Gorillaz | Herald Sun – October 2020

Gorillaz draw in big names

by Cameron Adams

Damon Albarn has just had a taste of what he’d been missing through lockdown. The British musician is frontman of Blur and also the musical force behind virtual band Gorillaz, but his latest side project saw him perform an opera in Paris earlier this month.
“It was so emotional to hear an audience cheering again, it was just wild,” Albarn says wide-eyed over Zoom. “In lockdown our senses have been retuned in so many ways.”

Albarn spent three years working on the project, which traces the history of the slave trade and France’s involvement in it, told in four different languages with song, dance, film and musicians from Nigeria, Mali, Senegal and Congo.
“It’s a pretty heavy theme but people somehow enjoyed it! I definitely want to make a record of it. We were working in Paris for six weeks, with 60 people. It’s such a different attitude to keeping the system going there in terms of the arts compared to here in England. We’re at the bottom of the pile here, literally. It’s shocking.”
Albarn is referring to Prime Minister Boris Johnson suggesting those in the arts who aren’t eligible for government handouts retrain to a more employable skill like working in IT.
“It’s just a really callous thing to say to people. If you’re a ballet dancer you’ve dedicated your whole childhood to getting to that point. It’s just that disconnect they seem to have. On a human level it’s disgusting, and on the functional level it doesn’t make any sense. You need content and real content only comes from creativity, not Tik Tok content.”

Albarn’s other lockdown project was finishing the new Gorillaz project, Song Machine, firing up his virtual alter-ego 2D. It began as a concept to release stand-alone singles each month, featuring different artists.
Gorillaz had banked work with everyone from Slowthai to New Order’s Peter Hook before lockdown.
Once the UK shut down, Albarn and family relocated to Devon, where he has a farm and a studio in a barn.
For a band used to working remotely and no stranger to virtual shows, they were ahead of the curve.
“We just carried on,” Albarn says. “We were able to function better in this environment than other people maybe … I was by the sea for five months, it was beautiful, idyllic really.
“So we worked with Robert Smith, Beck, Elton, St Vincent and Kano all down there in Devon on Zoom. But we had no idea we were making an album when we started.”
There’s a three-month delay between Albarn finishing a song and his Gorillaz partner, artist Jamie Hewlett, animating the accompanying video.
Albarn finished recording at the end of May and by the time he’d handed all the songs over to Hewlett the project that was designed to break the regular album cycle became an actual album.
“When we played it back we thought, ‘Blimey, that’s a really good record’.
“It was not written as an album at all, just written as stand-alone songs when people were up for collaborating. Normally you go into the studio for three months and you end up with songs that start sounding a bit the same because you’re trying to get a theme together, you don’t bother so much with every song being really super punchy because you’re listening to it as a whole. So this is a good way to work, I recommend it. I can’t wait to start season two.”

Albarn wrote a bassline for Aries that was so influenced by Peter Hook he felt he should get the bassist to actually play on it. “He came in and improved it vastly. I was imagining I was Peter Hook but it felt wrong.”
Elton John was quick to join rapper 6lack on The Pink Phantom (“Elton is so switched on to everything, he’s a force of nature”) while The Cure’s Robert Smith guests on Strange Timez. “We spoke mainly by email, Robert didn’t really become active until after dusk. When he sent what he’d done back and I put my singing voice next to his it didn’t work, his voice is just too distinctive, sometimes two distinctive voices don’t work, so I did my 2D thing instead, my essay on the apocalypse I’ve been writing for 20 years!”

While Blur remain on hold (“I’d like to be part of people standing in fields watching people on stages singing their hearts out, I miss it terribly”) Gorillaz plan to perform The Song Machine in London for a paid live stream in December.
“It’s essentially Song Machine Season One, and maybe some older songs but because there’s no audience I feel like the big hits are kind of redundant,” Albarn says. “What makes them magic when you play the hits at a concert is the recognition. “Maybe we might try and play stuff people haven’t heard so much to keep the spirit of what we’re doing. It’s the only way we’ll get a chance to play the songs this year.”