Damon Albarn

by Martin Roach

  What was around the corner was in fact a Blur world tour – an epic jaunt starting in Mexico in March, taking in major European cities, a quick hop over to the US, shows in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Indonesia before returning to south America in November to play the Planeta Terra Festival in Brazil and finishing off in the New Year with shows in Japan and Australia. Not all the dates went ahead as planned: the final show, an appearance at the Big Day Out Festival in Oz was cancelled. More important for the band’s future direction were two dates that were cancelled in May on the Asian leg of the tour. At a loose end in Hong Kong with a few days to kill, the band went into a studio, recording whatever took their fancy in a knockabout style reminiscent of Blur’s early days. “We didn’t have much stuff at all,” Albarn later explained to Mojo magazine. “It was back to how we recorded when we first started doing stuff. We just went in there and knocked about loads of ideas but we didn’t get anything finished … after that the whole thing dissipated. I didn’t think it had happened … nothing happened after that at all.”

  But Graham Coxon saw something in the 40-plus hours of material generated by the sessions that had clearly eluded Albarn. “It was, for want of a better word, ‘jamming’; some sonic landscaping was needed to be done,” said Coxon. “It was a lot of stuff to go through. I said, ‘Damon, can we have a little chat? Do you mind if I have a look at all this music and if there’s anything there, we’ll pursue it?’”

  While Coxon tinkered, the task that many believed Albarn should have pursued years ago finally came to fruition. All the collaborations, all the eclecticism and all the team playing that he’d done over the years left a question that yet to be answered: could Damon do it on his own? After releasing an African Express album called Maison Des Jeunes, Albarn finally knuckled down and, in the spring of 2014, released a solo album.

  Everyday Robots was like everything Albarn had ever done, distilled down into one exotic yet melancholy package. The cover sported an image of Albarn in a parka-esque coat staring glumly at the floor. The title track laid out the intentions well with Damon lamenting our mobile-phone obsession – though you suspect he had a top-of-the-line one himself and was never off it – over a backwash of samples, piano stabs and wooden clicks. It contained all the commuter-belt weariness of a classic Blur song with the World Music sensibilities of his side projects. Nothing here would sound amiss on a Gorillaz album, either. The downbeat air continued through “Hostiles” and “Lonely Press Play” before “Mr Tembo” – a palette-cleansing, jaunty romp about a baby elephant that Albarn spotted in Tanzania. “Parakeet” continues the animal theme – albeit it very quickly, as it’s a 43-second instrumental, a sketch that acts as a buffer to the continuing sadness of the rest of the album. After “Selfish Giant” – a song about nuclear submarines rather that domestic strife – are the two tracks that act as the central focus of Everyday Robots, “You & Me” and “Hollow Ponds”.

  The first is a song of cyclical blame and guilt. It’s beautiful. “Hollow Ponds”, meanwhile, evokes the sweltering summer of 1976, with Albarn swimming with other kids in a man-made lake near his childhood home in Leytonstone. “Some days, it felt like all of multicultural London was there and I was part of it,” he later explained to journalist Sean O’Hagan. “Up until [recently] I don’t think most people knew I even came from east London. They had this image of me as this middle-class kid from Colchester with a Mockney accent. But I grew up in seventies London and it was an incredibly interesting, vibrant place. It formed me in a far more profound way than I ever realised until I tried to articulate it.”

  “Seven High” is another instrumental – and another chance to take a breather – before “Photographs (Are Taking Now)”, a song initially inspired by people taking pictures of a solar eclipse where the sun failed to materialise. “The History of a Cheating Heart” is an Albarn apology song, a tease to those looking to find out more about him as a person. Finally, a surprise: “Heavy Seas of Love”, featuring that most unusual of things, a vocal by the producer, ambient musician and former Roxy Music knob-twiddler Brian Eno. “No one asks Brian to sing,” Damon pointed out at the time of the album’s release. “He’s such a fan of singing and he’s got such a clear, crisp voice. Mine is such a different tone [that] it was interesting to put them together. Obviously, I was delighted. I love Brian.”

  Many of the reviews for Everyday Robots came in at 9/10 or four stars. It had been touted as Albarn’s confessional album – the one where he’d drop the masks and finally reveal himself. The fact that he did it on only two of the tracks seemed to irk some reviewers. Alex Petridis of The Guardian described the album thus: “Beautiful, but subtle, cloudy and elusive, Everyday Robots certainly isn’t the album it’s purported to be. You come out of the other side not much the wiser about the man behind it. Never mind: the music is good enough that a lack of revelation doesn’t really seem to matter while Everyday Robots is playing. Whoever Damon Albarn is, he’s extremely good at what he does.”

  “Across a 25-year career – taking in bands from Blur to Gorillaz, promoting the music of Malian musicians and veterans such as Bobby Womack, and composing pop operas Monkey and Dr Dee – Damon Albarn has seemed most comfortable singing from behind the perspective of a compelling cast of assumed characters,” summarised the Telegraph. “But at 46, he has finally, he says, set up ‘a raw stall’ and made a directly autobiographical record. In a mood of nostalgia, Albarn is looking back at his life as it unspools over some of his most subtle, beautiful and melancholy melodies, rendered in a slightly hung-over, low-fi tone, occasionally pepped up by samples from producer Richard Russell.”

  Spin magazine’s review was one of many to pick up on the album’s overriding sense of sadness: “There’s a tremendous amount of plain old, gut-wrenching pathos here, bracing and intoxicating like good Tom Waits and great aged scotch. That this solemnity is intercut with signature Albarn moments of capricious tomfoolery gives the record a deliciously sweet and sour vibe.”

  Albarn performed live dates to support the album, incorporating a scattering of songs by Gorillaz, The Good, The Bad & The Queen and of course Blur into the set. Behind the scenes, work was continuing on the Blur “jamming” material that Graham Coxon was tinkering with, but Albarn did his best to downplay any chance of the material seeing the light of day. “We recorded 15 songs, but just because you record 15 ideas doesn’t mean you’ve got an album,” he told the NME. “Maybe for some bands it is [enough for an album], but for us it’s probably just like the first quarter of a record, ’cause you edit it a lot and you make sure you get the best stuff in the end. I love making music with those guys, but I don’t know, I mean, honestly, if all of us collectively feel like, ‘This is the best thing we could possibly be doing collectively now,’ we’d do it again. But until that happens, we won’t do it again.”

  Meanwhile, Graham Coxon – by now aided by producer Stephen Street – was still chipping away at the mountain of material that Blur had created in Hong Kong. It wasn’t until late 2014 that it was in a state where he felt able to present it to Albarn as being a possible eighth Blur album.

  Coming back from Australia at the end of the year, Albarn stopped off again in Hong Kong – to maintain the Far Eastern feel of the recordings so far – and wrote some lyrics. “It was really accidental. It was completely natural and spontaneous,” Albarn later said. “I was just singing lyrically what was coming in my head.” But he was still publicly saying that it could still be one of those albums that “might never come out”.

  But, by February 2015, the tune had been very much changed. Not only was the album to come out, it had a name: The Magic Whip. During a live-streamed press conference from the Golden Phoenix Chinese restaurant in London – very symbolic – Albarn explained how the album had come about: “Graham came to me and said, ‘We’ve got something here.’ I was really busy doing my own thing but they came back and played me what they’d done and I was like, ‘Oh, no, this is really good.’ There were v
ery mixed emotions for me. I really felt at the end of the last gigs we did that that was it; that was the end. Not for any heavy reason, [but] it had run its course. There’s no way we could do another gig without a new record.”

  Indeed, it was announced that there would be more gigs, including a return to Hyde Park, and the band unveiled a new track, the relatively low key “Go Out”. On the song there were walls of Coxon guitars, a Morrissey-esque vocal and a pub-based lyric – nothing to frighten off either the die-hard fans or the casual browser.

  “Go Out” was accompanied by a video that helpfully showed the viewer how to make vanilla ice cream and the theme was continued for the neon ice cream cone cover of The Magic Whip when it was released in the end of April 2015. Kicking off with “Lonesome Street” – a song that could easily sit on Parklife with its whoo-woos and whistles – The Magic Whip would essentially prove to be the album that fans and critics wanted it to be. In fact, the album’s opening track was so potent that Liam Gallagher tweeted his view of the song, dubbing it “track of the year”.

  Elsewhere there was Albarn in David Bowie/Anthony Newley mode on “New World Towers”, the kind of blips and bleeps favoured by Gorillaz on “Ice Cream Man” and “Thought I Was a Spaceman”, and enough World Music eclecticism and singalongs on “Pyongyang” – very Low-period Bowie – and “Ong Ong” to satisfy fans that Albarn had picked up in the years since Blur’s heyday. The spaghetti-western stylings of “Mirrorball” finish things off with a chance to marvel at Coxon’s guitar playing. And then it’s all over.

  Critics thought all their Christmases had come at once. “The Magic Whip turns out to be a triumphant comeback that retains the band’s core identity while allowing ideas they’d fermented separately over the past decade to infuse their sound with mature and peculiar new flavour combinations,” drooled The Telegraph. “Produced by Stephen Street – the man who stood behind the glass for them in their mid-nineties pomp – these songs inhale Albarn’s experiences with World Music and opera and Coxon’s with psychedelic folk, count to ten, then exhale them with the band’s unique and dynamic four-way chemistry.”

  “In returning, Blur have progressed,” stated Clash magazine. “This is not a band revisiting past glories, indeed they’ve said recently that they felt there was no scope to do further gigs without new music to play. Shorn of expectation and match fit in the middle of a long tour, four friends found each other again.”

  “It’s hard not to hope The Magic Whip isn’t Blur’s last word,” said The Guardian’s Alex Petridis, a long-term Albarn watcher. “Musically, they don’t sound like a band taking a final curtain call. They sound like a band filled with ideas and potential new directions, who have plenty left to do together, if they choose.”

  Petridis’s review was headlined “Friends reunited for a beautiful comeback”.

  There was a time when the return of Blur might have seemed like a terrible idea in terms of Damon Albarn and his place in the British music industry. There’s no question about his abilities and the way he’s outreached his peers – the idea of his being in any way in competition with the likes of Noel Gallagher now seems a touch quaint. But the Blur reunion may have provided Damon Albarn with something less expected: it’s helped make him loved rather than just admired.

  Yet he’s always seemed to want to have things his way. He was keen to shed Blur’s teeny following and find a way to maintain sales and venue capacities; he wanted to dabble in World Music, soundtracks and opera without appearing pretentious. He highlighted our obsession with adverts after the 2014 BRITS debacle, and permitted British Gas to use “The Universal”. Annoyingly, for his critics at least, in most cases he has had it both ways. But reforming a once glorious band with genuine credibility – now that’s a tricky one. Yet he’s not only managed it, he’s pulled it off with a critical and commercial flourish as The Magic Whip not only racked up great reviews but cruised to No.1.

  But, despite the plaudits and the nitpicking, Damon Albarn is a man who doesn’t seem too perturbed by what people think of him. Recall him firing up the orchestra during the sessions for Ordinary Decent Criminal – in front of the rolling South Bank Show cameras; remember him exhorting his band at the Roundhouse in London, before a packed audience; bring to mind Damon in animated conversation with the sound engineer during the first performance of Monkey. He has strong views and is not afraid to express them clearly.

  Yet he’s clearly mellowed. The Magic Whip – particularly on the track “My Terracotta Heart” – is essentially a mutual extended apology. “Damon and I have an increased respect for each other because of this record, and we’re not ashamed to let each other know about that increased respect,” Graham Coxon explained to the NME. “But what we also have a lot of is history and our friendship – like any friendship between two people who are in a band together – has had to go through a lot. It’s been put to the test and we’ve often let each other down. This record was a way of saying, ‘Sorry for being such a pain in the arse for the last 20 years.’”

  Albarn’s competitiveness is legendary – and can work against him. His run-ins with Oasis – brought to life so amusingly in John Dower’s film Live Forever – actually benefited the Gallaghers more than anyone. At the time, they were nowhere near as popular as Blur but the fight ultimately favoured the Mancunians more. Indeed, the row bolstered the fortunes of Oasis considerably. It was still a masterstroke of marketing and, although the row happened in the last century, we’re still talking about it today. Would a spat between Ed Sheeran and Kodaline raise such a kerfuffle these days? Absolutely not.

  After the Britpop years the fame he initially craved kicked back at Damon Albarn – and, before he found calm in Iceland, he admits it left him in a mess. “I was in a state of constant agitation for nearly two years,” he told Rolling Stone. “I had heart palpitations, and I thought about death virtually daily. I had a real physical sense that the off button was going to be switched… very soon, and that was very upsetting to me, because as a teenager and as a child, I was very relaxed and happy.”

  Damon’s former partner – and a vital player in this story – Justine Frischmann, says that Damon endured three months of not being able to sleep or stop crying during the Parklife period. “But once he got over the shock of the fact that he was actually getting what he wanted,” she told Q magazine, “it was pretty plain sailing for him.”

  That sense of Albarn having it easy is a common theme. He’s seen in some quarters as being privileged, almost upper class. Singer James Blunt once described Albarn as being so posh he had “an orchard full of plums in his mouth and a silver spoon stuck up his arse”.

  Not really true – and a bit rich coming from Blunt – but if Damon has been privileged in any way, it’s through being on the receiving end of the kind of happy, creative childhood that most people only dream of. That’s not his fault, nor should it be anything he is criticised for. The poverty-ridden, bedsit poet as the only type of songwriter capable of creative prowess is a clichéd and tired standpoint.

  The journey from his idyllic roots to soaking up applause for his latest opera – 2015’s wonder:land – has been unlike any other in British rock. Technically, creatively and socially he just seems better at it than anyone else. A great deal has happened since those first forays into synth pop and his inaugural live performance with Seymour back in 1988. But, from the word go, things seem to have gone in Damon Albarn’s musical favour.

  “It was great. It was perfect,” he recalled to Select about that first ever gig. “I felt, this is something. It was literally just an old train shed in this low-key museum that we hired out. The audience sat in a tube train carriage. We used my dad’s old strobe light from the 1960s. We were drunk, but in a good way, it was very innocent, pure.”

  Creativity seems to come very easily to Albarn and his muse. Yet, paradoxically, no-one doubts the puritanical work ethic that backs up his immense creativity – a powerful combination. That seems to annoy his detr
actors more than anything. Suburban pop paranoia, World Music, hip-hop and reggae, soundtracks and opera – it all seems to flow unabated. “I still get writer’s block sometimes but I have learned not to worry about it. If I get it, I just go off and do something else, work on something different, then come back to it later.”

  But, perhaps in direct contrast to his reputation in some quarters as a single-minded visionary, the skill that Albarn has shown more tellingly than any other during his career is his abilities as a collaborator. From Graham Coxon to Monkey’s Chen Shi-Zheng, or from Paul Simonon of The Clash to Jamie Hewlett, he has demonstrated an unerring sense of whom to pinpoint for his own work –and whom to jump on board with for theirs. This has created an output of such volume, quality and variety that it shames his contemporaries. This is a man unafraid of hard work and unafraid of looking forward to more of it in the future – whether it’s with Gorillaz, Africa Express, his solo outings or even with Blur.

  The return of Blur – something that has now added to his ongoing body of work rather than detracted from it – could have been a rare step backwards for Albarn, particularly when there are so many forward steps yet to be taken: “In music, as soon as you think you’ve discovered one code, you’re immediately faced with a thousand other codes,” he once said. “Music is infinite and that’s why, for me, it’s a life-long journey.”