Gorillaz hopeful of triumphant return to world of music after disappearance
The Daily Record, March 2010
ON paper, it sounds like insanity of the lowest order. The frontman of a hugely popular indie band, his comic book artist mate and a series of invited musical collaborators releasing music under the guise of an animated band.
Yet Gorillaz have sold more than 15 million albums, so Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett's wacky scheme turned out to be anything but insane.
However, the problem with a virtual band made up of crazy characters - in this case Murdoc Niccals, 2D, Noodle and Russel - is that you're never quite sure what's going to happen next in the weird world they inhabit.
So it really should not have surprised anyone when Murdoc decided he was fed-up with all things Gorillaz and, after triumphant shows in New York, promptly disappeared, vowing the band was finished. Noodles was missing, presumed dead, their online home Kong Studios was destroyed and that seemed to be that... until now.
Gorillaz are back with a new home, Plastic Beach, a new album named after it and a new cyborg version of Noodles. And if you think that sounds a little bit out there, wait until you hear what Murdoc had to say when we managed to track him down and beat some answers out of him. Virtually, of course.
How special were those New York gigs back in 2006?
The Demon Days shows? Far out. Wonderful. A five-night run at New York's legendary Harlem Apollo, stomping ground of every great from James Brown to Richard Pryor and beyond.
Couldn't have been a better setting for us. We had all the guests from the Demon Days album there, including the likes of De La Soul, Ike Turner, Dennis Hopper. We put all that lot with animations, pre-recorded appearances, an explosive live band. We should play there more often.
So why did you decide to end the band immediately afterwards?
I instigated my own disappearance. I didn't really care what the others got up to. Once the door slammed shut on Gorillaz that evening, for me that was it. I was sick of the sight and smell of the whole band. I just wanted to have a lost weekend and somehow I managed to string it out for about three years.
I think I just wanted to purge my soul of all things Gorillaz. The Demon Days album had been a long haul for all of us. No other band really has to experience the kind of mindnumbing antics we go through.
After the Apollo shows, Gorillaz-wise, that was it. There was talk of making a movie or something. But that's all it usually is. Just talk. I'd had enough.
What happened to your beloved Kong?
I had to sell the place. I loved Kong Studios, it was a fantastic hangout. It was the Gorillaz original HQ, the birthplace of my fantastic band. We all used to live there.
But I had to get rid of it. You'd think something like that would fly off the shelf. A gigantic disused haunted studio in the middle of nowhere. What's not to love? Kong Studios is a piece of rock'n'roll history. But no one was biting so I just torched the place. I blamed it on some local kids. I pocketed the cash and they all went to jail. Sometimes you've just got to burn the past to make a new future.
And that future is Plastic Beach?
Out of the ashes of Kong Studios, Plastic Beach rose like a big, dirty swan. So that's good. I spent my dosh on building a big recording studio on a stinking mass of floating plastic in the middle of nowhere. I mean, it's what you should do with your cash, isn't it?
Big extravagant wastes of time. I needed somewhere isolated. It was just landfill, grease, garbage, destruction and rusty old pipes and dumped bits of plastic.
That didn't bother me though. I painted the whole thing bright pink and got on with it. My own plastic beach. I wanted somewhere I could bring girls and guests and make a big ol' racket. The first thing I did was build a big Tracey Island-type playboy mansion, right on top of this Plastic Beach.
Just a towering, monstrous building. It houses everything from my new HQ to my state-of-the-art recording studio. It's got everything from lavish boudoirs to glassbottomed basement rooms, secret rooms, lighthouse towers. It makes Peter Gabriel's Real World studio look really rubbish.
So then you decided you wanted to bring the band back?
Around May 2007 I came round to thinking it would be time to assemble new Gorillaz stuff. You listen to the charts and they're still full of rubbish.
Seriously, if I hear one more vocoder I'm going to have to go round every single studio in the world with a hammer and individually smash every plug-in with that software on it.
Whatever we put into effect on the first two Gorillaz records still hasn't been matched. You'd think people would have seen how we operated and done something more imaginative with their moment.
But no, it's still the same old shit. So, yeah, I realised I had to put Gorillaz back together.
Did it come together easily?
I just started twanging away on Logic.
Me, my bass and crate of rum, sat on the beach just warbling along to my spongey dub rhythms and recording straight into my laptop. No expectations, just seeing what glory dribbled out of the fret-board.
Then some of it started making sense. Over the weeks, the melodies came into focus and the songs demanded to be finessed. Then bit-by-bit I built this 'state-of-my-arse' recording palace on the island, somewhere foxy to ship other collaborators out to.
To Gorilla-rize up the snazzy tunes.
I love the beauty of those early etchings. When you're in that state, everything seems all isolated and correct. It's like a concrete, light-smashing hammer when you have to return to the realities of salesmanship and cram these delicate eulogies into the traps and get them to race, mongrel-style, against the remedial emissions of some farcical vocoded hop-hip claptrap.
Another sad-sack record company pitting their money on an overly-groomed, e-numbered show-pony, in attempt to bludgeon their audience into a submission. It's more important to have nice shiny hair than a decent tune these days.
Were the rest of the band happy to come back?
Gorillaz is my band. I don't really have to put it back together. I am Gorillaz. Like the chick with the red Tin Tin hairdo is La Roux.
When Gorillaz is up and running, everything's sweet and dandy. I'm bulletproof. It just gives me everything I need. I can make swanky videos and swan around the globe like I own the place, all the while playing my dirty, thick, black bass over fantastic music.
It makes all my rubbish seem justified. My rudeness gets put down to entertainment. In fact people even pay for it!
On top of this, with the name Gorillaz, I get to invite an incredible set of people in on the gig. Real legends. Mos Def, Bobby Womack, Dennis Hopper, Snoop Dogg, Ike - they've all dropped a unique slice of themselves into the Gorillaz pot, making it the vast sprawling family of fun you see today.
We all thought Noodle was dead. How come she's back?
I had a Gorillaz album to make and I needed a guitarist, so I just pulled out that jar of Noodle DNA and got to work building a cyborg version of her. I knew that'd come in handy! It ain't the real Noodle but it's close enough.
How did you persuade your big-name collaborators - such as Snoop Dogg, Lou Reed, Mos Def, Bobby Womack, Gruff Rhys, Mark E. Smith, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, Kano, Bashy, De La Soul and more - to come to Plastic Beach?
Various methods. One way is you can phone them up and ask them. You've got to remember that the Gorillaz name goes a long way now and some people will just agree on the back of that.
For many people a Gorillaz collaboration is like a ticket to Disneyland. It's a day off, they can get to take part in this surreal little ghostly theme park that seems to sail round the world with me at the helm.
Not many people refuse an invitation. A couple of them refused so I had use another method of coercion. Well, chloroform and Rohypnol really.
You went public in January 2009 by playing three demos on Zane Lowe's show with Damon Albarn. What was the thinking behind that?
I spent a fair bit of time just mucking about that day. I'd brought one of those old bulb horns and I was parping it over someone else's music. A bit juvenile but not too dissimilar to what someone like Mark Ronson does.
It was just my version of his remixes. Take someone else's music then parp horns over it. But it was a great chance to play some demos. I unveiled three tracks. Tracks in progress. They seemed to go down well. Apparently their switchboard exploded. I did it for a number of reasons. I wanted to test the water, see who was listening, see if the fans were still out there for us.
Playing those demos unleashed a tidal wave of attention, good and bad... How does Plastic Beach, the album, measure up?
I tell you what Plastic Beach is. It's a four-dimensional postcard but this is a postcard that comes to life.
I'm immensely proud of Gorillaz. I grabbed colours, philosophies, artistic thought from around the world and bundled them into one plastic Polaroid called an album. Pretty snazzy.
As communication distances get shorter, given the right vision you can really put incredible things together. Now we've got Skype, ISDN lines, emails, file sharing, superfast transport.
You can get whole groups of people to sit together in the right places at the right time. If you're gonna use all these tools, why not do it this way? Get all the brilliant people together and make a positive statement.
What next? Will we get to see some new Gorillaz shows?
Ooooh. Have I got something special for you. I'm going to explode! I was just thinking about this big concert I'm planning and all the espionage going on around it.
I've planned a re-union of not one, not two, but maybe even all three of the Gorillaz albums to be performed live! Can you imagine? I'm not prone to excitement, due to all the medication and everything, but this is really something. Something unbelievable. Something that we may even tour until we're skeletons.
Yet Gorillaz have sold more than 15 million albums, so Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett's wacky scheme turned out to be anything but insane.
However, the problem with a virtual band made up of crazy characters - in this case Murdoc Niccals, 2D, Noodle and Russel - is that you're never quite sure what's going to happen next in the weird world they inhabit.
So it really should not have surprised anyone when Murdoc decided he was fed-up with all things Gorillaz and, after triumphant shows in New York, promptly disappeared, vowing the band was finished. Noodles was missing, presumed dead, their online home Kong Studios was destroyed and that seemed to be that... until now.
Gorillaz are back with a new home, Plastic Beach, a new album named after it and a new cyborg version of Noodles. And if you think that sounds a little bit out there, wait until you hear what Murdoc had to say when we managed to track him down and beat some answers out of him. Virtually, of course.
How special were those New York gigs back in 2006?
The Demon Days shows? Far out. Wonderful. A five-night run at New York's legendary Harlem Apollo, stomping ground of every great from James Brown to Richard Pryor and beyond.
Couldn't have been a better setting for us. We had all the guests from the Demon Days album there, including the likes of De La Soul, Ike Turner, Dennis Hopper. We put all that lot with animations, pre-recorded appearances, an explosive live band. We should play there more often.
So why did you decide to end the band immediately afterwards?
I instigated my own disappearance. I didn't really care what the others got up to. Once the door slammed shut on Gorillaz that evening, for me that was it. I was sick of the sight and smell of the whole band. I just wanted to have a lost weekend and somehow I managed to string it out for about three years.
I think I just wanted to purge my soul of all things Gorillaz. The Demon Days album had been a long haul for all of us. No other band really has to experience the kind of mindnumbing antics we go through.
After the Apollo shows, Gorillaz-wise, that was it. There was talk of making a movie or something. But that's all it usually is. Just talk. I'd had enough.
What happened to your beloved Kong?
I had to sell the place. I loved Kong Studios, it was a fantastic hangout. It was the Gorillaz original HQ, the birthplace of my fantastic band. We all used to live there.
But I had to get rid of it. You'd think something like that would fly off the shelf. A gigantic disused haunted studio in the middle of nowhere. What's not to love? Kong Studios is a piece of rock'n'roll history. But no one was biting so I just torched the place. I blamed it on some local kids. I pocketed the cash and they all went to jail. Sometimes you've just got to burn the past to make a new future.
And that future is Plastic Beach?
Out of the ashes of Kong Studios, Plastic Beach rose like a big, dirty swan. So that's good. I spent my dosh on building a big recording studio on a stinking mass of floating plastic in the middle of nowhere. I mean, it's what you should do with your cash, isn't it?
Big extravagant wastes of time. I needed somewhere isolated. It was just landfill, grease, garbage, destruction and rusty old pipes and dumped bits of plastic.
That didn't bother me though. I painted the whole thing bright pink and got on with it. My own plastic beach. I wanted somewhere I could bring girls and guests and make a big ol' racket. The first thing I did was build a big Tracey Island-type playboy mansion, right on top of this Plastic Beach.
Just a towering, monstrous building. It houses everything from my new HQ to my state-of-the-art recording studio. It's got everything from lavish boudoirs to glassbottomed basement rooms, secret rooms, lighthouse towers. It makes Peter Gabriel's Real World studio look really rubbish.
So then you decided you wanted to bring the band back?
Around May 2007 I came round to thinking it would be time to assemble new Gorillaz stuff. You listen to the charts and they're still full of rubbish.
Seriously, if I hear one more vocoder I'm going to have to go round every single studio in the world with a hammer and individually smash every plug-in with that software on it.
Whatever we put into effect on the first two Gorillaz records still hasn't been matched. You'd think people would have seen how we operated and done something more imaginative with their moment.
But no, it's still the same old shit. So, yeah, I realised I had to put Gorillaz back together.
Did it come together easily?
I just started twanging away on Logic.
Me, my bass and crate of rum, sat on the beach just warbling along to my spongey dub rhythms and recording straight into my laptop. No expectations, just seeing what glory dribbled out of the fret-board.
Then some of it started making sense. Over the weeks, the melodies came into focus and the songs demanded to be finessed. Then bit-by-bit I built this 'state-of-my-arse' recording palace on the island, somewhere foxy to ship other collaborators out to.
To Gorilla-rize up the snazzy tunes.
I love the beauty of those early etchings. When you're in that state, everything seems all isolated and correct. It's like a concrete, light-smashing hammer when you have to return to the realities of salesmanship and cram these delicate eulogies into the traps and get them to race, mongrel-style, against the remedial emissions of some farcical vocoded hop-hip claptrap.
Another sad-sack record company pitting their money on an overly-groomed, e-numbered show-pony, in attempt to bludgeon their audience into a submission. It's more important to have nice shiny hair than a decent tune these days.
Were the rest of the band happy to come back?
Gorillaz is my band. I don't really have to put it back together. I am Gorillaz. Like the chick with the red Tin Tin hairdo is La Roux.
When Gorillaz is up and running, everything's sweet and dandy. I'm bulletproof. It just gives me everything I need. I can make swanky videos and swan around the globe like I own the place, all the while playing my dirty, thick, black bass over fantastic music.
It makes all my rubbish seem justified. My rudeness gets put down to entertainment. In fact people even pay for it!
On top of this, with the name Gorillaz, I get to invite an incredible set of people in on the gig. Real legends. Mos Def, Bobby Womack, Dennis Hopper, Snoop Dogg, Ike - they've all dropped a unique slice of themselves into the Gorillaz pot, making it the vast sprawling family of fun you see today.
We all thought Noodle was dead. How come she's back?
I had a Gorillaz album to make and I needed a guitarist, so I just pulled out that jar of Noodle DNA and got to work building a cyborg version of her. I knew that'd come in handy! It ain't the real Noodle but it's close enough.
How did you persuade your big-name collaborators - such as Snoop Dogg, Lou Reed, Mos Def, Bobby Womack, Gruff Rhys, Mark E. Smith, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, Kano, Bashy, De La Soul and more - to come to Plastic Beach?
Various methods. One way is you can phone them up and ask them. You've got to remember that the Gorillaz name goes a long way now and some people will just agree on the back of that.
For many people a Gorillaz collaboration is like a ticket to Disneyland. It's a day off, they can get to take part in this surreal little ghostly theme park that seems to sail round the world with me at the helm.
Not many people refuse an invitation. A couple of them refused so I had use another method of coercion. Well, chloroform and Rohypnol really.
You went public in January 2009 by playing three demos on Zane Lowe's show with Damon Albarn. What was the thinking behind that?
I spent a fair bit of time just mucking about that day. I'd brought one of those old bulb horns and I was parping it over someone else's music. A bit juvenile but not too dissimilar to what someone like Mark Ronson does.
It was just my version of his remixes. Take someone else's music then parp horns over it. But it was a great chance to play some demos. I unveiled three tracks. Tracks in progress. They seemed to go down well. Apparently their switchboard exploded. I did it for a number of reasons. I wanted to test the water, see who was listening, see if the fans were still out there for us.
Playing those demos unleashed a tidal wave of attention, good and bad... How does Plastic Beach, the album, measure up?
I tell you what Plastic Beach is. It's a four-dimensional postcard but this is a postcard that comes to life.
I'm immensely proud of Gorillaz. I grabbed colours, philosophies, artistic thought from around the world and bundled them into one plastic Polaroid called an album. Pretty snazzy.
As communication distances get shorter, given the right vision you can really put incredible things together. Now we've got Skype, ISDN lines, emails, file sharing, superfast transport.
You can get whole groups of people to sit together in the right places at the right time. If you're gonna use all these tools, why not do it this way? Get all the brilliant people together and make a positive statement.
What next? Will we get to see some new Gorillaz shows?
Ooooh. Have I got something special for you. I'm going to explode! I was just thinking about this big concert I'm planning and all the espionage going on around it.
I've planned a re-union of not one, not two, but maybe even all three of the Gorillaz albums to be performed live! Can you imagine? I'm not prone to excitement, due to all the medication and everything, but this is really something. Something unbelievable. Something that we may even tour until we're skeletons.