“It’s An Anglo -Saxostentialist Crisis…”
Damon Albarn and Paul Simonon speak to Danny Eccleston.
The album opens with a passage from A Canterbury Tale. Did you view the record as a pilgrimage? DA: That’s how I constructed it, lyrically. I went on pilgrimages. Some of them were the sites of quite ancient pilgrimages, like St Albans. Then some were less historic, like Southend. Then places from folk tales, like Banbury. But it all started in Blackpool – the idea of the record started there.
There’s a lot of ‘leaving’ on this record – a charged word since Brexit – are you saying we should be careful we don’t ‘leave’ ourselves? DA: Well exactly. An album about the mechanics of leaving the protocols of the EU would not be very emotionally interesting, but the idea of us as a family splitting, and no one really knowing why – I wanted to say, how do we feel, emotionally, about this, and how do I feel emotionally about this? And I think you can tell from the record how sad I feel about it.
They’re the densest lyrics you’ve written… DA: This was the first time that I used a method of writing that Lou Reed taught me. On [Gorillaz’] Plastic Beach he wrote the lyrics [to Some Kind Of Nature] while on some journey out of Manhattan and back, and immediately came in and performed them. He said, “I don’t obey the verse-chorus [rule]. I ignore that. All I do is write words and perform them as if I was speaking them naturally. And if they fall in different places, I’m happy with that.” And I suppose that’s what I did with this. I wrote a huge amount of prose and then sang it.
What did Tony Visconti bring to the table? PS: A couple of years ago, Damon said to me, “If we don’t get a producer soon, we’ll end up with another 50 songs and it’ll be another 10 years down the line.” I mentioned Tony Visconti, and Damon said, “You get him and we’ll use him.” He was great to have in the room. He gave us the space to make the record we wanted to make. And he’s a chef of sound. He was good at moving sounds around in the picture.
The Truce Of Twilight references the Dorset tradition of the Horned Ooser. DA: It’s a remnant of our pagan past, I suppose. It’s important because of what I call this Anglo-Saxostentialist crisis we’re going through. We wanna be English but we have no real connection with our true English roots. So the Horned Ooser, for anyone who cares to look him up, is quite a scary creature – not something you’d want to meet on a dark night.
Last time, Paul, you painted this backdrop that felt like part of the music. Do you have similar plans for Merrie Land? PS: Oh yeah, of course. It’s almost done. I see what we do as The Good, The Bad & The Queen as theatrical. I’d rather take it over that way than the spinning rock’n’roll lights.