by Martin Roach
Blur.
Remember them?
“I’m really committed to Blur,” Albarn told Q magazine as he waited to go onstage at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem to perform Demon Days back in 2006. “But I’d really like it to be four people again. I hated playing old Blur songs without Graham on the Think Tank tour. Am I saying no more Blur records unless Graham comes back? No. But it’s got to be something really brash and stupid. There are real problems to be overcome before I feel right about it.”
Chapter 19
A REASON TO EXIST
There was a rum old crowd outside Manchester’s Palace Theatre on that muggy Tuesday night in June 2007. There were Indie Cindies and Billy Britpops, with their man-bags and gladrags along with a smattering of celebs … Hi De Hi actress Sue Pollard, anyone? There were even a few opera buffs. They were all there to see Monkey: Journey to the West. The reason that the audience filing into the Palace was so atypical was that this was the first ever performance of a new opera with music composed by Damon Albarn. He’d been dropping hints and references to the project during the previous year – and had somehow managed to create the piece while fulfilling his role in The Good, The Bad & The Queen. Now, here it was. “This is a very different thing for me,” Damon told journalists. “For the first time in my life I’ll be able to hear my music played – properly – because, obviously, I’ve always been in the middle of it.”
Inside the theatre, there was confusion among those who’d arrived to witness Damon’s opera debut. The show was part of the Manchester International Festival and was initially billed as a preview when tickets first went on sale. The show was then changed to a public, technical rehearsal, as it had been decided that Monkey wasn’t ready to be seen as a fully formed entity. So anyone who’d bought a ticket was given their money back. And everyone who subsequently wanted to see the show was offered a freebie. Unsurprisingly, the Palace was packed – but, then again, it’s not often you get a free night out in Manchester on a Tuesday.
The Monkey story dates back to 16th century, but anyone of Damon’s generation would know it best from the seriously loopy, imported TV series of the same name shown on the BBC in the late 1970s. It told of an arrogant, bollock-scratching Monkey with a hair-trigger temper, imprisoned for 500 years after rebelling against Heaven and claiming himself to be the equal of Buddha. He’s sent on a quest to find holy scriptures to make amends for his wicked ways. “It’s been a real spiritual journey for everyone involved,” Damon told The Sunday Times. “If we fail at this, it will set a lot of things back … if it works it could be absolutely extraordinary.” Clearly, Damon was nervous about the piece.
The opera version of Monkey that unfolded on the stage of the Palace that night was ridiculously ambitious – but it worked. Damon, along with Gorillaz collaborator Jamie Hewlett and opera and film director Chen Shi-Zheng, provided a show like no other, filling the stage with jugglers, dancers, martial artists, plate spinners, amorous pigs, ethereal monks and flying starfish. As the dialogue and lyrics kicked in, a slight groan went out across the stalls as some of the audience realised: It’s all in Mandarin.
Then a flickering LED display fizzled into life just below the level of the stage.
Live subtitles. Brilliant.
But as soon as the opening night of Monkey had begun – with animated sequences filling the entire stage before live actors took over – it ground to a halt. A babble of English and Chinese voices crackled across the PA system as technical staff tried to iron out the first of the night’s hitches and glitches. A tall man in the stalls then leapt out of his seat and ran up the aisle to the mixing desk, where he busied himself sorting out the problem. He would do this many times over the space of the next two hours. Then people sitting around him realised that the theatregoer in a Fred Perry shirt was in fact Damon Albarn – so he could get out of his seat as many times as he wanted to. Damon was willing the show to succeed.
Musically, there was little that could have been classified as typically Chinese. There were buzzes and beeps of electronica, repetitive codas that Michael Nyman would have been proud of and even Brechtian stomps. “You really don’t want to be pastiching Chinese music,” noted Damon in The Sunday Times.
Given the scale of what was on offer, the problems were surprisingly few and far between. Performer Fei Yang, playing the eponymous Monkey, took a few unscripted falls with his wire work, at one stage bashing into the crotch of an onstage female acrobat. But the stage was so full and the visuals so intense and exciting that, as people left the theatre, there was a danger that the last thing anyone would be talking about on the way home was Damon’s music. The preview went down well – not exactly a storm, but Su Pollard for one was on her feet at the end. One can readily imagine cast and crew going for the traditional postmortem. and tweaks being suggested.
When the reviews came in, they were overwhelmingly positive. “It’s lavish, dazzling and entertaining,” stated the Manchester Evening News. “Albarn’s inventive music plays wittily on the tension between the ancient and the new, and, although it’s a long way from Blur or even the Gorillaz, it’s by no means inaccessible.”
“I don’t know much about Chinese opera, but I know what I like,” offered Andy Gill in The Independent. “Ninety minutes of fascinating music by Damon Albarn, in which Oriental and Occidental forms are skilfully combined. The traditional Chinese elements – brittle wooden percussion and finger cymbals, astringent lute and violin sounds – are blended with Western beats, orchestral ostinatos that recall Philip Glass, the whine of bowed saw, fairground and oompah music, sombre brass passages, sprinkled throughout with moments that trigger memories of a vast range of musical touchstones, from Harry Partch and Laurie Anderson to Gregorian chants. What more could you want? Indeed, what more could they have crammed into this enchanting show?”
A note of caution, though, came from Alfred Hickling in The Guardian: “Albarn has certainly extended himself, encompassing a vast, brashly amplified melange of Chinese percussion, esoteric electronica (including an Ondes Martenot), and a blaring contraption of his own invention known as a Klaxophone. Yet, surprisingly for someone with Albarn’s melodic gift, there are no arias, thematic development or even much in the way of a memorable tune. Ultimately, Monkey is a cartoon opera in the same way that Gorillaz is a cartoon band, which makes it difficult to empathise with the characters on an emotional level.”
Richard Morrison in The Times brushed such thoughts aside, noting, “The sense of something new and exciting being created from the melding of many disparate styles – pop and classical, Western and Eastern, visual and aural. The audience, about fifty years younger on average than the usual opera crowd, loved it.”
Had Damon taken a firm and perhaps final step away from his past? Now approaching forty, he was no longer the tracksuit-topped Mockney waving an ice cream in the “Parklife” video. He was a musician capable of turning his hand to opera – the musical field that has claimed the scalps of many a foolhardy rocker in the past – and succeeded. Creatively, commercially and critically. From the stage of the Palace Theatre in Manchester, the Britpop years had been comprehensively put to bed. Just in case there was any doubt, the point was made coolly apparent the following day. Rising from his hotel bed after the Monkey preview, Damon would have flicked on the TV to see a familiar face amid very unfamiliar scenes. Tony Blair was stepping down as Prime Minister. The first rock ’n’ roll PM, the first British political leader to know how to handle a Stratocaster and the politician who courted the Britpop stars of the day, had left the building. He told the House of Commons this: “I wish everyone, friend or foe, well. And that is that. The end.”
But was it?
No sooner had the Blair years ended, it seemed like we wanted them to start all over again. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, if nothing else because it takes considerably less time to arrive than in the old days. They used to wait at least twenty years before the ache for something long gone became so great that a d
esire to revive it became overwhelming. But, by the noughties, folk were more impatient. By 2007, nothing seemed quite so appealing as the 1990s. By now, many current bands in the UK had been inspired by key aspects of Blur’s sound from the previous decade. Unfortunately, some of the aspects chosen weren’t necessarily the best to go for. Acts such as The Fratellis, The Pigeon Detectives and The View had certainly echoed some of Blur’s more “knees up Mother Brown”, musical-hall tendencies. Hard-Fi have taken on the suburban angst and Fred Perry frustration of Parklife. Kaiser Chiefs’ Blur-esque stylings – synth versus guitar with a story to tell – attracted the wrath of Albarn himself. The Leeds band’s second album, Yours Truly, Angry Mob, was dubbed “empty” and “messy” by Albarn, who compared it unfavourably to Blur’s The Great Escape. The Kaisers’ second single from the album – “Everything Is Average Nowadays” – had a title that sounded as if it was inspired by Modern Life Is Rubbish. To be fair, the obvious Blur reference points seemed endless. “I don’t give a shit what Damon says” was the measured response given to the Daily Star by Ricky Wilson, lead singer of Kaiser Chiefs and future judge on BBC’s The Voice. “It’s one man and his opinion. Of course we tried hard – it’s our second album. He can say what he likes.”
During the opening week of Monkey, as politicians jostled and pundits predicted the next political move after Blair had stood down, the music industry was fizzing with teasing talk of its own. The buzz was about big reunions from 1990s superstars. When the announcements came, there was excitement in two very different camps. Take That started the tidal wave of nostalgia with a colossal reunion tour – minus Robbie Williams – and followed it up with a surprisingly accomplished new album. They subsequently broke all records and completed what has been dubbed by some as “the greatest comeback in British pop history”. This opened the floodgates for various reformations – some good, some bad and some very, very ugly. Twenty-something women everywhere were digging out their Union Jack hot pants with the news that the Spice Girls were back – their winter 2007 Wembley show sold out in 39 seconds. Joining them on the comeback trail were the All Saints, East 17 and, from the pages of the music weeklies, The Verve, Richard Ashcroft’s Britpop outsiders, citing “the love of music” as their main reason. The only missing member was Simon Tong – he was too busy playing with The Good, The Bad & The Queen. It was almost as if a time portal had been opened with a direct link to the 1990s, and plenty more were ready to step through it: Shed 7, Dodgy, Northern Uproar and Kula Shaker also hit the comeback trail and all had their own justifications for doing so. For Shed 7’s Rick Witter, it was all about the hits – no new material, thanks – for old and new fans. Kula Shaker’s Crispian Mills had his own take: “Everyone got tarred with the Britpop brush,” he said to Metro on the band’s return. “But now, ten years later, we can be judged in our own right.”
The clever money had been on the big returning band being … Blur. A series of dropped hints and coded references had been trickling out from various members of the band. Ever the tease, Alex James was the chief culprit, while on the promotional trail for his autobiography, A Bit of a Blur. “We’re all heading into the studio this summer. Graham’s coming too. [We’re] gonna see if they’ve still got it … if not, I think we’ll just call it a day.” Coxon himself told James he was “up for a bit of a jam”. His spokesman told Pitchfork: “There’s a lot of rumour and conjecture around about Blur at the minute, but I can tell you that nothing concrete has been planned.”
But then Dave Rowntree, fresh from a failed bid to become a local councillor in the Marylebone ward in London, confirmed that a get-together had been booked. “There is a week in the diary,” Rowntree told NME. “But it’s a very small thing – it could either be a seed or a full-stop.” The music paper became a sort of message board for Blur, each member adding his own take on the matter week on week. “I’ve made a couple of solo albums and now I’m in a really collaborative frame of mind,” said Coxon. “I’m leaving this year open for collaborations, to do a lot of writing and practical domestic stuff … I didn’t want to plan anything this year in case anything big came about.” When Damon learned of Coxon’s tentative thumbs-up, he weighed in with this: “If he’s in a collaborative mood, then he should collaborate with his oldest mate. Simple as that.”
Despite these soothing noises from Albarn, that day in the studio for the Blur boys to get back together never happened. Instead, it turned into a nice meal for all four former members of the band that came to symbolise all things Britpop – the mid- to late 1990s summed up in four faces. It became little more than a chance to catch up. Talk about the old days! But nothing more. The person who appears to have put the kibosh on the whole affair was Damon Albarn. “It doesn’t feel right,” he told Q in the autumn of 2007, when asked why he was backing away from bringing back Blur. “It feels like a disingenuous thing to do, on my behalf.”
Despite their decommissioned state, Alex James for one believed that Blur would never actually split up – even if they were never to tour or record again. “I think we are kind of stuck together forever one way or another. There will always be Blur somehow or other, I think.”
Meanwhile Damon’s dizzying roll call of collaborations, campaigns and even cartoons continued throughout this period with no signs of easing off – almost to show that he was far too busy for things like reunions. “Sometimes I’ll be watching TV and get irrationally angry with myself,” Damon once told Q, “because I’m wasting time.”
Some of this time had been used to lend his (spoken) voice to Icelandic cartoon Anna and the Moods, which also featured Monty Python’s Terry Jones and Björk along with music by the Brodsky Quartet. The garish CGI effort saw Damon playing Björk’s dad in a cautionary tale of a young girl whose mood swings and Goth appearance forces her parents to take her to a Clinic for the Unruly Child. Turns out she’s just a teenager.
He also lent his name to a campaign against the introduction of ID cards, comparing the British government’s attempts to control people with paperwork to similar practices in Nazi Germany. His opposition to the UK government’s replacement of the Trident nuclear weapons system saw him donate a song – “5 Minutes To Midnight” – to the cause. The piece was performed by the 50-piece Sense of Sound choir on board the Greenpeace boat Arctic Sunrise while it was docked in the Thames. Again, Damon was using his fame to influence others. “I think people shouldn’t care what other people say when they’re talking about these issues,” he told NME. “Peer pressure is the worst kind of censorship: you can’t talk about issues because it’s not cool. Rubbish, we all have to engage.”
Meanwhile Damon contributed vocals to London Town, the 2007 album by UK rapper Kano, which also featured Kate Nash and Craig David. Albarn also launched his own stage at 2007’s Glastonbury Festival – his line-up on the Park stage included African musicians such as Tinariwen alongside Hard-Fi, Terry Hall and The Magic Numbers. At the same time, the expected swift end to The Good, The Bad & The Queen that many predicted didn’t happened. The project won “Best Album” at the 2007 Mojo awards and the band continued to play live through the summer festival season of 2007 and into the autumn. It seemed to be a collaboration that was just too good to put aside.
Certainly Albarn’s relationship with TGTB&TQ drummer Tony Allen was deemed worthy of further investigation and in mid-2008 it was announced that Allen and Albarn would be collaborating with Flea, bass player with Red Hot Chili Peppers, on a project later named Rocket Juice & The Moon. The trio came together on a plane to Lagos, where they were headed to play a show for Albarn’s Africa Express project, set up in response to the perceived lack of black artists involved in Live 8 in 2005. “[Flea] was in business class but he saw Tony and me at the back of the plane and sat with us for the journey,’ Damon later told Mojo magazine. “It was the first time he’d met Tony. They talked about [legendary Nigerian musician] Fela Kuti and we all got on really well. We made a promise to ourselves after the show in Lagos that wheneve
r we had a chance we’d get together and jam. So Rocket Juice & The Moon came out of that. If we were all in the same place, we’d rehearse, and as time went on we articulated our ideas. But it was never our intention to play shows and make a record. Things just happened.”
In fact, things happened very slowly indeed, with sessions grabbed here and there as and when the trio’s other commitments allowed. It wouldn’t be until October 2011 that the “supergroup” even announced their name, the day before they played their first gig at the Cork Jazz Festival in Ireland. Despite the fact they had a name, they chose not to use it, instead appearing under the moniker “An Honest Jon’s Chop Up!”, named after the west London record shop and label that would eventually release the group’s album in 2012.
When the Rocket Juice album finally appeared, the main surprise was how low-key Albarn’s appearances on it were, with his vocals appearing as the lead on only one track, a beautiful prog-jazz ballad called “Poison”. “Albarn’s presence is slight,” warned the NME. “Cup an ear on ‘Rotary Connection’ and you may hear him plaintively echo a horn line. He croons a little on ‘Benko’. It’s only on plangent heartbreak ballad ‘Poison’ that he really brings his vocals to bear. Of course, we know better than to approach an Albarn project with a ‘Wot, no Parklife?’ But his best work has cheek, wit and a smart-alecky desire to shake things up. All this reverence doesn’t really suit him.”
The Guardian, though, seemed cautiously welcoming of the album: “Damon Albarn does supergroups as regularly as other people do the washing up,’ the review pointed out. “This year’s ensemble includes Tony Allen, Flea, Erykah Badu, Fatoumata Diawara and the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble … Albarn’s talent with a pop melody is deployed deliciously, via dirty keyboard touches or across entire Gorillaz-ish tracks such as ‘Hey, Shooter’ and ‘Poison’. There is, however, a fragmentary feel to the album, with so many songs (18), most built around just a few short phrases … But the musicality and effervescent spirit are the qualities that abide.”