Damon Albarn | Les Inrockuptibles – December 2023 – January 2024

Translated by Émélina

What the hell is this?

After a busy year, with a Gorillaz album, another one with Blur and a festival tour, Damon Albarn is looking forward. He talks to us about the opera he’s working on, his new studio in the countryside, and what he thinks of the music industry, The Beatles and The Stones.

by François Moreau

2023 has been a particularly eventful year for you, but has it been good?

Damon Albarn: Has my year been good? [He takes a long pause] I did a lot, a whole lot even, but still it’s hard for me to define 2023 as “a year”. I don’t know why. I started this studio construction project in the countryside, which occupied both my mind and my body. It’s a very peaceful place where I’ve spent a lot of my time. I raise hens, which requires a lot of investment. I mishandled the laying period and I found myself with two chickens which turned out to be royal cockerels. Having three cockerels is a problem. One of them is bigger than the others, I think it would be a perfect candidate for Christmas dinner. I also made an album, performed at Coachella with Gorillaz. And I got even more invested in this opera which will be presented in Paris next year. This is why I spend a lot of time here: I did a first presentation yesterday. 

Blur | Les Inrockuptibles – July 2023

Blur, the return! Interview with Damon Albarn : “Just as it was before”

By Francois Moreau. July 12, 2023. TRANSLATION.

Unexpectedly, Blur’s new album, “The Ballad of Darren”, is a total hit. We went to meet Damon Albarn to discuss the makeover of the album as a return to their roots.

A week earlier, I saw Blur in concert in the small room of the Riviera, in Madrid, following the cancellation of the first day of the Madrid version of the Primavera Sound festival, where the group was to perform. “We’re very happy, we come from small venues”, confided Damon Albarn, who came with Graham Coxon to answer questions from a handful of Spanish journalists, after listening exclusively to the album. Kids. On stage that night, I saw kids come back to the basic truths of their art, with adolescent elation and a tsunami-like outpouring of love.

This return to basics, Damon, a bit crafty and facetious, will tell me about it during this meeting, in which it will be about The Ballad of Darren, an album mostly written on the road during Gorillaz’s last tour and put together in the urgency of winter. “In a way, this record reminds me of why our concerts since the start of the tour have gone so well; I feel like we’ve gone back to 1993, when we were releasing Modern Life is Rubbish . A blessed time for us”, he confided. The Ballad, a grandiose opening track, is even taken from an old demo published in 2003 in Democrazy, an double-EP lo-fi as fuck, recorded by Damon in hotel rooms during Think Tank ‘s US tour. Proof that throwing nothing overboard also has virtues and that, 30 years later, the coolest group of the 1990s are still the creative engine of these melancholy commentators on the inexorable decline of the United Kingdom.

You played with Blur last week in Madrid, then at the Rio Loco festival yesterday as part of a tribute to Tony Allen, before leaving with Blur for a festival tour. Are you doing alright ?

Damon Albarn: I was in Toulouse for this tribute to Tony Allen, indeed. I probably could have given myself a little time out, but, you know, Tony has a very special place in my life and has been very important in my personal development. I mean, it’s important for me to get involved in keeping this legacy alive, maybe we’ll have to set up some sort of Tony Allen institute in Paris at some point. There is a lot to do.

The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows | Les Inrockuptibles – November 2021

“Writing was always my refuge”

by JD Beauvallet

Interview # 1, 1991. “We never thought about our future because we were sure we wouldn’t have one … We are very nihilistic, empty-headed. We have no motivation, no ambition”

Interview # 147, 2021. “I am very disciplined. I wake up early, then I do yoga, then I work until 5 p.m., then I cook, then I listen to recommended music, then I go to bed … “

Between these two interviews, the first and last to date thirty years have passed. A century, on the scale of pop music. Since his debut, the Londoner has claimed a loyal admiration for David Bowie. It is not an obligatory posture of an English pop singer. He has known so many characters, so many metamorphoses that he himself struggles to identify with all his masks, all his parallel projects. Blur, Africa Express, Gorillaz, The Good, the Bad & the Queen, Rocket, Juice & the Moon, The Heavy Seas … 

Today he welcomes us at length in his London neighborhood to discuss his new solo album The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows. He was so English when we first saw him, in his beginnings, draped in a British flag, that today it’s too small to cover all his incarnations. Damon Albarn has learned to travel, to meet, to share.

Gorillaz | Les Inrockuptibles – October 2020

“We created modern pop!”

It’s been twenty years since Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett imagined a band to satisfy their desires for music and fantasy. Today, Gorillaz is releasing its seventh album, bringing together as many talents as ever in search of that “invisible vibration”.

by Carole Boinet and François Moreau
photos by Thomas Chéné

First day of autumn, in Paris. We meet artist Jamie Hewlett and musician Damon Albarn, the two minds behind Gorillaz, in a café on the corner of rue Malte and rue du Faubourg-du-Temple. A somewhat surreal meeting in the current epidemic context, the closure of borders and the containment measures not facilitating the comings and goings of international artists.

But that’s not surprising, Jamie is living in a Parisian little flat and Damon is working hard with the Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako on the staging of ‘Le vol du boli’, an opera to be presented from October 7 to 9 at the Théâtre du Châtelet.

Unrecognizable behind their masks, the two Englishmen come to talk to us about Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez, Gorillaz’s seventh album, which brings together the great Robert Smith of The Cure, Elton John, the rapper slowthai and Peter Hook from New Order among others. On the program, memories of youth, some jokes and a sharp look at the cultural policy of the United Kingdom.

Blur | Les Inrockuptibles – September-October 1991

Blank generation

Everything is in the name, Blur, that is: blurry, confused. Blurry like this music fed by itself, a kaleidoscopic vision of a thirty-year-old discotheque. Confused like this discourse, more talkative when it comes to selling itself to a sensationalist English press hungry for cardboard sensationalism. Blurry and confused like this lost generation, screaming as loudly as possible its total absence of message and beliefs, disoriented and yet rotten with certainties. The children of disorder.

by JD Beauvallet

I don’t know anyone in the world who has never dreamed of becoming a pop star. There’s nothing more outrageous in the world than a pop star. I kept changing heroes all the time, I wanted to be Albert Camus one day, Arthur Lee the next. We wanted to be like them. Graham, our guitarist, collects heroes. He’s fascinated by those guys from the 60s who went crazy, Syd Barrett or Arthur Lee. Bowie too, he was the champion of the 70s, but today, he’s completely useless. Popular culture is, more than ever, an intrinsic element of our generation. We grew up imitating it, whereas before, people and culture grew together. We arrived when everything was already over. All our ideas, we stole them from videos, records, photos of this popular culture. We have no reference point before it; this culture completely envelops us. In the 60s, people could refer to events before popular culture. We have nothing else but this mad religion. We have fed only on popular culture, but at least, we have understood it. That’s what makes us more necessary than any other group. We see this result in ourselves, and so we can celebrate our own futility? Anyway, all groups feed in this soup where debris float in spirals.

TGTBTQ | Les Inrockuptibles – November 2018

Gorillaz | Les Inrockuptibles – June 2018

Translated by yggdrasilbohdi.

Meeting

It’s the sixth Gorillaz album only one year after Humanz : the brand new The Now Now is a great introspective record, marked by Damon Albarn’s genius and Jamie Hewlett’s distinctive style. The two of them were in Paris for a few days and opened the doors of this little masterpiece for us.

Gorillaz didn’t play any mean trick on us this time. Expert on contradiction, grimace, farce and other assorted tricks, the sound-and-comics-making band led by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett has indeed come back less than a year after its fifth record, Humanz, with an album called the Now Now. When we met them for Humanz, in London, back in 2017, at a VIP concert which gathered De La Soul, Jean-Michel Jarre, Pusha T, Benjamin Clementine and even Noel Gallagher – who, we suppose, was eating humble pie more than ever before, even if the rivalry between the former leader of Oasis and the leader of Blur has lost the spicy aroma it used to have in the 1990s-, Albarn and Hewlett clearly implied that their boxes were full of projects, and that news were to be awaited from 2018 onwards. And it’s in March of that year that Damon Albarn announced that the finishing touches had been put to the project, and played for the first time live, in Chile, the song called Hollywood featuring the soul legend Jamie Principle and the weed and rap legend Snoop Dogg.

Gorillaz | Les Inrockuptibles – April 2017

 

Blur | Les Inrockuptibles – April 2015

 

Thanks to Legless Owl from the Veikko forum for the translation.

Kids Return

How does it feel to come back to Blur 12 years after the last album?

Damon: To me, it’s just an additional album. Recorded with my oldest friend, Graham Coxon… I keep on recording albums, with a lot of people, in very different styles. When I work on them, I’m fully invested. There is no hierarchy within my projects, I am equally involved in them, I give everything I have. I don’t keep ideas under my hat to favour Blur… I don’t consider myself more part of Blur than I am of Gorillaz or of the Malian bands with whom I play. What I always find exciting is the next step. Besides, even if I live daily with that new album since we are rehearsing and will soon be live, to be honest, I’m already elsewhere… I’m currently working on a musical about Alice in wonderland for the National Theater in London. But please don’t believe that I took that Blur album lightly! It was settled in my head though: I was sure there would never be a new Blur album. I didn’t need it. Hence my surprise. I even long to play those songs live. We’re going to play at le Zénith de Paris but I don’t want to go on a huge tour, play every festival, be forced to postpone the opportunity of a new Gorillaz or Africa Express album… Or even a movie soundtrack. I cherish my freedom.

Damon Albarn | Les Inrockuptibles – April 2014

   

Parts of the interview translated by yggdrasilbohdi (thank you!):

Are you happier, less frustrated, less ambitious nowadays?

I drag my carcass around, and it’s hard to get things into perspective, but I think I am at peace these days. It’s easier to analyse my evolution, my transitions from an outside point of view ‒  to me, I just remain one and the same person.