Albarn provides the perfect soundtrack to the Brexit chaos
Pop The Good, the Bad & the Queen Earth, London N16
On a day when parliament descended into chaos over Brexit, Damon Albarn’s supergroup provided the perfect soundtrack.
The Good, the Bad & the Queen consist of members of The Clash (bassist Paul Simonon), The Verve (guitarist Simon Tong) and Blur (multiinstrumentalist frontman Albarn) with Tony Allen, the legendary Nigerian afrobeat drummer. The latter’s subtle jazz playing lends an exotic grooviness to an ensemble of British alternative rock stalwarts. Between them, they stirred up a deliciously weird sea-side-pier-flavoured dub rock as a hypnotic backdrop to Albarn’s surrealist and lyrical state-of-the-nation address.
This was an ever-shifting psychedelic collision of reggae rhythms and folk melodies coloured by fairground organs and pub piano, all strung together with spidery guitar figures hinting at film noir. Albarn prowled the stage, serenading and lamenting perfidious Albion in singsong blank verse. “If you’re leaving can you leave me my silver jubilee mug?” he crooned. “My old flag/ My dark woods/ My sunrise?”
Merrie Land, released last month, is only the second album in 11 years from this particular Albarn side-project, revived as a vehicle for thoughts and feelings about British nationalism. Albarn rose to prominence as an idol of Britpop, a genre that deployed the Union Jack as a symbol, refocusing British pop on British themes.
It would be absurd to blame Brexit on Oasis and Blur, but their swagger certainly fed into a sense of a nation reasserting pride in itself. Albarn’s wide-ranging post-blur work has been much more globalist, encompassing Japanese pop opera (Monkey: Journey
to the West), experimental Pan-african
adventures (Mali Music, Africa Express) and cartoon genre-bending hip hop with Gorillaz.
If it is difficult unreservedly to admire everything Albarn does, it is only because he keeps so busy that he makes all other musicians look like wastrels. At the age of 50, Albarn has made 26 albums and operas with over a dozen different ensembles, making him arguably Britain’s greatest contemporary pop polymath.
The Good, the Bad & the Queen might be his most satisfying post-blur configuration, with enough rock grit and satirical bite to allow Albarn to be a passionate frontman once again.
The second half of this intimate show in a converted cinema drew on material from GBQ’S self-titled 2007 debut album, which was much more direct and vigorous. The Merrie Land songs proved more slippery and yet utterly absorbing, showcasing Albarn’s ability to pull a melodic hook out of any combination of elements.
Simonon’s bass drove the rhythm with reggae inflections, while a string quartet, keyboard player, percussionist and, briefly, a pennywhistle player contributed to a miasma of sound. This peculiar sonic mélange is, in its own way, an ode to British multiculturalism, as if sea shanties and pub songs had always been underpinned by West Indian cadences. A dedicated Remainer, Albarn mostly refrained from hectoring, instead offering up bittersweet incantations to a land he loves, with references to maypoles, folk art and the sacrifices of the First World War’s soldiers.
Only on The Last Man to Leave did he really vent his spleen, snarling about “the houses of joy and disappointment of the Windrush”. It may have been a bold choice to abandon rhyming schemes, yet Albarn’s scansion and melodic flow ensured that you barely even noticed. “We don’t want you any more, we like the bed we’ve made to lie in much better, thank you,” he roared.
Agree with him or not, it is fantastic to hear this great songwriter so engaged again. Maybe we need to do Brexit more often.