Reality Blurs! Damon interviews Gorillaz
NME, March 2010
Who better to interrogate the cartoon band than Damon Albarn? Not that he had any say in it, mind. You join him drugged and tied to a chair, somewhere in the Plastic Beach...
His swollen eyelids flicker open, batting away acrid green fog. His head swims, his vision focuses, then pain crushes his skull like a rotten conker. Agony! He tries to reach ahand up to the throbbing dent on his head but it won't move; it’s lashed to the leg of the straight-backed chair he’s tied to. Last thing he remembers is Portobello Road, a choked cackle from a darkened doorway, a thread of turquoise valium gas. Valium gas, the same stuff that... oh God... “Albarn.” A grizzled croak, the one voice he least wanted to hear. “Good to have you back with us...”
Before him, a long oak desk. Upon it, two grave-green feet, crossed, filthy with soil and hooked at the nails. Above the feet, a trail of smoke weaves down to a cigarette clenched between rotten fangs. And those bag-burdened yellow eyes, always swirling. Murdoc Niccals nods deviously. “Now,” he says. “Look. This is how it is. NME say that without you involved in our article, Gorillaz, ie me, ain't getting on the front cover. And I can't have that. But you had to refuse to be interviewed, din'tcha?” Damon makes a weak “wwuuhhahhh?” Murdoc leans across the desk and pulls his gag from his mouth. “Thing is, we're about to put out the third and most glorious panel in my magnificent triptych,” he continues. “Critics are creaming themselves like an explosion at a Clearasil factory, like it’s the greatest collaborative effort since that banana record from the '60s. So this interview needs to be done. But you don’t want to do an interview, and I can't do this without you. Not allowed.” Murdoc taps his cigarette ash into an empty wine glass; instantly a whirring mechanical shape appears from a trap door, empties and polishes it. Damon recognises the tiny figure - that’s Noodle! But wasn’t she blown to bits in the ‘El Manana’ video? And why’s this Noodle metallic and covered in guns! And if she’s here that must mean... Fearfully, Damon peers out through the French windows at the fiendish, unnatural landscape beyond. The palm trees built from U2’s abandoned Pop Tour arches. The beached jellyfish made from a million burst Muse balloons. The wash of melted vinyl pebbles; the shattered shards of NeYo promo CDs scattered across the shore as glistening shells. He’s at that place. Damon stutters: “Oh f...” “No swearing either!” barks Murdoc. He plops a stack of papers on the table next to him and flicks ‘record’ on a creaky old tape reel. “I've got a list of questions. As soon as we're done you can get back over to west London and continue with whatever rubbish you get up to.” He zaps Damon with a Taser strapped to his wrist. “Ask the questions. ASK!”
Damon: Oh... Um... Christ. Er... What happened that made you flee to Plastic Beach?
Murdoc: “Oh Damon, I’m so glad I made you ask me that. Well, after the ‘Demon. Days’ album in 2005, I ran up a tab right round the world on the global bender I went on. So I had to find a way to whip up some money fast. I made a fair amount as an amateur gun-runner, but in the process I built up a healthy database of dissatisfied customers. People who thought I'd short-changed them, with dud weapons, stuff that didn’t work, and they wanted to kill me. The Black Clouds, a group of airborne pirates, had been hunting me down for some time. They were in the black helicopters that appeared in the ‘El Manana’ video. They shot the island out of the sky, with Noodle on it. [had to split. So I burnt down Kong Studios, our old HQ. Torched it, picked up the insurance and ran for the hills. Or the sea to be more precise.”
That’s why you chose Plastic Beach?
“I needed somewhere isolated. Really hidden. I scouted the globe, until finally I found it. I knew I'd struck gold. The perfect Plastic palace. ‘Point Nemo’ - No Man’s Land! The place furthest from any other land-mass on the planet. No-one would dream of looking for me here. It’s just a giant piece of rotten plastic in the middle of the ocean. The funny thing was it that it looked idyllic from far away, through the binoculars. A floating paradise! But once you got close you can see it’s just landfill — grease, garbage, destruction, rusty old pipes and dumped bits of plastic. Bits of the music industry chucked into the ocean. That didn’t bother me though. I painted the whole thing bright pink and built a big Tracy Island-type playboy mansion on top. Then I began work on this new Gorillaz record, in the studio I had installed.”
What did you take with you to watch and listen to and eat? Does it feel like home now?
“Yeah, it’s my big mucky plastic empire. What did I take to listen to? Congolese rhythm sections. Gambian brass bands. Recordings of seagulls, advert stings, whale music, keyboard instruction tapes, bits of '70s Studio 54-type disco, wildlife documentaries, some Edward Lear speeches, underwater classical tracks, some metal machine music, a bit of new wave. Some Weimar-1930s-era vaudeville recordings, white noise, show tunes... My mind is scattered across several dimensions.”
Snoop Dogg came to you, right? What did he make of the place?
“Snoop? He told me that my Plastic Bizzle was the shizzle. I suspect that running into fully-animated walking, talking cartoons on a giant piece of floating plastic in the middle of nowhere isn’t the type of thing that would faze a man like Snoop. He just cruised up to shore, enshrouded with plumes of smoke and pimp fur, looked around and said, ‘Welcome to the world of the Plastic Beach’. I used that for the opening number. It sounded snappy.”
Your collaborators must all represent something to you - what is it?
“They're chosen like colours, colours to filla spectrum, different characters in the story. You see the whole narrative needs to feel complete. Each of those collaborators comes with such beautiful baggage, half the job’s done as soon as they open their mouths. They represent different elements of a story. They’re triggers. Snoop is the master of ceremonies, hosting the introduction. Bashy and Kano the sound of British youth bursting over the rich lush heritage of the Syrian orchestra. Mark E Smith the toothless barking pirate ship that blows into Plastic Beach. Bobby Womack the oceanic voice of soul love and street politics. Mos Def the sassy hip New York rapper. Yukimi from Little Dragon the gentle female lullaby, a healing breeze; Lou Reed the wizened old New York curmudgeon, rattling tales of pills and plastics and girls. Each part helps the picture become complete. Urrrp!! Pass the wine.”
D’you think you're the boss in all those situations?
“Our collaborators do have to feel that the ship is being captained by someone in control. So we don't hit any big dull icebergs. In the beginning ‘we’, Gorillaz, did use your name, Damon, to drop as a kind of mastermind Svengali figure. Before people knew who we were. All that stuff you did with your Blur band back in the '90s kind of helped endorse these hip young bucks that were just breaking through, back in 2000.”
Do you tell the rest of the band how you want things to sound, or is that entirely up to them?
“It’s not a strict formula, making music, as you know. With Bobby Womack we just kind of sketched out verbally what Plastic Beach was, what it meant to us and the sense of where the place was positioned, then he went into the booth and unleashed a hurricane of emotion. It just tore the roof off ‘Stylo’. You sit his soul vocal next to Mos Def's rap and 2D’s purer melodic tone, all over a digital version of Chic, and you've got Studio 2010. Something new, fresh and expansive. D'you get me?”
What have you done with Noodle?
“Fixed her. Well, not her. But rebuilt a version of her, but better. Like The Six Million Dollar Man. I couldn't find her when I went to the crash site of the ‘El Manana’ video, so I just scraped up some of her DNA, and when the time came I had a cyborg replica built of her. Out of the original Noodle matter. This one’s better though. More guns. I made her my bodyguard to keep some of these assassins off my back. But guitar-wise she still shreds.”
What are your expectations for this third album?
“Parping my dirty noise all around the world, This is the third act in the sprawling epic that is Gorillaz. We've blossomed from a concept into a concrete institution. Now we're a household name, a brand that you can stamp on any record and it gives a mark of confidence. If you look and listen closely to all three albums, you'll notice that there’s an evolution, a growth and a narrative that you'd never get with any other band. It’s how I always planned it”
How will the new live show work?
“Very well. In fact I've just started revving my bass up in order to destroy Coachella. Y’know, when you see all those tracks come to life, goft tall and powered by a million volts of electricity it’s going to make your spine go all goo-ey. And of course there'll be the jaw-dropping ‘visual’ entertainments we've woven into every performance. If this works how I think it will, it’ll change everything. EVERYTHING. It's quite possible you're going to see the history of music dancing up on that stage, in a form unfathomable to man and beast.”
Is this really the last Gorillaz album?
“Mmm... think it'd be hard to top this one at the moment. But every album I enter is made as if it’s my very first and very last. It’s the only way to work. I'll say yep now. It feels complete... today. But I might have another one in the bag already. You'll have to wait and find out. I might even use some of my Gorillaz demos to finish off your Carousel project. So try not to be startled if you wake up in the middle of the night with a rag of chloroform over your mouth. What's the next question?”
What words would you like carved on your tombstone?
“I'm not having a tombstone. If I ever do die, I want to be buried at sea. And the way it’s going now it looks like I'll die out here anyway. But if I do get a choice I want my ashes ground up with
charcoal and sulphur, shoved into a barrel and then exploded out into the nocturnal sky, among the stars from whence I came. Kaboom!!! Either that or I'd get Keith Richards to snort them...”
(Long pause) Look. This is ridiculous...
“I know. That’s exactly why this all works, Everyone loves the ridiculous side of showbizness. Otherwise you just get a dopey band in jeans and T-shirts mumbling into microphones.”
But Plastic Beach is just a place we dreamed up as a setting for the characters. Just a phrase to inspire the collaborators. It’s not real. None of it is.
“It would seem your Rohypnol is wearing off. Look. Plastic Beach may be just a phrase to you but it’s a home to me. And anyway, as dear old William Blake said, ‘The imagination is not a state. It is the human existence itself’. Some visions are strong enough to become actualities. Bit like The Bible. Plastic Beach is real enough. You're here now, aren’t you? The place where I recorded my new long-player and that, my friend, is a soundtrack for a plastic beach. It’s taken little snapshots of many, many places round the world, and then stuck them all together on a billboard so you can see how they all fit. How they all work together. It’s not a judgement on the world, it’s just a picture. That’s all. Nothing to be alarmed by. It’s all allegorical.”
I’ve had enough.
“Listen. There’s something I wanted to ask you.”
What?
“How come you lobbed that sausage at Courtney Love at the NME Awards?”
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
“C’mon sonny. Yes, you did. I saw you. You missed her by inches. She even picked it up straight afterwards, so there's your proof.”
It was a cocktail sausage. I did wave when she asked who threw it - she just didn’t see me.
“Cocktail sausage? It was a banger! The camera doesn't lie!”
A deep bell chimes. The window shutters burst open, a howling wind rips through the room. Murdoc’s green, leathery pock-marked face leers, leaning close into Damon's.
Murdoc: “It would seem, Mr Albarn, our time is up and our job complete. Yes? So therefore I have one last question. (Ahem) Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?”
Murdoc pushes an ether-soaked cloth into Damon’s face; Damon struggles a second, then falls slack. Untying the heavy, comatose body Murdoc drags Damon across the floor, heaves him into a wooden crate, nail-guns the box shut and slaps a sticker on the side: “Back to the Westway from the World. W11. Do not open 'til Xmas!” He rings a nearby servant's bell and cyborg Noodle arrives to drag the crate down to the beach and lob into the sea, while Murdoc slopes to the couch to watch the rest of the Girls Aloud: Exposed programme he’s had held on pause. He dims the lights, sparks up a fresh cigarette, soaks the green fog into his pores and lets out that deep, rasping cackle, echoing across the synthetic shores of this most deserted of islands...
His swollen eyelids flicker open, batting away acrid green fog. His head swims, his vision focuses, then pain crushes his skull like a rotten conker. Agony! He tries to reach ahand up to the throbbing dent on his head but it won't move; it’s lashed to the leg of the straight-backed chair he’s tied to. Last thing he remembers is Portobello Road, a choked cackle from a darkened doorway, a thread of turquoise valium gas. Valium gas, the same stuff that... oh God... “Albarn.” A grizzled croak, the one voice he least wanted to hear. “Good to have you back with us...”
Before him, a long oak desk. Upon it, two grave-green feet, crossed, filthy with soil and hooked at the nails. Above the feet, a trail of smoke weaves down to a cigarette clenched between rotten fangs. And those bag-burdened yellow eyes, always swirling. Murdoc Niccals nods deviously. “Now,” he says. “Look. This is how it is. NME say that without you involved in our article, Gorillaz, ie me, ain't getting on the front cover. And I can't have that. But you had to refuse to be interviewed, din'tcha?” Damon makes a weak “wwuuhhahhh?” Murdoc leans across the desk and pulls his gag from his mouth. “Thing is, we're about to put out the third and most glorious panel in my magnificent triptych,” he continues. “Critics are creaming themselves like an explosion at a Clearasil factory, like it’s the greatest collaborative effort since that banana record from the '60s. So this interview needs to be done. But you don’t want to do an interview, and I can't do this without you. Not allowed.” Murdoc taps his cigarette ash into an empty wine glass; instantly a whirring mechanical shape appears from a trap door, empties and polishes it. Damon recognises the tiny figure - that’s Noodle! But wasn’t she blown to bits in the ‘El Manana’ video? And why’s this Noodle metallic and covered in guns! And if she’s here that must mean... Fearfully, Damon peers out through the French windows at the fiendish, unnatural landscape beyond. The palm trees built from U2’s abandoned Pop Tour arches. The beached jellyfish made from a million burst Muse balloons. The wash of melted vinyl pebbles; the shattered shards of NeYo promo CDs scattered across the shore as glistening shells. He’s at that place. Damon stutters: “Oh f...” “No swearing either!” barks Murdoc. He plops a stack of papers on the table next to him and flicks ‘record’ on a creaky old tape reel. “I've got a list of questions. As soon as we're done you can get back over to west London and continue with whatever rubbish you get up to.” He zaps Damon with a Taser strapped to his wrist. “Ask the questions. ASK!”
Damon: Oh... Um... Christ. Er... What happened that made you flee to Plastic Beach?
Murdoc: “Oh Damon, I’m so glad I made you ask me that. Well, after the ‘Demon. Days’ album in 2005, I ran up a tab right round the world on the global bender I went on. So I had to find a way to whip up some money fast. I made a fair amount as an amateur gun-runner, but in the process I built up a healthy database of dissatisfied customers. People who thought I'd short-changed them, with dud weapons, stuff that didn’t work, and they wanted to kill me. The Black Clouds, a group of airborne pirates, had been hunting me down for some time. They were in the black helicopters that appeared in the ‘El Manana’ video. They shot the island out of the sky, with Noodle on it. [had to split. So I burnt down Kong Studios, our old HQ. Torched it, picked up the insurance and ran for the hills. Or the sea to be more precise.”
That’s why you chose Plastic Beach?
“I needed somewhere isolated. Really hidden. I scouted the globe, until finally I found it. I knew I'd struck gold. The perfect Plastic palace. ‘Point Nemo’ - No Man’s Land! The place furthest from any other land-mass on the planet. No-one would dream of looking for me here. It’s just a giant piece of rotten plastic in the middle of the ocean. The funny thing was it that it looked idyllic from far away, through the binoculars. A floating paradise! But once you got close you can see it’s just landfill — grease, garbage, destruction, rusty old pipes and dumped bits of plastic. Bits of the music industry chucked into the ocean. That didn’t bother me though. I painted the whole thing bright pink and built a big Tracy Island-type playboy mansion on top. Then I began work on this new Gorillaz record, in the studio I had installed.”
What did you take with you to watch and listen to and eat? Does it feel like home now?
“Yeah, it’s my big mucky plastic empire. What did I take to listen to? Congolese rhythm sections. Gambian brass bands. Recordings of seagulls, advert stings, whale music, keyboard instruction tapes, bits of '70s Studio 54-type disco, wildlife documentaries, some Edward Lear speeches, underwater classical tracks, some metal machine music, a bit of new wave. Some Weimar-1930s-era vaudeville recordings, white noise, show tunes... My mind is scattered across several dimensions.”
Snoop Dogg came to you, right? What did he make of the place?
“Snoop? He told me that my Plastic Bizzle was the shizzle. I suspect that running into fully-animated walking, talking cartoons on a giant piece of floating plastic in the middle of nowhere isn’t the type of thing that would faze a man like Snoop. He just cruised up to shore, enshrouded with plumes of smoke and pimp fur, looked around and said, ‘Welcome to the world of the Plastic Beach’. I used that for the opening number. It sounded snappy.”
Your collaborators must all represent something to you - what is it?
“They're chosen like colours, colours to filla spectrum, different characters in the story. You see the whole narrative needs to feel complete. Each of those collaborators comes with such beautiful baggage, half the job’s done as soon as they open their mouths. They represent different elements of a story. They’re triggers. Snoop is the master of ceremonies, hosting the introduction. Bashy and Kano the sound of British youth bursting over the rich lush heritage of the Syrian orchestra. Mark E Smith the toothless barking pirate ship that blows into Plastic Beach. Bobby Womack the oceanic voice of soul love and street politics. Mos Def the sassy hip New York rapper. Yukimi from Little Dragon the gentle female lullaby, a healing breeze; Lou Reed the wizened old New York curmudgeon, rattling tales of pills and plastics and girls. Each part helps the picture become complete. Urrrp!! Pass the wine.”
D’you think you're the boss in all those situations?
“Our collaborators do have to feel that the ship is being captained by someone in control. So we don't hit any big dull icebergs. In the beginning ‘we’, Gorillaz, did use your name, Damon, to drop as a kind of mastermind Svengali figure. Before people knew who we were. All that stuff you did with your Blur band back in the '90s kind of helped endorse these hip young bucks that were just breaking through, back in 2000.”
Do you tell the rest of the band how you want things to sound, or is that entirely up to them?
“It’s not a strict formula, making music, as you know. With Bobby Womack we just kind of sketched out verbally what Plastic Beach was, what it meant to us and the sense of where the place was positioned, then he went into the booth and unleashed a hurricane of emotion. It just tore the roof off ‘Stylo’. You sit his soul vocal next to Mos Def's rap and 2D’s purer melodic tone, all over a digital version of Chic, and you've got Studio 2010. Something new, fresh and expansive. D'you get me?”
What have you done with Noodle?
“Fixed her. Well, not her. But rebuilt a version of her, but better. Like The Six Million Dollar Man. I couldn't find her when I went to the crash site of the ‘El Manana’ video, so I just scraped up some of her DNA, and when the time came I had a cyborg replica built of her. Out of the original Noodle matter. This one’s better though. More guns. I made her my bodyguard to keep some of these assassins off my back. But guitar-wise she still shreds.”
What are your expectations for this third album?
“Parping my dirty noise all around the world, This is the third act in the sprawling epic that is Gorillaz. We've blossomed from a concept into a concrete institution. Now we're a household name, a brand that you can stamp on any record and it gives a mark of confidence. If you look and listen closely to all three albums, you'll notice that there’s an evolution, a growth and a narrative that you'd never get with any other band. It’s how I always planned it”
How will the new live show work?
“Very well. In fact I've just started revving my bass up in order to destroy Coachella. Y’know, when you see all those tracks come to life, goft tall and powered by a million volts of electricity it’s going to make your spine go all goo-ey. And of course there'll be the jaw-dropping ‘visual’ entertainments we've woven into every performance. If this works how I think it will, it’ll change everything. EVERYTHING. It's quite possible you're going to see the history of music dancing up on that stage, in a form unfathomable to man and beast.”
Is this really the last Gorillaz album?
“Mmm... think it'd be hard to top this one at the moment. But every album I enter is made as if it’s my very first and very last. It’s the only way to work. I'll say yep now. It feels complete... today. But I might have another one in the bag already. You'll have to wait and find out. I might even use some of my Gorillaz demos to finish off your Carousel project. So try not to be startled if you wake up in the middle of the night with a rag of chloroform over your mouth. What's the next question?”
What words would you like carved on your tombstone?
“I'm not having a tombstone. If I ever do die, I want to be buried at sea. And the way it’s going now it looks like I'll die out here anyway. But if I do get a choice I want my ashes ground up with
charcoal and sulphur, shoved into a barrel and then exploded out into the nocturnal sky, among the stars from whence I came. Kaboom!!! Either that or I'd get Keith Richards to snort them...”
(Long pause) Look. This is ridiculous...
“I know. That’s exactly why this all works, Everyone loves the ridiculous side of showbizness. Otherwise you just get a dopey band in jeans and T-shirts mumbling into microphones.”
But Plastic Beach is just a place we dreamed up as a setting for the characters. Just a phrase to inspire the collaborators. It’s not real. None of it is.
“It would seem your Rohypnol is wearing off. Look. Plastic Beach may be just a phrase to you but it’s a home to me. And anyway, as dear old William Blake said, ‘The imagination is not a state. It is the human existence itself’. Some visions are strong enough to become actualities. Bit like The Bible. Plastic Beach is real enough. You're here now, aren’t you? The place where I recorded my new long-player and that, my friend, is a soundtrack for a plastic beach. It’s taken little snapshots of many, many places round the world, and then stuck them all together on a billboard so you can see how they all fit. How they all work together. It’s not a judgement on the world, it’s just a picture. That’s all. Nothing to be alarmed by. It’s all allegorical.”
I’ve had enough.
“Listen. There’s something I wanted to ask you.”
What?
“How come you lobbed that sausage at Courtney Love at the NME Awards?”
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
“C’mon sonny. Yes, you did. I saw you. You missed her by inches. She even picked it up straight afterwards, so there's your proof.”
It was a cocktail sausage. I did wave when she asked who threw it - she just didn’t see me.
“Cocktail sausage? It was a banger! The camera doesn't lie!”
A deep bell chimes. The window shutters burst open, a howling wind rips through the room. Murdoc’s green, leathery pock-marked face leers, leaning close into Damon's.
Murdoc: “It would seem, Mr Albarn, our time is up and our job complete. Yes? So therefore I have one last question. (Ahem) Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?”
Murdoc pushes an ether-soaked cloth into Damon’s face; Damon struggles a second, then falls slack. Untying the heavy, comatose body Murdoc drags Damon across the floor, heaves him into a wooden crate, nail-guns the box shut and slaps a sticker on the side: “Back to the Westway from the World. W11. Do not open 'til Xmas!” He rings a nearby servant's bell and cyborg Noodle arrives to drag the crate down to the beach and lob into the sea, while Murdoc slopes to the couch to watch the rest of the Girls Aloud: Exposed programme he’s had held on pause. He dims the lights, sparks up a fresh cigarette, soaks the green fog into his pores and lets out that deep, rasping cackle, echoing across the synthetic shores of this most deserted of islands...