SUSO

From Blur to Gorillaz to Monkey – Paul Morley spends 18 months chasing Damon Albarn across an ever-shifting sonic landscape.

W / PAUL MORLEY
I / GEORGE TSOUTSIAS (Above)
I / JAMIE HEWLETT

Here I am, or there I’ve been, talking with Damon Albarn. It’s after midnight inside a bustling hotel bar in Manchester; it’s a glorious spring day on a rooftop terrace in West London; it’s a mid-summer Saturday afternoon at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.

The hotel in Manchester is within sight of a filthy, clogged canal and a city centre Starbucks, set inside a renovated, futuristic Manchester superimposed over a grimy, derelict Manchester, somewhere between the elusive, ghostly past and the specific, persuasive present. This is a good position for a musician interested in exploration to find himself. The rooftop terrace is outside Albarn’s studio/office headquarters, a place where he can work, play and plan his next projects.

Albarn’s got a lot to say; about where he’s been and what he’s seen and where he’s going as a musician, father, impresario, celebrity – a word that is delivered with an expression of mild disgust – and what the world’s coming to, and what he, and others, might be able to do about that, with their work, and their ideas, and their views. He’s particularly appalled about a pop culture world filled with passive consumers distracted and devalued by their obsession with sex, celebrities and shopping, and he’s deeply committed to the African tradition that music is a dynamic, driving force that animates entire communities.

His conversation, which features regular absentminded pauses that suddenly leap into passionate speeches about the need to battle mediocrity, is a combination of the naïve, the knowing, the frustrated and the determined. He can be stroppy. He can be gentle. Physically and facially he resembles the fresh-faced, slightly squalid Albarn who was a dressed-up southern popstar rival to loutish retro-northerners Oasis issuing ordinary if exuberant statements that seemed solidly, and a little drearily, based in an everyday world. He dresses darkly and loosely, like someone who found their style in the early ’90s, a style based on a mod, punk and rave past, like someone who used to be a lively loved frontman but who’s now withdrawn into, more or less, the shadows, where he can lurk and cheerfully resist conventional expectations about his behaviour and attitude.

Rock is now made for a fundamentally nostalgic audience. Albarn is a reminder of that liberating, eneterprising spirit.

Ten years ago I would not have imagined that it would be the cocky, comedic lead singer of the laddish four piece Blur who would break free of obvious rock music restrictions and become an elusive sonic adventurer imagining potential new musical hybrids without sacrificing accessibility and popularity. I would not have bet that the jaunty, surly Albarn would reveal, through his Honest Jon record label, extravagantly packaged concepts and animated fantasies – that he may have the interests and fascinations of an historian, but that he’s an explorer. He loves searching the stranger, more hidden past for material and motivation, for fresh angles on where to go next. He describes how the past is, if you think about it, a version of the future. He remembers how as a child he would feel that he had discovered the secret of the universe when he imagined that the past was the future and the future was the past. He would momentarily grasp the tantalising theory and then lose it, and then desperately attempt to get it back into focus, and savour its significance.

I tell him that I paid little attention to him as a cheeky chappy pop singer in the Britpop years because he offered nothing new and seemed embedded in a rocked up music hall movement that appeared to fear the future. I’m surprised to be so interested in him now that, as a pop musician, he’s offering numerous examples of something new, even if this is something that is new only inside the world of pop, which is less about the new and simply about rearranging obvious parts of the past. He shrugs his shoulders, as if to say, ‘What do you want me to say?’ Or he’s saying, ‘I had no choice, it was Blur forever – friendly hits and unattractive ageing youth, Britpop revivalism leading inevitably to a catastrophic collapse of dignity and vision – or the kind of music I’m really interested in.’ This music ranges from the fantastically obscure to the sensationally bewitching and can be found at various times and places between the gloomy, ethereal twelfth and the dazzling, dangerous twenty-first century.

Most rock performers tend to establish their style and sound based on natural adolescent enthusiasms for outlaw gestures (which tend to be fairly predictable), and repeat these ideas endlessly, until it becomes a comfortable formula that basically undermines the original renegade principle of rock. Rock is now made for a fundamentally nostalgic audience. Even young teenage fans of rock are ultimately yearning for a past when rock looked to an unknown future, a provisional sense of the next. Albarn is a reminder of that liberating, enterprising spirit, and although there are still numerous musicians working within rock that commit themselves to exploration, to uncovering essential truth, Albarn is doing so as a kind of fashionable pop star, albeit a discreet one in various forms of camouflage.

Very few rock musicians have the talent and courage to discover and smartly revise new post-pop sounds without sounding neurotically inauthentic and out of their depth. Whereas his peers have continued to reproduce a pop music that in the first place was a modified, ornamental reproduction of 30-year-old riffs and poses, the impressively inquisitive Albarn has instinctively slipped into new spaces, crossed a few horizons, slipped through unexpected tunnels, bathed in unusual waters, climbed different trees, examining the idea of pop – and music – from a multitude of different points of view. His music is still clearly the music of someone who listened to The Clash, The Specials and The Human League, but instead of this music continually betraying those early loves, it demonstrates that as a youngster, before he fully embraced pop music, he was listening to the serious, wide ranging and international music his parents were playing every night at home – religious and secular music that demonstrated how there was a deeply rewarding world out there beyond the Beatles, Stones and Pistols, beyond Bowie, Bolan and the Kinks. Albarn’s modern music might emerge from a pop, hip hop, post-punk and psychedelic landscape, but it’s also informed by other music as far apart, or as close together, as Perotin, Bartok, Terry Riley, Kurt Weill, John Cale and Neu!.

The parochial and conformist pop Englishness which boxed Blur in, and trapped Albarn as tabloid-monitored scoundrel with pop star wife, has consequently been replaced by a fabulous, haphazard and sinister Englishness as much connected to Blake, Carroll, Orton and Orwell as Barratt, Eno, Drake and Wyatt. This furtive, hallucinatory island Englishness blends with ancient and modern music from around the world without ever sounding, like most hopefully groundbreaking fusion music, ugly, diluted or plain ridiculous.

Even the one post-Blur project Albarn helped conceive that is the closest to imagining what his egotistical version of a new Blur pop group would have been like, The Good, The Bad & The Queen, might involve bassist Paul Simenon of The Clash and guitarist Simon Tong of Verve – which fits predictable rock supergroup parameters – and Albarn might, from an amused, stunned distance, sing, but it also features bop-inspired, afrobeat inventing Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, musical director of Fela Kuti’s Africa ’70. The Dickensian psychic dub music is cranky, plangent and forbidding. GB&Q is not really a group but a spectral song cycle about how the present day replaces the past, about how one, old London has been replaced by another, more modern London, and how both Londons reflect each other. Albarn’s GB&Q meditated on how the forces of the past can drain life from the present even as it sustains it, which is some kind of comment on where pop music and culture in general is at the moment. GB&Q was a typical post-Blur Albarn project – where ideas are a form of wish fulfillment, and one project is loosely connected to another by speculative sensibility and purpose, and a robust melodic yearning, but which emerge from very different sources and cultures and Albarn's idealistic sensitivity to the social, ceremonial and ritualistic functions of music.

Some months separate the conversations I have with Albarn. In those months, he has been very busy. Albarn likes to be busy. He likes to be on the move; perhaps making sure no one can pin him down and cut off his creative blood flow like they did in the ’90s. At times he seems so busy – racing from idea to idea, project to project, country to country, musical hybrid to musical hybrid – that you decide he must be easily bored, chronically restless, some kind of musical missionary, or just embarrassed by his plain and ultimately unbrainy Britpop past. ‘Look at me,’ he’s saying. ‘You might not have to be much of a thinker to be a success in pop right now, but I have all these ideas, and that’s just scratching the surface of what you can do musically following a century that went from Stravinsky to Kraftwerk, from Bertolt Brecht to Beck, from Elgar to Sun Ra, from John Fahey to Baaba Maal, from Matthew Arnold to XTC, from Erik Satie to Roxy Music.’

In Manchester, it’s summer 2007, and he’s 39, and he’s just witnessed the first performance of the theatrical opera, or experimental musical, or abstract song cycle, Monkey: Journey to the West, which he has dreamt up in collaboration with various others, including his creative partner, the graphic pop artist Jamie Hewlett, but which he takes most responsibility for. He’s wondering if the piece, the production, might be a whimsy, an ambition, a fantasy too far. He was nervous before the performance that it might not work, this volatile combination of orchestra, dancers, acrobats, singers, special effects – an epic, centuries-old Chinese fable about spiritual awakening, the fierce sounding Mandarin language, his melancholic English sensibility, Hewlett’s vivid comic book imagery. Has he fallen into the trap where rich, lauded, self-righteous and deluded pop star produces bloated, pseudo-serious extravagance that has minimal enduring value? Having been a traditional pop star, even in a group that tried, within reason, within particular conventions, to manipulate and experiment with pop formats, he might just be building the post-Britpop version of prog rock.

Albarn does not seem to belong in the kind of grand musical palace that implies music is about wealth, glamour, royalty and status.

He is uneasy after the performance – despite the fact there were no major mistakes, and it seemed a fluent, entertaining, occasionally transcendent combination of Chinese atmosphere, classical drama, physical comedy, metaphysical strivings and pop agility. He’s not sure that the musical balance, between the noble and the stormy, was completely successful. The sold out audience at the Manchester Palace seem to have enjoyed it, but Albarn can’t help but be anxious, as if he quite enjoys the self-examining pain, and deflects those who congratulate him on the achievement, twitching when the compliments seem too over the top. He’s sensitive to the possibility that the reaction to Monkey, which is not exactly accessible, and if not specifically operatic does have its cryptic and melodramatic moments, might just be the polite conversation of those respecting the fact that he mysteriously skipped from hit Blur to virtual Gorillaz to ghostly The Good, The Bad & The Queen, with other various bold stops along the way, so he must know what he’s doing, even if this new thing’s a bit enigmatic and lacks an obvious hit tune. He’s already calculating how to make changes to the piece, how to make it better and less unwieldy. It’s unfinished, he decides, and sets off to finish it.

In West London, in spring 2008, he is now 40, and he is talking to me as part of the promotion he will reluctantly and yet agreeably engage in for the Monkey record he has spent some months putting together – not a direct reproduction of the stage music, but a personal, fragmented exploration of the experience he has had as researcher, traveler and musicologist visiting China and learning about the culture, history, religion, art, politics and geography of one of the world’s most mysterious, intimidating and remote countries. He feels more comfortable with the way the record of the Monkey event has been a little more under his control. He likes to be part of large, mobile teams of musicians, with large and small groups pulsating in various interactive shapes, he loves working with Hewlett on theatrical, possibly preposterous, concepts, but he’s probably happiest on his own in a studio pursuing a very private idea of beauty, modestly flirting with the idea that he might actually be at the centre of the universe. The fancy, excessive and sub-operatic cosmic pantomime Monkey has been transformed into an intimate, very personal experiment in time, rhythm and place.

The Monkey album reminds me of early melodic, deliberately guitarless electro music on the Mute label – Fad Gadget, The Normal, Thomas Leer – as though there was an alternative Chinese movement of futuristic new wave synth-pop in 1978. By replacing real strings, brass and percussion with computer generated substitutes, and processing samples of found Chinese sounds and recorded monkey voices, Albarn reflects the recent Chinese move, which is both magical and businesslike, into the modern world. It’s a postmodern souvenir of the way a vast, stubborn China has tentatively, and then lustily, embraced the seductive uncertainties of modernism. Oddly, it then fits into the crammed, superficially decorative contemporary pop landscape. Somewhere there we can locate Albarn’s supple genius.

At times he seems so busy - racing from project to project - that you decide he must be easily bored.

Monkey is definitely related to his most famous post-Blur assignment, Gorillaz, the million selling non-existent pop group drawn from the pulped up imagination of Hewlett as well as the focused studio control of Albarn. To some extent, it is a Gorillaz record, at the same time a prequel and a sequel to the two playful, dissolute Gorillaz albums released just before and a little after September 11, 2001, and it’s certainly advertised as being made by the makers of Gorillaz. (It’s not officially a Gorillaz record as then it would have been released on the Parlophone/EMI label, Albarn’s long time commercial home, and Albarn is disappointed with what he says is the label’s recent betrayal of its pioneering British roots.) Monkey is another surprising Albarn solo record, surrounded by various levels of associated promotional, visual and conceptual paraphernalia. It’s the work of a pop musician with an inquiring mind raised on the cosmopolitan intellectual passions of the post-punk indie era who had open-minded, literate, music loving parents.

At the Royal Opera House, summer 2008, Albarn marvels at the idea that the establishment has briefly staged a production of Monkey – the earthy, antic Monkey is especially mischievous when craving for immortality under the sparkling Opera House chandeliers. Damon does not seem to belong in the kind of grand musical palace that implies music is about wealth, glamour, royalty and status, but you can imagine someone quite like him; tough, talented and strangely dedicated to making the world more fascinating, time weaving through the centuries, finding novel ways to entertain large, attentive and discriminating audiences with all kinds of exotic and visceral musical entertainments. 

On the terrace outside his studio, Albarn more or less sits still for a couple of hours and does all he can to sincerely fulfill his duties as interviewee. I get the feeling that he would rather stare at the sky and daydream about what he’s going to do next, tired after the three years it’s taken to set Monkey into motion, impatient to prove that he’s more than a resourceful pop illusionist with a graceful facility for reinvention; that he’s not run out of ideas. He’s desperately keen to follow up one or more of his projects, schemes and activities with something else the same but different that doesn’t quite repeat anything he’s done before.

I am talking, or will be talking, to Damon Albarn, an aggrieved romantic who likes to release his imagination, who fervently opposes the idea of a static society, who used to be just another pop star, part of a predictable crowd, and is now, for various reasons, something else altogether.

www.monkeyjourneytothewest.com

This is where it ends

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