, because two captains can never be in one ship,” was Allen’s seasoned reply. “There must be one captain leading the boat, so that the boat can reach its destination. We must all drop our egos at the door.”
Reviews for the show were mixed though on balance it’s fair to say that Damon got away with it. “The Good, The Bad & The Queen may never achieve the commercial heights of Gorillaz, even Blur,[but] there’s a sense that this project has a higher purpose.” predicted MusicOHM. Taking note of Albarn’s onstage outburst, NME noted that it “gives more ammunition to those who think he’s too uptight to be genuinely great – but between strops and audience murmurings there was enough to suggest that in The Good, The Bad & The Queen, Damon has defied the haters and pulled it off again.” The Guardian was far from convinced. “Sounds like a polished second chapter to Albarn’s 2003 fractured solo offering, DemoCrazy. Despite the gang mentality – they play for
themselves, often turning inward to face Allen – this is never more than an interesting one-man band.” The wider public got to see what the fuss was about in December when the outfit played three songs on BBC2’s prestigious Later programme, fronted by Jools Holland, as a teaser for the forthcoming album due in the New Year. When the album was finally released – some 18 months after the initial recording sessions and with Danger Mouse on synths, percussion and most importantly on production – there was a chance to hear what the eclectic mix would produce: “I wanted to make a scary, sad but ultimately optimistic record,” said Albarn just prior to its release. In a way, he succeeded.
Although its cover image dates back to London in the mid-19th century, many of Paul Simonon’s drawings that are scattered inside the album’s packaging are of more recent additions to the capital: alcopops and cctv cameras, parking meters and satellite dishes … essential elements of modern city dwelling to some, unnecessary evils to others. London, it would appear, is very much in the eye of the beholder. It was, to use one of the many and varied descriptions that Albarn brought into play when asked about this set of songs, a “narrative of moods”. As he had done in the past (especially with his dedicated spin of 13 being ‘The Justine Album’), Damon set out his stall early: this was ‘The London Album’, now that he felt comfortable commentating on the characters and situations inspired by the capital once again. “I’ve been holding back on writing an album like this ever since Parklife. I just felt so burned by everything that happened around Britpop and felt I wasn’t mature enough to cope with the ridiculous stage I found myself on. It seriously wasn’t worth it. I’m not saying these new songs have the immediacy of Parklife and I’m not trying to compete with it. But I definitely feel it’s a worthy successor,” was how he explained himself.
Opener ‘History Song’ actually tells us more. Lyrically it may have connections with Parklife, but sonically we are in Think Tank territory, baggy (in a comfy sense rather than a Stone Roses vibe) and late night, with a half bottle of rum to hand and a fag on the go. Spanish guitars rub up along clattering yet quiet drums, a skanky bass and organs from the box marked ‘The Specials’ as Albarn sets the scene: if you don’t like this place, then you will by the end of the next forty minutes. Tune is sacrificed to tone, which is cosmopolitan. ‘80’s Life’ sets off like a 1950s doo-wop and largely stays that way with a barber shop protest song about living through a war that’s unlikely to come to an end in the near future – or unlikely to come to an end at all. ‘The Northern Whale’ uses the true story of a whale that swam up the Thames in January 2006 and captured the imagination of the public. Britain seemed more concerned about the fate of the mammal than of wider issues at the time of the incident, which Albarn uses to lyrical effect over an odd mix of buzzy synths, bar room piano vamps and a chorus that’s surely influenced by the Jagger and Richards song ‘As Tears Go By’, made famous by Marianne Faithfull. “There are myths that when a strange creature arrives in the city, it tells people something about their society,” Damon explained to NME. “The fact that the whale died says it all.” Britain had relaxed its drinking laws to allow 24-hour consumption a week before one of the key recording sessions for the album and this is reflected in ‘Kingdom Of Doom’, where Albarn despairs at a country boozing away while war rages on – in his mind whether it’s a bottle of beer or a bottle-nosed whale, we’re easily distracted away from the real issues. “You can drink all day, shop all day, watch telly all day and then you add that line, ‘the country’s at war’, at the end of a sentence and it’s a different world.” he explained to Time Out. “Even the news is consumerist. Life wouldn’t be normal at the moment unless every night there was someone getting blown up in Iraq. That is the whole crazy thrust of the not-so-hidden agenda of politics over the last five years. It relies on that picture being there, in bars or stations, in shops, you catch a little bit of this chaos on the TV, while you’re looking at that new pair of trainers. They work together in a weird way.” ‘Herculean’ was the single lifted from the album, albeit very swiftly as it was released and deleted within 24 hours. It would be a downbeat track by most people’s standards but here it’s positively uplifting. Again, there’s a reference to the new drink laws, with the ‘medicine man’ available ‘24-7’ in a town where the canal and the gas works live alongside the morning call for prayer, a diverse town that is greater than the sum of its parts. “There are a lot of people running around saying [the album is] all about West London and it’s about this and about that, it’s not really,” Simonon told Isolation. “There are geographical references, which are important to us. We are all affected by global warming and if we haven’t, we will be, there are things that are brought up as subject matter on the album that affect everybody, so it’s not just about London, or west London in particular. It’s sort of like a musical post card.” ‘Behind The Sun’ puts its cheap sounding keyboards against lovely piano tones and strings and overlays a virtually constant theme of a police siren as Albarn yearns for the simpler days of the past. In ‘The Bunting Song’ he gets explicit – all England wants you home, states the singer – as the clouds of conflict darken over a London that doesn’t seem to care too much about the war and even its own soldiers, not least because an escape to the countryside beckons. Why put out the bunting to welcome them home, when it’s unlikely they will return? There’s more warnings of war in ‘Nature Springs’, but the danger is mainly environmental as the seas rise and threaten our very way of life – it’s a pleasure to listen to Tony Allen’s drumming here as he seems to go in several directions at once before meeting up with himself at the end of the song. ‘A Soldier’s Tale’ – despite it’s title – is opaque about its lyrical intentions – Damon says it’s about a fear of technology - but the strings slide and swell over a simple Simonon three-note riff and an early morning vocal from Albarn. If there’s potential for a Parklife moment, it hovers around the jazzy spy theme ‘Three Changes’ with its tales of violence, guns and estates on a ‘little island’ as Damon’s accent teeters close to Pearly King territory. It’s still a great track, with Simonon stomping around the tune accompanied by Tong’s clipped guitar. ‘Green Fields’ – a re-imagining of a tune Albarn had contributed to Marianne Faithfull’s 2005 album Before The Poison – sums up the mood of the record in one go; a Beatles-esque lament which name-checks the Goldhawk Road, war and tidal waves as this green and pleasant land is concreted over. It also gives a nod to a key source of inspiration for the whole piece: Martin Amis’s sprawling novel, London Fields, charting a selection of the city’s inhabitants and their individual failings as a mysterious conflict threatens their way of life. Hefty finale ‘The Good, The Bad & The Queen’ rounds off the cycle; the denizens of the city finish their tasks – be it idling or industry – preparing to do it all again the next day. It’s a heady mix and even the bohemian Simonon struggled to sum the album up. “It’s got spaghetti western in there, bit of reggae, bit of rock ’n’ roll … bit of everything really. What we’ve actually come up with is something that’s actually quite folk orientated … that’s how I would classify it … as being sort of tough folk music.”
There’s much to admire on The Good, The Bad & The Queen but it has another similarity with Think Tank as well as a comfy, loose sound: it appeals greatly to, but sometimes misses, the heart. You admire its skill, dedication and inventiveness but you wouldn’t necessarily feel impelled to rescue a copy if fire was threatening your CD collection. That said, the heavier end of the critical fraternity weighed in heavily in the album’s favour. Observer Music Monthly rated it as, “one of the most surprising and magical records for which Damon Albarn has ever been responsible.” The Guardian went further: “You’re left both marvelling at the album itself, and considering what a unique figure Albarn cuts. If you doubt it, try to imagine the result if any of Britpop’s other major players had assembled a supergroup and made an anti-war concept album. Now take your fist out of your mouth.” “The Good, The Bad & The Queen is
a noir-ishly understated suite of songs,” stated Mojo, “further testament to its chief author’s need to keep on moving.” Of all the reviews, NME probably hit the nail on the head: “For all its weird beauty, this is very much Damon’s record – much more so than Gorillaz. Or indeed, Blur.”
Without a ‘normally released’ lead single and little airplay, the album still reached No.2 in the UK charts – propelled by Albarn fans, critical support and the merely curious – and made the Top 50 in the American Billboard chart. The band dutifully played a mid-sized North American tour taking in Toronto, New York, Washington, Austin, New Orleans and California. The success – via sales and the admiration of the press – raised questions about where the project would go from here. “Who knows?” shrugged the ever laid back Paul Simonon. “Damon’s going to be off doing other work and I’ve got some painting to catch up on … everybody’s got their own work. It’s quite healthy really, as opposed to a situation where we’re just all on this bus and it keeps going until it decides to crash.”
Something though, had got lost in the exotic mix of Damon Albarn’s adventures in World Music, Demon Days, The Good The Bad & The Queen and the plans he had for his next guise. Something that many people had forgotten about in the rush and push of critical acclaim and record sales.