Beneath the Planet of the Gorillaz
Chord, June 2005
The Gorillaz sit somewhere in the middle of a Bermuda Triangle formed by music, marketing, and straight-up media mayhem, and woe betide any music journalist foolish enough to try and describe them. A band made up of four cartoon characters who both are and aren't alter egos for famous real-life rockers, they're equal parts vanity project, performance art, practical joke, and promotional juggernaut. Take them seriously, and you're destined to wind up with egg on your face, but dismiss them and you're forced, painfully, to reckon with the fact that they've put together one of the most musically accomplished records of the summer. Demon Days is brilliant and banal and will do to any party what Tabasco sauce does to any omelet. And if that doesn't make you want to rush out and buy it, how 'bout I tell you it features a killer track called "Fire Coming Out of a Monkey's Head?"
(The scene: a nondescript room. Blinking sweetly at me with a nonchalance that belies her training 'in the deadliest of martial arts, Japanese guitarslinger NOODLE sits beside portly hip-hopper RUSSEL HOBBS, who looks kind of like an ink-and-paint version of Randy Jackson. Shaggy lead singer 2D, with the face of a boy-toy but the voice of a laconic philosopher, slouches at a far remove from joggedtoothed, wild-eyed bassist MURDOC NICCALS, who seems more than half inclined to silt my throat. I'm feeling a bit off my game, but maybe that’s because I'm the least, uh, animated person here.)
So, tell me ... How do you see this new record in relation to your last disc? (The Gorillaz exchange eyerolls. “Another day, another interview," they seem to be thinking. Surely they've been asked this same question a hundred times. Noodle and Russel shrug their shoulders and tacitly agree to field this one for the team.)
Noodle: Well, you can only really centrate on the job in hand.
Russel: It was important to prove that what we created and put into motion last time had a lasting value. That our Gorillaz sound, sensibility, and insight wasn't a, uh, flash-in-the-pan, here-today-gone-tomorrow sensation. Most great bands and crews tear themselves apart real soon, but the real trick is to tear yourselves apart, and then put it back together differently, and better. We'll see how good we are seven albums down the line.
Murdoc: (picking at his fingernails absently) It was easy following up the last record, mate. I could keep knocking out classics ‘til the cows come home.
But did you ever experience any doubt that you'd come up with a worthy successor? (Murdoc looks up sharply, fixing me with the kind of stare that could frost over a small lake, I shift in my chair uncomfortably.)
Murdoc: What d'you think? Take a good look into my eyes and see if you can spot any self-doubt.
2D: Don't mind Murdoc, He's all talk and no trousers. Having said that, during the making of the album I did wake up one day with a headache and a nine-inch scar across my abdomen.
Murdoc: (smiling maliciously) If you want your liver back, I'd keep an eye on eBay...
(An awkward silence settles over us.)
But perhaps I should step back into realty for a moment. Some background might help make sense of all this. What you need to know, in case you haven't been following the ins-and-outs of Britpop musico-politics in the last half-decade, is that in 2001 Damon Albarn decided he had a bunch of ideas that wouldnt quite fit on a new Blur album, He teamed with a surprisingly diverse crew - Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth of the Talking Heads, Del tha Funky Homosapien - and found a producer in Deltron 3030 boardsmaster Dan the Automator.
The result, the first self-titled Gorillaz record, would likely have been a big hit on the dance and modern rock charts even without the final stroke of genius which saw the record done over by Tank Girl comics artist Jamie Hewlett. Hewlett's visually arresting drawings were the genesis of Noodle, Russel, 2D, and Murdoc, and their chunkily inked animated mugs splashed all over the superb video for irresistibly catchy lead single “Clint Eastwood.” The music press delighted in the weird marketing, relishing the novelty of “interviewing” cartoon characters via odd e-mail exchanges, and even tolerating the somewhat sterile live performances that saw Albarn and company playing in silhouette form behind a scrim onto which the cartoons were projected. A good time was had by all, the record sold a gazillion copies, and it was the soundtrack to just about every '01 revelry you can remember.
This could easily have been the end of the story. Albarn’s fondness for the zany either galvanized or destroyed Blur on 2003's Think Tank - your opinion generally depends on how you feel about alienated collaborator Graham Coxon, who departed as Albarn's obviously commercially viable Gorillaz-ish impulses were allowed freer and freer rein. And since the four cartoon members of Gorillaz don't really exist, there was no need for them to make house payments or indulge their restless muses, which meant there never really needed to be a follow-up. The whole project could have remained a clever prank, perpetrated on the entire music community with its gleeful consent, except that Albarn had a lot more beats in his head, and the record company certainly wasn't averse to a second disc from a massively popular band, however fictional its members might be. Which brings us back to Noodle, who we're told, penned early drafts of much of the music that became Demon Days ...
Tell me a little about the recording process. Where did these new songs come from?
Russel: Well, this time Noodle did most of the work herself, recording mainly at our HQ Kong Studios. She's shown a fantastic dexterity with sound, It's almost martial
Noodle: Yeah, I started writing near the beginning of the year, around March of 2004, I began just by writing tunes on my Tascam four-track, sketching out ideas as proceeded. Once I had what I felt to be the main outline and template for the album, I started layering further textures, melodies, and sounds over the top. The compositions began to take shape, and gradually the songs began revealing their true identities, and which direction they needed to be taken. After that it's a question of finding the relevant ways to finish it and deliver the complete vision. Sometimes this can mean drafting in other collaborators.
Meaning, um, bringing in Russel and 2D and Murdoc?
Noodle: No. Well, yes, but what I mean was that I was impressed with the work Danger Mouse had done on The Grey Album. It was wonderfully inventive, and showed a childlike creativity, an artistic bravery and disregard for convention that I thought suited Gorillaz. As soon as I began working with him, the songs came to life almost immediately. I think it was when he turned a Gorillaz jam into the track “Dirty Harry.” That track became a starting point for the whole album.
The reference in the title of that song to your huge hit "Clint Eastwood” suggests you knew this record would be compared to the debut.
Murdoc: (snorting derisively) Well, what else are journalists gonna compare it to? The First World War?
Russel: That Eastwood thing is just an in-joke that keeps getting out.
2D: Much like Clint himself, in Escape From Alcataz!
(Laughter from all around. I laugh, too, thinking I get the joke, but also half-suspecting the joke might somehow be on me.)
It's true, as Noodle herself explains, that Demon Days finds the bottom-heavy hookiness of Dan the Automator replaced by a thicker, treblier-bloop-and-blip electronic sound courtesy of mash-up wonderboy Danger Mouse. There are probably those who will regard this as a shift away from accessibility and you'll feel the difference from early in the record: By the time you get to Neneh Cherry's guest vocal, a sly nod to Salt-N-Pepa's “Push It” buried beneath a grimy guitar line on “Kids With Guns,” you'll have almost forgotten the band is capable of something brighter and more OutKast-y like lead single “Feel Good Inc.”
Or lose yourself for a few in the murky marimbas of “Last Living Souls” and you'll be astonished when, 10 tracks later, Albarn kicks into the sunny DARE" the way the Tom Tom Club busted into "Genius of Love" midway through Stop Making Sense. There's no doubt whatsoever that the guy who mischievousty, and illegally, swirled a wooden spoon through a bowlful of the Beatles and Jay-Z has led the Gorillaz in an exciting, if occasionally somewhat dificult, new direction.
But lets not lose track of where we learned this information: Noodle has told us, of course. Somewhere in the strange interaction of journalists with non-existent musicians is the key to understanding both the cheeky appeal and the maddenng mystery of the Gorillaz, and there is no denying that Albarn and his compatriots have found a way to subvert the traditional native of rock music. If the way intellectually inclined listeners consume CDs is by devouring press accounts of its creators' history and opinions - by placing songs in the context of their backstories and dissecting lyrics and musical choices according to the relationships between songwriters and thelr professed influences - then the Gorillaz stand steadfastly opposed to that brand of listening, Their music is meant to be heard with the heart, not the head.
Although the marketing whizzes behind the Gorillaz are happy to provide oodles of biographical facts for the four ‘toons - whoever it is who writes "answers" for the band will gladly respond to interview questions about Noodle’s membership in an elite Japanese paramilitary team, or Russel’s longtime spiritual possession by a deceased rap genius, or 2D and Murdoc's testy, bordering-on-homicidal hate/hate relationship - we are doomed in any
effort to use this stuff to enrich our understanding of the music, since it didn't, obviously enough, actually happen. We can't even draw simple lines between the characters and their real-life counterparts - tousle-haired pretty-boy 2D is clearlythe Albarn analogue, yet there's no neat correspondence between his "contributions" to the band and Albarn’s role in producing the music.
Nor can we read this asa lightweight lark of cartoon band, since the fictional Gorillaz claim to have made the album with real-life producer Danger Mouse, which of course is what the real-life Albarn really did. Moreover, though the music is charmingly resistant to the two-dimensional simplicities the easy label “cartoon rock” might imply - the chorus to “Dirty Harry" features a child choir chillingly singing the chorus "I need a gun to keep myself from harm" - there's also a Polyphonic Spree-ish coda to Demon Days in the arms-in-the-air sing-along "Don't Get Lost in Heaven" and the gospelly title track. But this doesn’t mean the band members don't have some fascinating stories about the recording process, which of course you can take or leave as you please ...
So do you credit Danger Mouse with the host of atmospheric sounds that make this new record so distinctive, or were you going for something like that even before he came on board?
2D: Well, actually I think it's that our reconding studio is built on an old burial site, You end up getting really odd drafts, sounds and smells, and some of that ambience obviously ended up on the record. You can hear whooshes
and growls in the background on some of the tracks, One track wound up sounding so infested and diseased we just had to ditch it.
(He shivers visibly, remembering the creepiness of the discarded song.)
Noodle: Some of the spooky sounds on the track "O Green World” were caught on tape by accident. It is believed that they are the mysterious recordings of paranormal experiences going on at Kong Studios, and if you listen really carefully, you can hear this, uh, this growling and whispering. You can't help but be affected by the nature and atmosphere of your surroundings.
Russel: (nodding wisely) A horribly haunted house can leave quite a heavy imprint.
Murdoc: I tell you, baby, once you'e in Kong, you're in Kong for life! It's like the Overlook Hotel out of The Shining. It has a mind of its own ...
(He trails off. Alt four Gorillaz sit silent, musing, pondering the spiritual weight of the rooms in which they make their music.)
You get to a certain point with the Gorillaz where you just have to throw up your hands and roll with it. After all, in smudging the line between reality and fantasy it's possible that they've done more than most bands ever do to locate the fuzzy place where music exists. And what the heck, you think to yourself as
you realize your interview is coming to an end. Might as well play along ...
I don’t know if you read much of your press, but a lot of articles about you insinuate that you've had help from some non-cartoon ringers, people who were in other, lesser bands like Blur and the Talking Heads. Do you find this insulting?
Russel: I do feel that there is a very "cartoon-ist" attitude in the music press towards us. I think that that kind of bigotry and phobia is just a limited and shallow judgment on us as people,
Murdoc: Yeah, you'd think that people would comment on your huge, fat weight problem before they noticed you were a cartoon. "Look at that chubby sod! Oh, and he's a cartoon!”
Noodle: But Damon Albarn, if that’s who you're referring to, has been a great friend of Gorillaz right since our inception. He has always provided us with his musical opinion.
2D: Quite loudly sometimes.
(Chuckles of recognition indicate Albarn has been known to get a little pushy with his opinions in the past.)
Has there ever been any discussion of involving him in the band, musically?
2D: Wow. A duet between me and Damon would, uh ... Well, it would be pretty weird. Our voices are so similar ...
Russel: Both Damon and Danger Mouse gave us a lot of support in making this album, and there's no way, despite the devastating skills that Gorillaz have, that the record would have come out sounding as it does without the work that they did.
Murdoc: Yeah, but there are only four people in this band: me, Russel, Noodle, and 2D. (He glares dismissively at 2D.) And even some of them aren't really essential.
(The scene: a nondescript room. Blinking sweetly at me with a nonchalance that belies her training 'in the deadliest of martial arts, Japanese guitarslinger NOODLE sits beside portly hip-hopper RUSSEL HOBBS, who looks kind of like an ink-and-paint version of Randy Jackson. Shaggy lead singer 2D, with the face of a boy-toy but the voice of a laconic philosopher, slouches at a far remove from joggedtoothed, wild-eyed bassist MURDOC NICCALS, who seems more than half inclined to silt my throat. I'm feeling a bit off my game, but maybe that’s because I'm the least, uh, animated person here.)
So, tell me ... How do you see this new record in relation to your last disc? (The Gorillaz exchange eyerolls. “Another day, another interview," they seem to be thinking. Surely they've been asked this same question a hundred times. Noodle and Russel shrug their shoulders and tacitly agree to field this one for the team.)
Noodle: Well, you can only really centrate on the job in hand.
Russel: It was important to prove that what we created and put into motion last time had a lasting value. That our Gorillaz sound, sensibility, and insight wasn't a, uh, flash-in-the-pan, here-today-gone-tomorrow sensation. Most great bands and crews tear themselves apart real soon, but the real trick is to tear yourselves apart, and then put it back together differently, and better. We'll see how good we are seven albums down the line.
Murdoc: (picking at his fingernails absently) It was easy following up the last record, mate. I could keep knocking out classics ‘til the cows come home.
But did you ever experience any doubt that you'd come up with a worthy successor? (Murdoc looks up sharply, fixing me with the kind of stare that could frost over a small lake, I shift in my chair uncomfortably.)
Murdoc: What d'you think? Take a good look into my eyes and see if you can spot any self-doubt.
2D: Don't mind Murdoc, He's all talk and no trousers. Having said that, during the making of the album I did wake up one day with a headache and a nine-inch scar across my abdomen.
Murdoc: (smiling maliciously) If you want your liver back, I'd keep an eye on eBay...
(An awkward silence settles over us.)
But perhaps I should step back into realty for a moment. Some background might help make sense of all this. What you need to know, in case you haven't been following the ins-and-outs of Britpop musico-politics in the last half-decade, is that in 2001 Damon Albarn decided he had a bunch of ideas that wouldnt quite fit on a new Blur album, He teamed with a surprisingly diverse crew - Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth of the Talking Heads, Del tha Funky Homosapien - and found a producer in Deltron 3030 boardsmaster Dan the Automator.
The result, the first self-titled Gorillaz record, would likely have been a big hit on the dance and modern rock charts even without the final stroke of genius which saw the record done over by Tank Girl comics artist Jamie Hewlett. Hewlett's visually arresting drawings were the genesis of Noodle, Russel, 2D, and Murdoc, and their chunkily inked animated mugs splashed all over the superb video for irresistibly catchy lead single “Clint Eastwood.” The music press delighted in the weird marketing, relishing the novelty of “interviewing” cartoon characters via odd e-mail exchanges, and even tolerating the somewhat sterile live performances that saw Albarn and company playing in silhouette form behind a scrim onto which the cartoons were projected. A good time was had by all, the record sold a gazillion copies, and it was the soundtrack to just about every '01 revelry you can remember.
This could easily have been the end of the story. Albarn’s fondness for the zany either galvanized or destroyed Blur on 2003's Think Tank - your opinion generally depends on how you feel about alienated collaborator Graham Coxon, who departed as Albarn's obviously commercially viable Gorillaz-ish impulses were allowed freer and freer rein. And since the four cartoon members of Gorillaz don't really exist, there was no need for them to make house payments or indulge their restless muses, which meant there never really needed to be a follow-up. The whole project could have remained a clever prank, perpetrated on the entire music community with its gleeful consent, except that Albarn had a lot more beats in his head, and the record company certainly wasn't averse to a second disc from a massively popular band, however fictional its members might be. Which brings us back to Noodle, who we're told, penned early drafts of much of the music that became Demon Days ...
Tell me a little about the recording process. Where did these new songs come from?
Russel: Well, this time Noodle did most of the work herself, recording mainly at our HQ Kong Studios. She's shown a fantastic dexterity with sound, It's almost martial
Noodle: Yeah, I started writing near the beginning of the year, around March of 2004, I began just by writing tunes on my Tascam four-track, sketching out ideas as proceeded. Once I had what I felt to be the main outline and template for the album, I started layering further textures, melodies, and sounds over the top. The compositions began to take shape, and gradually the songs began revealing their true identities, and which direction they needed to be taken. After that it's a question of finding the relevant ways to finish it and deliver the complete vision. Sometimes this can mean drafting in other collaborators.
Meaning, um, bringing in Russel and 2D and Murdoc?
Noodle: No. Well, yes, but what I mean was that I was impressed with the work Danger Mouse had done on The Grey Album. It was wonderfully inventive, and showed a childlike creativity, an artistic bravery and disregard for convention that I thought suited Gorillaz. As soon as I began working with him, the songs came to life almost immediately. I think it was when he turned a Gorillaz jam into the track “Dirty Harry.” That track became a starting point for the whole album.
The reference in the title of that song to your huge hit "Clint Eastwood” suggests you knew this record would be compared to the debut.
Murdoc: (snorting derisively) Well, what else are journalists gonna compare it to? The First World War?
Russel: That Eastwood thing is just an in-joke that keeps getting out.
2D: Much like Clint himself, in Escape From Alcataz!
(Laughter from all around. I laugh, too, thinking I get the joke, but also half-suspecting the joke might somehow be on me.)
It's true, as Noodle herself explains, that Demon Days finds the bottom-heavy hookiness of Dan the Automator replaced by a thicker, treblier-bloop-and-blip electronic sound courtesy of mash-up wonderboy Danger Mouse. There are probably those who will regard this as a shift away from accessibility and you'll feel the difference from early in the record: By the time you get to Neneh Cherry's guest vocal, a sly nod to Salt-N-Pepa's “Push It” buried beneath a grimy guitar line on “Kids With Guns,” you'll have almost forgotten the band is capable of something brighter and more OutKast-y like lead single “Feel Good Inc.”
Or lose yourself for a few in the murky marimbas of “Last Living Souls” and you'll be astonished when, 10 tracks later, Albarn kicks into the sunny DARE" the way the Tom Tom Club busted into "Genius of Love" midway through Stop Making Sense. There's no doubt whatsoever that the guy who mischievousty, and illegally, swirled a wooden spoon through a bowlful of the Beatles and Jay-Z has led the Gorillaz in an exciting, if occasionally somewhat dificult, new direction.
But lets not lose track of where we learned this information: Noodle has told us, of course. Somewhere in the strange interaction of journalists with non-existent musicians is the key to understanding both the cheeky appeal and the maddenng mystery of the Gorillaz, and there is no denying that Albarn and his compatriots have found a way to subvert the traditional native of rock music. If the way intellectually inclined listeners consume CDs is by devouring press accounts of its creators' history and opinions - by placing songs in the context of their backstories and dissecting lyrics and musical choices according to the relationships between songwriters and thelr professed influences - then the Gorillaz stand steadfastly opposed to that brand of listening, Their music is meant to be heard with the heart, not the head.
Although the marketing whizzes behind the Gorillaz are happy to provide oodles of biographical facts for the four ‘toons - whoever it is who writes "answers" for the band will gladly respond to interview questions about Noodle’s membership in an elite Japanese paramilitary team, or Russel’s longtime spiritual possession by a deceased rap genius, or 2D and Murdoc's testy, bordering-on-homicidal hate/hate relationship - we are doomed in any
effort to use this stuff to enrich our understanding of the music, since it didn't, obviously enough, actually happen. We can't even draw simple lines between the characters and their real-life counterparts - tousle-haired pretty-boy 2D is clearlythe Albarn analogue, yet there's no neat correspondence between his "contributions" to the band and Albarn’s role in producing the music.
Nor can we read this asa lightweight lark of cartoon band, since the fictional Gorillaz claim to have made the album with real-life producer Danger Mouse, which of course is what the real-life Albarn really did. Moreover, though the music is charmingly resistant to the two-dimensional simplicities the easy label “cartoon rock” might imply - the chorus to “Dirty Harry" features a child choir chillingly singing the chorus "I need a gun to keep myself from harm" - there's also a Polyphonic Spree-ish coda to Demon Days in the arms-in-the-air sing-along "Don't Get Lost in Heaven" and the gospelly title track. But this doesn’t mean the band members don't have some fascinating stories about the recording process, which of course you can take or leave as you please ...
So do you credit Danger Mouse with the host of atmospheric sounds that make this new record so distinctive, or were you going for something like that even before he came on board?
2D: Well, actually I think it's that our reconding studio is built on an old burial site, You end up getting really odd drafts, sounds and smells, and some of that ambience obviously ended up on the record. You can hear whooshes
and growls in the background on some of the tracks, One track wound up sounding so infested and diseased we just had to ditch it.
(He shivers visibly, remembering the creepiness of the discarded song.)
Noodle: Some of the spooky sounds on the track "O Green World” were caught on tape by accident. It is believed that they are the mysterious recordings of paranormal experiences going on at Kong Studios, and if you listen really carefully, you can hear this, uh, this growling and whispering. You can't help but be affected by the nature and atmosphere of your surroundings.
Russel: (nodding wisely) A horribly haunted house can leave quite a heavy imprint.
Murdoc: I tell you, baby, once you'e in Kong, you're in Kong for life! It's like the Overlook Hotel out of The Shining. It has a mind of its own ...
(He trails off. Alt four Gorillaz sit silent, musing, pondering the spiritual weight of the rooms in which they make their music.)
You get to a certain point with the Gorillaz where you just have to throw up your hands and roll with it. After all, in smudging the line between reality and fantasy it's possible that they've done more than most bands ever do to locate the fuzzy place where music exists. And what the heck, you think to yourself as
you realize your interview is coming to an end. Might as well play along ...
I don’t know if you read much of your press, but a lot of articles about you insinuate that you've had help from some non-cartoon ringers, people who were in other, lesser bands like Blur and the Talking Heads. Do you find this insulting?
Russel: I do feel that there is a very "cartoon-ist" attitude in the music press towards us. I think that that kind of bigotry and phobia is just a limited and shallow judgment on us as people,
Murdoc: Yeah, you'd think that people would comment on your huge, fat weight problem before they noticed you were a cartoon. "Look at that chubby sod! Oh, and he's a cartoon!”
Noodle: But Damon Albarn, if that’s who you're referring to, has been a great friend of Gorillaz right since our inception. He has always provided us with his musical opinion.
2D: Quite loudly sometimes.
(Chuckles of recognition indicate Albarn has been known to get a little pushy with his opinions in the past.)
Has there ever been any discussion of involving him in the band, musically?
2D: Wow. A duet between me and Damon would, uh ... Well, it would be pretty weird. Our voices are so similar ...
Russel: Both Damon and Danger Mouse gave us a lot of support in making this album, and there's no way, despite the devastating skills that Gorillaz have, that the record would have come out sounding as it does without the work that they did.
Murdoc: Yeah, but there are only four people in this band: me, Russel, Noodle, and 2D. (He glares dismissively at 2D.) And even some of them aren't really essential.