“Then I joined in the naked breakdancing.”
Damon Albarn speaks to Tom Doyle.
The first phase of this record, pre-pandemic in Iceland, involved you looking out at the landscape and the changing weather patterns, and improvising. But later on, some of the songs felt prescient?
“Yeah. Very little was prepared beforehand. It really all just started from looking out the window. You’re staring out at such a vast landscape that is kind of an expression of our environment in every aspect. Y’know, from the brightness of the sun, to the darkness, to the violence and unpredictable nature of when storms come in and you just can’t really gauge how intense the experience is going to be…all of that was just going on. That was the daily soap opera outside the windows. So it’s in this state of flux, and I suppose, in a way that’s so true of where we are.”
Then, in May 2020, you did an online broadcast featuring a few of the songs with different lyrics. Just to air the work-inprogress ideas?
“I don’t know. I mean, no one was thinking particularly straight in May 2020 (laughs). But I’m glad that I was afforded all this extra time. Because my lyrics and everything are so much more what I wanted to express now than they were at that point. I benefited from having that huge pause put in my life.”
Why did the John Clare poem Love And Memory speak to you? “I’ve had a [John Clare] anthology knocking about since I was a teenager. My mum gave me it as a present. So there must have been some point where that line, ‘The nearer the fountain…’ just hit me like a hammer and I’d written it down. I’ve carried that around for a long time. But it was only really after Tony [Allen] died, when I came back to try and articulate what I felt in the songs, that I revisited the poem.”
None of us could travel, so in quite a few of these songs, you’re travelling in your mind…
“Yeah, all over the place. I went to the River Plate to Montevideo to Argentina. I went to Yazd and Shiraz in Iran. And it was really wonderful to do that. Because when I was writing the lyrics, I could spend a couple of days in my head in that place. It was perfect.”
The story behind Daft Waders is that in Iceland you drunkenly tried to get close to these “mad oyster catchers at 3am”. Can you elaborate?
“Well, what preceded that was a party in my house. My mate, Einar Snorri, who is a film-maker and also Iceland’s most famous breakdancer back in the early ’90s, wanted to demonstrate naked breakdancing. And then I joined in. Then we decided to go and try and get onto the island which is outside the house, because it was very low tide. We put some clothes back on, but we got stuck in the mud and shoes were lost, y’know. So, we were the Daft Waders. But the song is actually about travelling to Iran. I don’t know… I just make it up as I go along most of the time (laughs).”