MONTREAL ‘A BEGUILING CITY,’ GORILLAZ MASTERMIND SAYS
Ground control to Damon Albarn ...
The Gorillaz leader and former Blur frontman was calling from a studio in London, where he was putting the finishing touches on a new song, but he might as well have been on the line from another planet. The crackly cell reception and overseas delay made for a conversation that drifted in and out of intelligibility.
Which was fitting for a guy who runs a cartoon band about a group of interstellar explorers wandering through the universe.
“2018,” Albarn said, in response to my query about what city he was in.
Sensing that he was not being facetious but had simply misunderstood, I asked again.
“London,” he replied, adding, “This is a good start: establish time and place.”
While we were at it, I figured I’d get his thoughts on the place I was in, Montreal.
“Ah,” he said. “Lots of images come to mind. It’s in parts a beguiling city with a slightly odd yet very interesting history and perspective on France, compared to anyone else’s, perhaps.”
On the topic of cities, the recently released sixth Gorillaz album, The Now Now, is a laidback and groovy affair written entirely from the perspective of Albarn’s animated alter ego 2D. It may be the band’s most downto-earth release, with American cities prominently featured in song titles and lyrics.
On Hollywood, a bumping rap track featuring Snoop Dogg and Chicago house pioneer Jamie Principle, he croons languorously of “Jealousy and dark times / Sinking on the web,” adding, “There’s more to love than that.”
The head-bobbing Kansas finds him asking, “Am I incapable of healing ?” before informing us, “I’m on my journey home with no fuel, alone” and resolving, “I’m not gonna cry.”
Idaho drifts off to the sound of acoustic guitar and synths, as he recounts, “Every day I look out of the bus / Silver linings getting lost.”
Parallels to David Bowie’s Space Oddity come to mind, a comparison to which Albarn is not averse.
“I’ve got this theory that we’re in an anglo-saxo-existentialist crisis,” he said, “so yeah, absolutely.”
And though he was writing for his cartoon avatar, Albarn concedes that connections to his own life, and to life on this planet, are fair game, and something he and Gorillaz co-founder and illustrator Jamie Hewlett aspired to from the get-go.
“This band has been, in many ways, an emotional response to the world Jamie and I found ourselves in.
“A lot of this album was written from the top of buildings — I got vertigo about it — from on high, looking down onto vistas of North America ... I’m calling the world ( back) from isolation — not just America, but the multiple states of the world at this moment, which is more isolationist.”
His native U.K. with its ongoing Brexit crisis is a prime example.
“Absolutely,” Albarn agreed. “We’re at the epicentre, and we might end up in a civil war — it’s not impossible. Let’s hope we can resolve it peacefully. The next stage is coming up quite soon.”
A lot has changed on our planet in the two decades since Gorillaz took shape. Musically, the industry appears to finally be catching up to Albarn’s anythinggoes esthetic that has found him combining rock, hip-hop, reggae, electronics and whatever else is within reach, in liberal amounts.
“We came about at an interesting time,” he said, “right at the beginning of the transition to how we process music now. We already had that philosophy, that things don’t have to be physically with you to exist.”
That liberty allowed the band to attract guests ranging from De La Soul to Miho Hatori, Ibrahim Ferrer, Neneh Cherry, Ike Turner, Dennis Hopper, Bobby Womack, Lou Reed, The Clash’s Mick Jones and Paul Simonon, Grace Jones, Mavis Staples and Kali Uchis over the years.
And while their last album, 2016’s Humanz, was an overpacked, 20-track opus exploring the myriad possibilities of that freedom, The Now Now finds Gorillaz more focused and largely guest-free, making for one of the band’s most stylistically coherent releases.
“That has to be in part due to James Ford’s work,” Albarn said, referring to the British producer who has collaborated extensively with Arctic Monkeys.
“I loved working with him. He’s a really good musician. We made it very quickly, there wasn’t time to do anything other than work with what we had. Sometimes faster is better.”
This will be the last Gorillaz album for the foreseeable future, Albarn said, while admitting he doesn’t look ahead and likes to keep his options open.
“I honestly never imagined (we’d still be doing this),” he said. “We started the band with a couple of drawings and two songs. We didn’t imagine it was going to stick to the wall quite as firmly as it did.
“The nice thing is that when we stop doing it, we always have lots of things we’re interested in doing next. Then you just have to sort of try them all, and one of them becomes what you want to do. It takes the time it takes.
“I like that creative freedom. I aspire to it everywhere in my life.”