Under A Hail of Plastic Bullets
Channel24, March 2010
Monkey Bizness
Your last public performance as a band was in April 2006 with the Demon Days live shows in NYC - how do you feel now, looking back on those shows - surely very proud?
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 some animations, pre-recorded appearances, an explosive live band... A phantasmagoria of sounds, colours and assaults on the senses.... Even without my usual self-administered trinkets and tinctures I would’ve have found that experience quite er...'psychedelic'. So yeah, very proud. We brought the houses down....We should play there more often....
But then the band went their separate ways - did you instigate that?
Well, I instigated my own disappearance, certainly. I didn’t really care what the others got up to. After the show I stayed round long enough to goose some of the guests, throw down a couple of rums and then made a swirling disappearance off into the ether. POW! 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 want to have a long "Lost Weekend"...and somehow I managed to string it out for about three years.....It's amazing what kind of fun you can get up to with a Coutts credit card and a big bottle of Absinthe.....
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. I mean no other band really has to experience the kind of mind-numbing antics we go through. Possessions, assassination attempts, Grim Reapers, Madonna collaborations, floating islands, Black Clouds...that idiot 2D. I mean the last time I saw Noodle she was being shot by helicopters at as she parachuted off the floating island in the El Manana video...KaBoooM!! The whole thing just crashed into the ground and exploded. Haven’t seen her since. Still... Great video....
And Russel... As you know, he had his big, bad breakdown... seeing demons shooting out of the speakers. He was working on his solo album, just after the first Gorillaz record, a kind of hip-hop version of Pet Sounds but it just turned into his version of ‘Smile’. It sent him over the edge. His mind just turned to jelly. Sickly gloop oozing out the speakers, cherry stones vomiting out of the bass bins. Sent him krackers. He ended up living in Ike Turner's 'basement'. Which I thought was a euphemism for something else, until Ike Turner turned up to play on Demon Days.... So Russel, yeah, we only just managed to put him back together for the last album. I was in no hurry to hang around with him much more, once we’d done those Apollo shows.
And 2D... well, I don’t know or care what he got up to. He probably went back to his Dad's fairground in Eastbourne to work on the arcades...OH NO. Hang on. Tell a lie... I remember operating on him at Kong Studios. I chloroformed him and then stole all his organs. Hah hah hah.... I think it made him quite ill. Still he’s a great singer, lovely voice box. That’s why I got him back in on the new record...
But where were we...? Oh yeah...
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. Some people seem to make a career out of dining out. In fact the only way to keep things moving in some parts of that world is to make sure nothing gets finished. It’s like war really -just keep everything ticking along with no conclusions. I’d had enough too. I thought I’d scoop up my coppers, put on my ermine and go party.
We hear that various 'business deals' then didn't really work out well for you, leading to you putting Kong Studios up for sale in Nov 2007 - did you get any serious offers for the studio?
No, not serious offers. A couple of crank calls... some quacking noises down the phone and a few... er... delinquent enquiries from the more medicated part of our audience, but nothing more....
I had to sell the place. I loved Kong Studios, really, it was a fantastic hangout. It was the Gorillaz original HQ, the birthplace of my fantastic band. We all used to live there, me, Russel, Noodle... 2D. But I had to get rid of it....People were hunting me down, I’d just come back from a long trip to the demonic Underworld, about 6 months long. I only came back to pick up a can of mace. When I got back to Kong Studios I found the place collapsing, full of zombies, just a mess. It looked like Dawn of The Dead.
And I knew that all those other people we’re still looking for me, the underworld entities and the pirates, The Black Clouds, and the deranged fans turning up with the paternity suits and stuff... I had to move on from Kong. So I though I’d sell it...You’d think something like that would fly of the shelf. A gigantic disused haunted studio in the middle of nowhere? What’s not to love? I even put it on sale through the property website. But nothing. So I went about getting rid of it a different way...(evil laugh)
But these 'various business deals' you mentioned. Let’s just clear that up a bit shall we...
I'll tell you what happened. After Gorillaz split, I’d partied my way round the world, ruffling feathers and spilling drinks around the globe... But then the money kind of dried up. The Demon Days stuff had been expensive, and I’d invested in all these other things, stupid mobile phone companies, and get rich quick pyramid schemes... I bought a load of pyramids in Giza over in Egypt, but it turned out the guy who sold them to me - Bernie Madoff - was a crook, and the contracts weren’t worth the parchment they were written on....
I was broke. I needed to get some new funds coming in... So I tried my hand at various tricks and trades... And one of them was amateur arms dealing. That’s good fun! I bought a copy of 'As Used On The Famous Nelson Mandela' by Mark Thomas in a second hand bookshop. Great book. It shows you how very easy it is to push different weapons round the globe, by buying up old stock as countries upgrade, repainting them, relisting them and selling them on at a profit to other groups.
As long as the paperwork is done, should all be cool, right? It's basically what Governments do anyway. The British arms industry is the second biggest in the world. We’ll sell arms to anyone. Same all over. Every time any big country needs a weapons upgrade they just flog the old lot in a garage sale. I was just working as an independent trader.
The way I see it is, y'know, I knew they were duds. They were all damaged goods. They'd never work, so I was just trying to make a fast buck... As far as I can see I was doing something for er...'world peace' by selling on weapons that wouldn't work. I just happened to make a bit of cash in the process.
That did backfire though. I ran into to some er...'dissatisfied customers'. In particular an underground network group of pirates called "The Black Clouds", the ones I mentioned before. They’ve been after me since they appeared uninvited in that El Manana video. It was them in the helicopters, that turned up and shot the island down...
I smoothed it over with them at the time with promises of cheap weaponry, but after I stiffed them with the dud scuds, the blood between us turned very bad...
(Murdoc pauses)
But, yeah, the Bernie Madoff thing was a mistake for sure. I thought what with the economy fluctuating so chaotically, surely your money’s safe in pyramids? Apparently not. Still, I like to feel a little bit of my heart is entombed forever somewhere in Egypt. Next to Tutankhamen.
July 25th 2008 - a significant date Murdoc? Kong Studios burnt to the ground.......care to enlighten us on what happened there then.....?
Oh yeah...er...the 25th July 2008. That was the date of the Monkey King Opera at The Royal opera House... I remember it well. I would. It was the date I burnt Kong Studios down and then went to the Opera as an alibi!
I went along dressed to the nines, in a silky Victorian cape & silver-topped cane, and just guffawed loudly throughout the performance. I even started kicking the chair in front of me with my big Cuban heeled boots. I just want to draw attention to myself really, LOUD, make nice and sure everyone got a good look at me... Putting me far away from the scene of the crime... Arson doesn’t look good on the CV really.
As I said, I’d put the place up for sale, and to be honest Kong Studios is a piece of rock n’ roll history. National Heritage. It should be covered in blue plaques. But no-one was biting so WHHOOOOSSHH!!! I just torched the place. I blamed it on some local kids. I pocketed the cash and they all went to jail... (starts laughing) Which is funny really. I think they’re all still inside.
Sometimes you’ve just got to burn the past to make a new future. Out the ashes of Kong Studios, Plastic Beach rose like a big dirty swan. So that’s good.
So with the money from the insurance you can pay off some of your creditors, but you choose not to - correct?
Correct. Paying your debts off would be a tedious way to spend your illegally gotten gains. That’s not fun is it? No, 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 though, isn’t it? Big extravagant wastes of time...
You therefore now need two things - to get away from certain people and find a location for a new studio. What did you do next?
Yeah. I needed somewhere isolated. Really hidden. Somewhere not even Google could find me. I’d created a trail of destruction, a huge mess... As I said, The Black Clouds were on my tail. They were cheesed off about all the dud weapons and useless shooters I stiffed them with. None of the weapons worked. But they must have got their hands on a new batch because the next thing I know is that they’ve tracked me down. Bullets everywhere. Shooting out my windows, chucking mustard gas into my hotel room... going through my mail... I had to split.
So I needed somewhere, SOMETHING, unique....
So I hauled one of the helicopters from the ‘Feelgood Inc’ video, out of storage and fired it up. GNNNNGNNNNGGGG!!! I just scouted the globe, zipping around all over the place. Everywhere... Arctic tundra, Amazon jungle, down the back of the sofa... I searched on maps, visited secret locations, 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 landmass on the planet. No one would dream of looking for me there...You can really make as much noise as you want...
It was just a giant piece of rotten plastic in the middle of nowhere. The funny thing was it that it looked idyllic from far away... through the binoculars... a floating paradise! But once you got closer you could see 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... TA DA!!!
I was home again... I always make a lot of noise, where ever I am, and also I wanted somewhere I could bring girls and guests and make a big ol’ racket. Crank the stereo up to 2000!
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 glass bottomed- basement rooms, secret rooms, lighthouse towers... It makes Peter Gabriel’s ‘Real World’ studio look well... Really Rubbish! Plastic Beach is... Fantastiche!
But y'know. It’s not like these people, the guys that were after me, just disappeared into the sunset. They've tracked me down on Plastic Beach already. I’ve been shot at loads out there. One of them put a hole in my island the other day. In fact that's how our single 'Stylo' got leaked. Siphoned out of my island by some filthy Russian pirates. I’ll get ‘em back though... Don’t you worry... I’m good at stuff like that.
Did you start demo'ing as soon as you had assembled the studio on Plastic Beach?
Murdoc: No. Not really. When I first got there I just wandered up and down kicking the landscape. Playing with the echoes and marvelling at the enormity of the universe. You wouldn’t believe the view of the stars from out there...just amazing. Anyway I didn’t need a studio at first. Initially, I just started twanging away on Logic really, alone. 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.
Happy days! No expectations, just seeing what glory dribbled out of the fret-board. Then some of it started making sense, unfortunately. Over the weeks, the months, the melodies came into focus and the songs demanded to be ...finessed and defined. Yah Yah! Like errant children, wild and untamed, full of potential but with nappies full of excrement. Then bit-by-bit I built this ‘state-of-my-arse’ recording palace on the island, to cater for the whims of these tunes, and somewhere foxy to ship other collaborators out to. To Gorilla-rize up the snazzy tunes, and construct this towering mournful behemoth that sits in your CD slot today.
But I love the beauty of those early etchings. Staring into the vast, open chasms of the nocturnal universe, a skyful of dust and a gentle tune emanating from me and my minuscule soul. Mmmmmm... When you’re in that state, everything seems all ....isolated and correct.
(The warm smile on Murdoc's face blackens into a frown)
And 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! PROMOTION! RACING AGAINST WHAT? 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... I mean... it’s more important to have nice shiny hair than a decent tune these days!!! It makes me mad!!
SFX (Chairs and tables going over, room being smashed...)
January 2009 - you turn up unannounced on a live national radio station in the UK with collaborator Damon Albarn and play three new demo's on-air. In hindsight was this a clever idea or not?
Murdoc: Well... er... some of it was and some of it wasn’t. I spent a fair bit of time just mucking about that day. I’d brought one of those old bulb horns with me, that sound like this (horn effect) and I was parping it over someone else’s music. A bit juvenile I grant you but basically I guess not too dissimilar to what someone like Mark Ronson does.... It was just my version of his remixes... Take someone else’s music and then parp some horns over it...
But it was a great chance to play some of the demos. I unveiled three tracks. Tracks in progress...'Stylo', 'Electric Shock' and 'Broken'...They seemed to go down well. Apparently their switchboard exploded...Why did I do it? 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 and also....And .....also.......
Look. There was a coded signal in there. I needed to let someone know that I was ready to make the shift over to Plastic Beach. The Big Push. Playing those tracks was the signal. The hidden code...That I was at the radio station and that my man, my contact needed to meet me outside.
But yeah, backfired a bit because as soon as I left the studio a hail of bullets tore up the inside of my car. These other guys knew where I was at so. All hell brought loose... And, right, it was also what lead the Child Support Agency to track me down. They wanted me to pay up all this money to this band The Horrors...
So yeah, playing those demos just unleashed a tidal wave of attention. Good and bad...
So with everyone now back on your trail it's time to go back into hiding. Was this the time that you finally realised you could solve all your problems by putting Gorillaz back together again?
Yeah... ish. Well. Y’know.... 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... But y’know, yeah I thought it was time to release another one of my "long-playing emissions"...
See when Gorillaz is up and running everything’s sweet and dandy. I'm bulletproof. It just gives me everything I need. I can pay off the debtors, make swanky videos, and swan around the globe like I own the place, all the while playing my dirty thick black bass over some fantastic music. Mmmmmm...
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 too. 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....
So bit by bit, demo by demo, I started carving out the Plastic Beach record. When I had the foundations nice and solid, and sonically knew which way I was pointing the ship, I thought "it's time to get some entertainers on board", y'know... start to colour this picture in a bit more...
You are on Plastic Beach though, in the middle of nowhere - how on earth do you get the collaborators you want on the album to record with you?
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, Murdoc Niccals, at the helm... Not many people refuse an invitation.
So, for many of these cohorts, I sent out a whole load of 'Golden Tickets'; specially coded sparkly invites with our secret Plastic Beach location embossed on them. It had the map details, dress code, and the meeting place watermarked on to them, so the guests would know what was up. I sent copters out to pick them up one by one and fly them out. All like ‘top secret’ styleeee. Bit like Fantasy Island.
But it wasn’t all plain sailing. A couple of them refused so I had use another method of coercion. Well, chloroform and Rohypnol really. But as long as got what I needed I was fine. So who’s on the rack this time? Uhmmm... Lou Reed, Mos Def, Bobby Womack, Una Stubbs, Spin Ballback, Bashy and Kano, Little Dragon, Mark E. Smith, some exotic orchestras, bazooka players.... “Angel Trumpets and Devil Trombones...."
I mean, to be honest I treat my record collection like a catalogue now. Or a menu. I’ll have the number 58, the "Snoopy Doggy Dogg" with a little dollop of Lou Reed on the side. Actually, no, I’ll start with The Horrors then finish off with a big Bobby Womack ... I mean, it’s like that for us these days. As soon as I’ve mastered my little ‘DNA re-animation machine’, I’m going to start going through the back catalogue of all music’s history. I’ll be bringing back everyone from Otis Redding to Marvin Gaye, and each great legend in between.... I mean, I brought back Noodle, so who knows what I can do... I might even get a couple of 16th Century lute players on board... go all pastoral, like.
Late Jan 2009, you start recording the album on Plastic Beach. Is it true you started with UK band The Horrors, and that that session totally inspired you to make an album that eclipses everything you have done before?
Murdoc: Mmmm... Yeah well after the Zane Lowe thing I was contacted by the Child Support Agency. They track down wayward daddies, right? They wanted to talk to me about this group, of ... er... goth kids. “The Horrors.”. Turns out, DNA tests and everything, that I’m their dad. Their biological father! 5 separate kids from 5 different mothers, who’d have thunk it? 3 of them I can’t even remember...
But the fact that they all grew up and met each other and formed a band, and it’s actually good... well... What are the chances? Anyway. They said I owed them about £500,000 each in unpaid Child Support... Maintenance. Then it hit me like an anvil on the top of my pretty black-haired bonce... I know what I’ll do! I’ll stick them on the record. I’ll say I’m making a new Gorillaz album and say that, forget the 500 grand each, they can be on my new album...
So I sent them out a golden ticket each, and shipped the little buggers out to the island...There they were. The very first guests to be invited over to record on Plastic Beach.
Surprisingly the track turned out to be a monster. A whale of a tune. "Leviathan!" and, instead of filing it in the bin, I kept it. Actually that track, was the inspiration, the spring board for the whole new album. The combination of that track, some Arabic orchestra music I had pilfered and the tracks I stole from Damon’s Carousel project gave me three strong separate flavours... angles to come from. I had my Bermuda Triangle. My plastic beach vision. I would make a world wide album from the Plastic Beach location, something that took us right round the globe.
I was so full of excitement, my body was vibrating... just humming. MMMGGGGGGNNNNHGGGG!!! Might have just been the rum though....
Anyway, The Horrors stuck around for a few weeks before I had them boxed up and freighted back to Blighty... Lovely boys.
What happened to The Horrors track then? Will it see the light of day in the future?
No....I think the Horrors track will only come out at night. Mwhah Mwhah Mwhahh! But really, yeah, I’d like to think so. I think it’s a great tune. Like a great big monstrous whale hurtling round the bay, a sonic torpedo. Unleash the sonar Whale!!!
And I’ve already shot the video in the graveyards and cemeteries of Kensal Rise... With me floating around in the background in some stupid cape. I look like Nosferatu!....So hopefully the track will wash up on Plastic Beach at some point. Maybe on a B-sides or a C-sides album... Plastic Beach? C-sides? Did you see what I did there....No? Let’s move on.
Before we start talking about the tracks that have made the album, we need to talk about the rest of Gorillaz and how you got the band back together. Can we start with Noodle as after all, she has been reported as missing since the El Manana video....
Yeah ...yeah. I couldn’t seem to track her down.... I’m still not sure where she is... at the moment...So yeah, it was around maybe May 2007, I came round to thinking it would be time to assemble some new Gorillaz stuff. My pockets were empty, my liver enflamed but my head and my heart were full of grand schemes and intricate visions of a whole new Gorillaz assault. You listen to the charts and they’re still full of rubbish.
Seriously if I hear one more vocoder I'm going to have 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. It’s seemed right. And the only possible way out of the situation, with all these pirates and demons and people trying to squeeze my lute. When Gorillaz are up and running, I’m bulletproof, so to speak. So I had to go get Noodle back. I thought.
I mean, when I first started thinking about putting this all back together, y'know, I wanted to start with Noodle...Noodle was my greatest asset, she’s an outstanding guitarist, looks great and a brilliant songwriter. Noodle wrote most of Demon Days, y’know. I would’ve done it myself but I was in jail over in Mexico. I was innocent, of course, but it meant she had to do a lot of the last record herself. Until I turned up to fix it, and finish it off....
Anyway Noodle, ...I went back to the place that’d I last seen her, back in 2006. The scene of the El Manana video. The crash site. Where the floating island had been shot down, crashing to earth, in a ball of bullets and fire... However, there was nothing left other than the burnt-out remains of that Floating Island.
I did what I could. I scraped up some of Noodle’s DNA samples from the wreckage. Stuck it in a jar, just in case... You never know when something like that’s gonna come in useful...
And then I er... went back to Kong Studios, to see if there was any clues there or not....
When I got there Kong was a mess, a real bomb site, even by my standards. The place had been looted and various threats smeared on the wall in red paint or tomato sauce or something.... One of them said. "See you in Hell" and a red arrow pointing down. There were various threats sprayed all over the place. It looked like the members of the Manson gang had had one of their infamous sleepovers....
I didn't know Noodle was involved until I heard that radio signal, coming out the radio in the basement in Kong. And even then it took a while for me to twig. And then I kind of realised what happened... that maybe some of these Underworld goons had taken her.... so....
See Gorillaz have always had ties in with the Underworld. Spirit-possessions, and all that kind of stuff. I mean Del, The Ghost Rapper was the guest on our first big hit Clint Eastwood. So we’ve always been down with ghosts.
I’d struck a pretty tight deal with certain entities to get Gorillaz up the charts in the first place... A very er..Faustian pact... Mephistopheles and all that... I mean my very bass “El Diablo’ is hand crafted by the Lord of Darkness, Beelzebub himself. I mean you must remember I was born in a demonic nuthouse named “Balphagor Asylum” in the first place....
But once Gorillaz were big, The Big Man, Mr. B, he wanted his cut of the goods... Y’know? It’s funny. It doesn’t matter who or what you are everyone wants to be in a band. Especially Gorillaz.
But basically, y’know, royalties take time to come in... and I guess I didn’t pay my dues to those concerned on time.
And that wasn’t it... Erm...well...it...er...kind of turns out that some of those bombs, those weapons I'd been flogging were for some underworld entity....some devil by the name of "Malthus" or something. A demon of weaponry and underworld armourer. Although it might have been "Sabnock", actually. Whatever. I’m no good with names. It was some devil who’s into guns and stuff.
Turns out that some of the weapons I had sourced were for one of those two...He was pissed with me when the bombs didn’t really work. That’s when he sent those demon flunkies to come get me. At Kong, They found their way through Russel and his spirit-channelling abilities...He’s just an open porthole for that kind of stuff. Always has been.
But I wasn’t there so they grabbed Noodle instead. Turns out she got dragged off to some Underworld, "Hades"-type place, So I had to go looking for her....So it was up to me I guess to at least try and track her down.....downstairs so to speak.
After that y’know, I had to follow a different kind of trail.... (pause) And Go To Hell...
How to get to there? Number of methods...Stick on ‘Straight to Hell’ by the Clash, rub a little juniper on the temples, fast for 7 days... a few circles of salt....and some candles....using....well...Look.... It’s not like you just tootle off down some corridor. How you get there is a...long and complicated process that involves lobbing certain aspects of your psyche out into the abyss. But it’s a very real state. How ‘real’ others would consider that journey I don’t know. But if someone pokes you in your ‘third eye’ it still stings. (sniggers) And if someone stamps on your soul, stuffs it in a bottle and labels it "Murdoc Niccals: Do Not Open Until Hell Freezes Over" you’re still done for ...
I just looked up demon summoning in my spell book, a 15th century magical grimoire entitled "Pseudomonarchia Deamonum", opened up a portal and kind of tottered my way downstairs....
Anyway, I couldn’t find her. I spent six months or the equivalent there. But I couldn’t get hold of her. Maybe she found a way out of that one herself...
Still I had a Gorillaz album to make, and I needed 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!!!
When I got over to Plastic Beach I employed the services of a couple of top-notch genetic scientists, had them flown over, and guys from the ‘android robotic’ world and built a cyborg Noodle... It ain’t the real Noodle but it’s close enough for Jazz....
Also right, because I’m being shot at by all the various bastards, I made sure this one was armed to the teeth... She’s my own personal gunslinging, guitar playing bodyguard.....She can shoot bullets right out of her mouth y’know!!
What other band can stake claim to something like that?
Cyborg Noodle.....? what happens then if the real Noodle ever re-surfaced?
Ooooh....Now there’s a plot twist I haven’t seen coming. What’s the chances of that? Look. If Noodle’s alive it’d be great to see her back....In fact I could probably stick them together and have two Japanese female guitarists. Twins... One either side of the stage...
That’d be incredible....
But I've got a funny feeling that I haven’t heard the last from the real Noodle. The cyborg Noodle said her first words the other day....“Noodle!”, bless her metal socks. Just like the real thing... And I didn’t program any of that in so... as this cyborg version shares DNA with the real one, maybe they’re connected... maybe there’s some kind of organic, ‘psychic’ link between the two... Maybe the real Noodle can even ‘home in’ on this one, like some genetic tracking device....COME TO MUMMMY!!!! Who knows how this’ll pan out..!?
On to Russel then - how did you get hold of him?
Murdoc: I don’t think I have managed to get hold of him. He’s way too big....Ha ha ha ha ha....
I did kind of make an effort to track Russ down, but y’know...I only just managed to put him back together for the last album. His psyche’s very weak, very fragile.... You’ve got to understand that he’s been through a lot. Del, his best friend was shot dead in front of him, when he was still a teen. Del's spirit immediately took up residence in Russel’s body, and chose to manifest itself as a Ghostly Ghost Rapper. You heard him on "Clint Eastwood" and "Rock The House" back in the day, as I said.
But I just ended up programming the drums myself....Well...”nudge, nudge” “wink wink”....I actually did use a fair amount of Russel’s drum takes and programmes, bits and pieces of his that I’ve recorded over the years.... Some of it’s even from his solo album that never got finished. Great stuff...Now that would had been an exceptional album, probably would’ve launched his solo career.....but now it’s a Gorillaz record! So boo hoo for him.
Russel’s a dude, man. He took my band up a whole new level... But drummers... ten a penny... You can always find a drummer... You can hear them a mile off. If you’ve ever miked up a drum kit you’ll know how tedious it is.
Even if you’re Clyde Stubblefield all anyone else hears is... Bish! Bosh! Bash! Thud! Crash! It sounds like someone putting up a shed.
Anyway what Russel really brought was a whole range of hip-hop, soul, dub and classical stuff. Me and 2D, we’re into music but he was a musician. Incredible. Something way out of our league. Initially that was great. He turned me onto Schoolly D, Eric B and Rakim, Grandmaster Flash, DC Basehead, The Last Poets, Gil Scot Heron, loads of stuff. The Congos, Neu, Zapp, Morricone... I also got Holst, Hermann, Debussy, Messiaen... fantastic, glorious stuff, really rich. But I’ve soaked that up now. But all he’s come up with in the last couple of years is some old Wu Tang B-Side. So why do I need the rest of it? Ditch it. I can do what I need with Pro-Tools... and my tinnitus has cleared up too, funnily enough.
No, seriously. I just didn’t need Russel. Or Noodle. Not the original Noodle. I just built another. But y’know I’ve noticed this mysterious brown dome, way, way off in the distance...but it seems to be inching closer and closer to the island.... Still, probably nothing eh? The chances of that dome turning out to be Russel’s big bald head is ridiculous... isn’t it? So yeah, drummers? Who needs ‘em?
Seems slightly harsh- hope that doesn't comeback to haunt you......so finally 2-D?
Murdoc: 2D? Good grief. He’s harder to shift than herpes.... Y’know, whatever you think of him, his voice is an integral part of Gorillaz. You can get away with ditching lots of aspects of a band, skipping parts, put it down to ‘experimentation’: but you can’t switch the singer. Very few bands get away with that. Perhaps New Order... Maybe.
I’d pretty well done what I needed to, on Plastic Beach... but it was still missing that magic vocal touch. So it was time to bring in the larynx. The voice. I tracked 2D down to this flat he was renting...
No.1 Buckingham Place Road, London. It was the same place Patrick McGoohan’s character rented in Danger Man. Danger Man was the series before The Prisoner, that one in which he gets kidnapped and taken to a mysterious island village location. 2D was kind of asking for it by renting that place.... strange boy that he is....
Anyway, 2D had been renting the place for a while, over the summer of 2009, when I tracked him down. I realised I needed those vocals, that "melancholic soul", for the album. 2D refused. He wanted no part of a third Gorillaz campaign. Pffft!! As if he’s got a choice.
So I just copied the beginning, the opening sequence of The Prisoner! Gassed him out cold. Shipped him over to Plastic Beach and installed him in the room downstairs....
I used this wonderful thick turquoise 'valium gas'. Could knock out an elephant that stuff. I got it on eBay. Very effective....
I knew 2D has a crippling fear of whales - cetaphobia it's called - he can’t stand them. So I installed 2d in the glass-bottomed room in a sub-sea level of Plastic Beach with the whales on patrol. Just for safe keeping... Which is a bit mean. But that is how I roll!
I got the job done. Got his vocals on the tracks and it sounds incredible, a glorious performance... 'Career High'...'Purple patch'. He should be happy, grateful that I bothered to drag him over. Might have stung a bit. But I almost had him replaced with Englebert Humperdink, so he's lucky he's on there... Shall we hear a little of the record now...my throats getting very dry......
Let's go through the finished album now in running order - so track one, a beautiful orchestral piece to take us into Plastic Beach - how did that come about?
Ahhhh... The Orchestral Intro.....I needed something other-worldly to to open the record. This album’s been a while in the making and this was “The Big Reveal”. The curtains are going up on a brand new world, a vast new landscape to breathe in, and it needs to have that scope... It needed to be portentous, VAST and.... oceanic. But graceful... Like the morphine’s just gently kicking in as the listener glides into the Plastic Bay....MMmmmm...
Guitar bass and drums just weren’t gonna cut it.... I wanted to something that would.....reveal the majesty of the surroundings of this plastic retreat....... As the listener swoops across the landscape.... into the bay. Unaware of the events ahead....
And then the organics of the music descend into decay, a digital decay ...One of the trombones started to collapse towards the end, just coming off its coasters....Urrr! Urrr! Urrr! Urrr! Urrrr! Urrrr! Urrrr.... You can hear the trombone going rusty in front of your ears.
Like it was.... decaying, rusting ... a rusty trombone.....*rusty trombone*? Did I just say that...? Yes. I did.
Anyway this little symphony was recorded with the Orchestra Viva, the Sinfonia Viva, in Derby around April 2009. I can’t remember too much about the session other than the weather is abysmal in Derby. I recorded with them in the old Rolls Royce engine factory, where they built the engines for the World War II spitfires... Which strangely enough kind of fits the soul of all this... a bygone era, the remnants of war and planes and decay... It’s turned out nice again, though... So that’s alright.
And then we get into the plasticky stuff, the digital.... Vocoded emotion, the album’s evolving into plastic... Hurry Up!!! QUICK!!!
Track 2 is Welcome to the world of Plastic Beach with Snoop Dogg - tell us about that
'Welcome to The World of The Plastic Beach' with Snoop Dogg and the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. Snoop is unveiling the show here. He’s the Boss Dogg, mein host, the introductory MC, if you will. As you land on the island he welcomes you aboard.... to the world of the Plastic beach...y’know?
Snoop's the grand daddy, isn’t he? Doggystyle was for many people the record that really made the leap for them, got them in rap and G-funk ...along with De La Soul, who did the same kind of cross over with 'Three Foot High and Rising...' It's kind of a lineage from Sly and the family Stone.. The idea of mixing genres, styles, people, continents and bringing it all together to form something fresh and vibrant....something colourful.
The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble are from Chicago, a 9-piece brass group featuring 8 sons of Phil Cohran. Phil Cohran played trumpet with The Sun Ra Arkestra. The Hypnotic Brass are made up of all his sons. Which actually makes my revelation about my Goth boys The Horrors coming together pale into insignificance... They’re just a drop in the ocean compared to this lot. But this is a proper soundtrack: brass-laden, pimped out, plastic funk... mixing the organic with the plastic to form something new and shiny.....And who better to open up this world than Snoop?
Next is White Flag with UK rappers Kano & Bashy
...And The National Orchestra For Arabic Music, of course You can probably see where I’m heading with all this now... By positioning Plastic Beach as the most isolated point, a lonely sentinel post, I could look a full 360 degrees around the world, and grab little bits of everything from everywhere....
The plan with Plastic Beach, Gorillaz third album, would be to make it a worldwide collage. A map of the modern world...Via the guests I brought in and used, I could take little snapshots of the world, get different souls from around the globe and stick their essence onto the album. Plastic Beach would be a microcosm of the globe.
D'you get me? So White Flag opens with a lush and hypnotic Arabic orchestra. Recorded over in Beruit, around the end of March 2009. I went over there in disguise... I knew I wanted that part of the world on the record, so I fired up the helicopter again and left PLASTIC BEACH and headed for Beirut and Syria. I had to be in disguise because of all of these... elements that were after me...., so I chose a black burka as my disguise and flew out to Beirut to record with The National Orchestra For Arabic Music.
What a fantastic piece to lay on a so called 'pop album'...It’s fundamental to open people’s ears up to this aspect of the world... Because if you only read the papers or watch the TV the impression you get of that area is so very different.So it’s important to stick things like this out there....Just erode all this mis-information....GORILLAZ: We're a public service!
While I was over there various guides took me around the city. Which is an eye-opener...Y’know, the Israelis like to fly their jets really low over the city of Beirut once a month. It’s called “sabre-rattling”, buzzing the towns in order to pop out, the windows.
If they fly low and fast enough, it creates a sonic boom effect, taking out all the windows in the area. It’s a part of the atmosphere, and the relentless campaign to keep the city on its toes.
The city is like Port Royal, the old pirate town. Basically you can kind of get what you want, if you want to party in a war zone. Which I guess I did, in my own unique and singular style.
So this is just one angle on the record, one colour, but the thing is, right, whatever’s going down in a country... whatever they’re going through you can always find the core soul of the people in their music.
I guess this faintly surreal experience in Beirut and Syria got rolled into various themes on the album.
I took all these tapes back to Plastic Beach and what I wanted to do was then fly in something ....else- a British counterpart....a different balance...And who would fit the bill better than the British grime artists Bashy and Kano...??
What they bring to this is great- it’s what I loved about bands like The Specials: a true sense of the city... and so loose and buoyant...
I spotted Kano when Damon worked with him. on a track called London Town. I like to keep my ear to the ground. I can’t really help it really sometimes, because quite frequently I wake to find myself slumped there..... on the ground.
So I took ‘em over to Plastic beach and gave them a pen and paper, put the mic to their faces and said “Do IT!” “Say what you see” “SAY WHAT YOU SEE...”
And they described the scene as if they had just hit town, like a lonely cowboy. Or a a vacuum cleaner, or a whirlwind... A grimy wind blowing dancehall music over Arabic Orchestras. Just like that.
I watched all this unfold, while I was making Doctor Who quacking noises with my synth in the background....I wanted it to sound like an oily seagull being sick....
I had the same reaction when I first arrived here on The Beach. It looked like something out of a magazine... golden shores, bright sunlight: an idyll. But it’s not. It’s a gloopy mass of decay. Everything rotten swirling towards it... But you don’t see it at first. At first, it looks all good.
And y’know, if you arrived on a fresh beach, a clean slate... a new day...how would you feel? Clean, fresh, hopeful? Am I right, kids? ...But, bit by bit, these ‘islands of paradise’ fill up: wars, religions... crap... plastic.... drill baby drill! We just suck the life out of the places we inhabit and then move on, once it’s sunk... very... nomadic.
Plastic Beach looks like an escape, like a paradise, but it's actually a drain. It's where all the rotten bits of the world end up. They all get caught up in the grill at the end of the sewer. Plastic Beach is the blockage at the end of mankind’s drains. I think, though, that Kano and Bashy nailed the optimism and potential of Plastic Beach just right, in their little skit. Probably my favourite track on the album.... Apart from all the others.... My leg’s gone to sleep....
Rhinestone Eyes is track 4....
Rhinestone Eyes... This one was recorded in my little submarine. I’ve got this little personal submarine that I use to scoot round the Bay. I put 2D in it one day and took him for a spin, through all the murky quagmire of Plastic Beach. Even though he was terrified he managed to free-style this one.
I looped up the sonar noises my boat was making, made it into a rhythm and he just mumbled over the backing track. I soared round the sub-aquatic terrain and he sang his little mantra, about gargoyles and factories and electric towers and whatever...Came out quite well, don’t you think?.... 2D at his most wistful and boy-ish...
I nicked a bit of my own ‘Electric Shock’ track, and stuck it in here....with a little delay over the top.I think my sub’s probably the most indulgent ‘rock star’ item I’ve bought to date... but it’s essential round these parts.
Well, as the world gets wetter, and dry land gets scarcer that “70%” of water on the earth surface is beginning to look like a great big splashy playground. Vast areas of ripe ‘underwater real estate’ going untouched. To navigate these new terrains, you need something zippy to get around in, right?
Now personal submarines aren’t exactly new, I’ve had loads for ages, but the tipping point will come when someone starts mass-producing these things, making them affordable to all. It’s all going to kick off in the ocean world. Yeah, of course there’s going to be a whole load of accidents at first. Well, fatalities probably. Y’know, kids joy riding, underwater pile-ups, water rage, etc... but the long terms prospects? Very exciting. A sparkly new future!
But yeah, that was Rhinestone Eyes. I recorded it underwater. And it turned out all good....
Track 5 on Plastic Beach is also the first single from the album, `Stylo'. [It's an] Amazing track featuring vocals from the legendary Bobby Womack and Mos Def
.... Stylo. Yeah, this was the first single to come off this album. And in fact this one got stolen just weeks before the release... Some pirates shot up my island and nicked it, then leaked it online... You can’t plug holes like that anymore in the brave new digital world. This is a new sound for Gorillaz. An electro-ish ‘crack funk’ sound, with a little ‘bit of politics and a lot of soul going down...
With Stylo, I wanted the music to feel euphoric, whilst still putting across how precarious our tightly packed situation is now, worldwide. Where we’re at as a species on this overpopulated planet....“Coming on to the Overload. Overload. OVERLOAD.”....Can you feel it, Kids? CAN YOU FEEL IT?
The funny thing is, since man could pick up a pen and put his thoughts on paper we’ve always had a sense of the Apocalyptic. An imminent Doomsday...but y’know....yeah...I think something’s got to give...It’s like rubbing the impossible to burst!
I think you can hear that in Bobby Womack’s chorus, he just explodes into the track. How good is it to get Bobby Womack on the record...? This was the first recording he’s made in ...15... 20 years...so what an honour....for him. Only joking....Bobby said he only returned to do this Gorillaz track because his granddaughter said Gorillaz were cool. Which is true. We are...
Bobby came into the studio, and sang full pelt for 45 mins straight, laying down some different versions of “110th Street”, just to get warmed up. In between takes he told us some fantastic stories...He told us about the time he was partying at Ike Turner’s house, with the Stones, the Rolling Stones, and Ike ended up trapping The Stones in his mansion for 3 days... They were partying and everything at Ike Turner’s house, when Bobby found Ike in this room with all these TV screens. It turns out that he had cameras installed in every room, and had locked the doors so The Rolling Stones couldn’t get out. He was on his own, just watching them on the screens... I’d say it was a different world back then, but I’ve just realised that he’d accidentally stumbled on the format for Big Brother. I hope he got paid for that.
So the vocals for this we recorded this out in New York... Same time that I hooked up with Mos Def. He’s great; great rapper, great actor and a really vibrant presence. And him and Bobby work really well with 2D here, so the whole track came together. When I first met up with Mos it was at The Box Club in New York. He wouldn’t stop yapping about The Boogieman. I thought it was just the cocktails talking, but Mos said he’s a dark entity, a black-caped figure made up of all the evil in the world. A swirling black shadow, with a gasmask for a face. He is a war unto himself.
I shrugged and let Mos spill all this out, but I didn’t really take it in. I just wanted Mos on the album. So I put up with it. Turns out that Mos was right! We’ve got the Boogieman on film now. I’m definitely looking over my shoulder more often. No doubt that’s another battle I’m gonna end up having....In fact I tell you where you can see the Boogieman - he turns up in the footage we used for the Stylo video....
Anyway it doesn’t matter. It all got caught on film, so I used it as a video for the Stylo single... You can’t really buy press like that... And the Boogieman’s in there too. It’s enough to send a chill right down your spine. Look, why don’t you top my glass up, stick the record on and we’ll have a listen, eh? How about that?
Sounding like an advert, track 6 is the brilliant Superfast Jellyfish' with Super Furry Animals' Gruff Rhys and longtime collaborators De La Soul....
It is an advert. It’s a little plastic advert about life... I mean...what have we got: “Frozen Sushi”... “Superfast Jellyfish” .... “Plastic Chicken”...everything shrink-wrapped, freeze dried, covered in Formica...what are we building here. Y’know - and this is true, right - out of all the fast food in the world, it’s a proven statistic that ‘SuperFast Jellyfish’ is the fastest food known to man. I didn’t know this piece of information until I read it in a leaflet. About maybe 20,000 of these leaflets washed up on the Plastic Beach. All adverts for this ‘Superfast Jellyfish’ fast-food chain. Maybe it didn’t catch on....It’s funny what washes up on the beach there....
In fact one day, back in January, I was walking along and then I saw what appeared to be a couple of jellyfish, dried up and washed up on the shore.
Living things don’t really arrive on Plastic Beach so I was quite intrigued. I approached them to get a better look and then on closer inspection I realised they weren’t jellyfish at all. They were actually silicon implants. A pair of silicon implants. Some discarded silicon implants had washed up on the shore. Now this is the moment when you’re thinking about.....y’know the beach, this place, the world .....the very small leap in the evolutionary scale it would take for maybe silicon implant to morph, evolve into a living life form such as jellyfish...Or vice versa...Maybe life forms could even become silicon implants,...or these bits of jettisoned body parts over years would mutate into life forms of their own, something totally new......There’s enough of them in the sea now....it could happen.
I mean though, the stuff that’s floating around in there now is unbelievable, I mean, what kind of person chucks a pair of tits into the sea?
Just crazy. Anyway. It was great to get Gruff on the album....When you think about Gorillaz, it makes sense to have a Super Furry Animal on there doesn’t it? I’ve always loved them, so I sent a jet over to pick Gruff up and take him over here. And he whooshed his way over here, and along with De La Soul they put this thing together... A lot of fun this track. If you turn it up loud enough all the colours start spilling and washing out of the speakers... You could flood your room with a track like this.....Like something out of Fantasia....
And the good thing about our “Superfast Jellyfish”, is that’s it’s nice and shiny, it’s crunchy and it tastes just like chicken...and it comes with a toy....essential for any fast food. Why would you eat fast food unless you got a toy out of it...? I ask myself. So, Here’s Gorillaz with Superfast jellyfish......
Up next is "Empire Ants" with Little Dragon.....
Yes. A moment’s peace amongst the rush. After all that gooning about and splish-sploshing on the last track this is a chance to reflect, sailing out on the gorgeous inky blue waters of the night-time ocean....the blue lagoon...the nocturnal shore...mmmmm.
Which again just fragments into teeny tiny pixels slowing into more of the digital plastic funk... and in drifts Yukimi Nagano from Little Dragon, the girl who sings on this one.... The track emerges from the lagoon, tethers its boat to the shore and swims into the rush of the digital. I sampled a lot of this from the theme music to Tomorrow’s World. I subscribe to a very 70’s view of the future. So the song is dated but from the future. Or do I mean it’s futuristic but from the past?
It was actually 2D who got me into Little Dragon. He played me this lovely song of theirs called "Twice". Little Dragon are an electronic band from Sweden. So we requested their company for a couple of songs for the album. She sings with 2D on another track called "To Binge". 2D first heard this song "Twice" on the TV show Grey's Anatomy. So strangely even though it's a like delicate whisper of a tune, it always reminds him of being in hospital. Or being operated on. Probably by me...
Track 8 on Plastic Beach is "Glitter Freeze" with Mark E Smith of The Fall on vocal duties....
I really glad we managed to get Mark E. Smith on the record. I’m not sure he felt the same....but, y’know... sometimes I just get bored of asking people. Some of the collaborators I just kidnapped. “Here. Does this rag smell of chloroform to you?” “Er...Rohypnol, anyone?” He’s great. I love The Fall. He’s on this track called “Glitter freeze”. He wanted to do his part facing North. “Which way’s North from here?” I guess that’s his Mecca. I pointed South West, but he went with it anyway..... But we still used his question as a little intro...kind of like what we did with Shaun Ryder on DARE. Sometimes the greatest moments are those little mistakes that you catch in the mix.....when you’re just warming up....
On this track...Mark. E. Smith’s character, he’s the black wind of doom...the roaring pirate trader...keeping his crew under the cosh with rum, sodomy, the lash and weevil biscuits...The ghostly slave ship moored just outside the harbour........
If you fall asleep on his watch, he’s going to climb ashore, stick you in the hold, rip out the gold from your teeth and put you to work on his rum sodden pirate ship...."It waaarsssss The Glitter Freeezzee....ICE AGE!!!!!!"
Like 'Punk' on the first album, and 'White Light on Demon Days this is our noise, our rawkus section of chaos sailing in to frame and belching in your face...Every album’s got to have one...Otherwise it’s just a load of ballads.
Next up is `Some Kind of Nature' with the one & only Lou Reed.....
Actually, that’s not true. There was another Lou Reed pencilled for that track originally, but he wasn’t as good as this one. This Lou Reed’s a legend, from The Velvet Underground. I don’t think we could have got a better Lou in for the job here.....Not just any old Lou will do, you know.
I grew up on Lou Reed, and the Velvets. Well, not grew up because that still hasn’t happened but I did listen to them a lot when I was younger than I am now...And I loved Lou’s solo stuff, ‘Magic and Loss’ and ‘The Blue Mask’ and ‘Transformer’ of course. Produced by "Daviiiiidd Booowwieeeee".
It's funny. This track’s got a good ol’ sunshiny vibe. Like something off Sesame Street. Apparently Lou Reed is one of the only people to never appear, or refuse to appear, on Sesame Street. Or maybe it was 'The Muppets'... He refused ....I don’t know why...so it’s quite a coup that we got him on this....It was him or Oscar the Grouch. I think the best man one the job.
Anyway, I was very pleased when Lou agreed to do it. I recorded with Lou over in New York and he wanted to do his whole vocal thing in private, on his own. He ordered everyone out the studio. Me too. At one point he even tried to have himself kicked out, but he’s smarter than that. Anyway he ordered me out the studio. I just waited until he was up and running, getting his groove on, and then I crawled back in, under the mixing desk where he couldn’t see. I love Lou, but y’know: this is my album. I wanna know what’s going down....His track “Some kind of Nature”. Wow! Solid gold.
The last line, “All we are is stars” that 2D sang......That’s true, I’ve looked it up. In the history of time, as Earth spun out the Sun, basically formed out of a Solar Nebula, ‘a disc shaped mass of dust and gas’ that spun out of the Sun, it means that we, and all life essentially.... that’s what’s we’ve all evolved from. From the atomic material from stars....Nice thought. “All we are is stars”.....Here’s Bob with the weather....
Gorgeous melody on Track 10 - tell us about "On Melancholy Hill"....
Ermm welll....Melancholy Hill...That's a place on the island...The Melancholy Hill of Plastic Beach.... It's that feeling, that place, that you get in your soul sometimes, like....someone’s let your tyres down. A bit deflated. I usually get that around Tuesday morning. Clears up again maybe Thursday and I’m ready to start all over again...Bit it always seems quite real when I’m going through it...It’s nice to break up the album with something a little lighter...I think is also good to have something that’s a genuine pop moment on every album...And this is one of those.
One of 2D's best ever vocal performances is next: "Broken"....
Yes, though actually, another friend of mine ‘Barry the circus freak’ did a far more accomplished rendition of this track, but he wanted paying so I got 2D to do it....
Y’know sometimes it’s possible to break stuff so it’s unfixable. It’s just Broken. There’s no glue for a broken heart...Pass the rum, could you? Ow....Erm....I don’t really know what to say about this track, y’know...Like Frank Zappa said "talking about music is like fishing about architecture".
Yes, some things gets broken forever. But maybe they’re not broken. Maybe the kaleidoscope shifts, and ....er.....it's a new day...it's perfectly possible to restart the game...If....I’m rambling here.....but...Look. This track just works...I don’t want to talk about it...Is that, OK?
Track 12 is simply incredible - "Sweepstakes" with an amazing rap from Mos Def and is that Hypnotic Brass Ensemble providing the backing?
Why, yes, Sherlock I believe it is...The Hypnotic Brass brothers give us that full on Chicago brass muscle, turning this track out into a ‘Quincy Jones’ version of hip hop, MC’ed superlatively by Sir Most Definitely. Ah yes! Mos Def. An absolute gent. I first met him in The Box club on the Lower East side of NYC. I went over there to find him to try and get him on the record, y’know? I like his rap work...and I saw him in "Be kind Rewind". So yeah thought we needed that on the record. Some NYC perspective....
“Sweepstakes: you’re a winner.” Collect your little plastic prize at the counter. You’re a winner...There’s a lot of rubbish that gets dangles in front of people on this Earth, little plastic inducements to get you to dance and jump and do the things that people want you to...Making people feel like a winner is one of the best way of hooking them in.........
Track 13 is a special moment for fans of The Clash - the song `Plastic Beach' features both Mick Jones and Paul Simonon
Well...It's a special moment for fans of Gorillaz and the Clash.....How did this come about? Well, I had commandeered Paul Simonon from the Good, the Bad and The Queen. And it made sense. To er...See...Gorillaz were always influence by the Clash...and Big Audio Dynamite. It was my brother Hannibal who got me into the Clash.
It was him who broke my nose too, so I've got a lot to thank him for really. But being influenced by them one thing....Getting them back together, well Paul and Mick Jones, to work with us is just something else...Now the way I was thinking is, I’m in the middle of the ocean and what I’m really missing in this sub-tropic garbarged state is a bit of ‘West London’. As much as I wanted this record to include elements from around the world, I need this boat, this cruise ship to have a west London anchor. So I got a couple of anchors out The Clash.
They were always my favourite band, I loved how they took the heart and soul of punk and reggae smeared it in London graffiti and paint and then sailed it round the world. I don’t think that’s a million miles from what Gorillaz do now....We’re all in the same boat together. Which if you listen to this track you can hear.I always like to go for that ‘end of the pier’ feel - turquoise fog, melancholic funk, but this time I wanted it to sound like plastic...plastic....dreams...Casio, plastic beach...Styrofoam. What? All this stuff is fogging up my periscope...
I’ll tell you what happened on this track, and take it how you will.. Basically we started off like the Owl and The Pussycat sailing round in a little wooden boat...but the dream turned bad and the idyllic island.. the island started filling up....I knew this would happen...It’s inevitable...
But all these keyboards and synths and effects boxes started washing up on this shore...You ever wondered happens to funk bands when they split up...? Where the 80’s went...? what happens to all those synth basses...those cheap keyboards and all that mass-produced claptrap? Once the bands and the record labels and the industries collapse...they get chucked into the sea...It all gets dumped...but then...bit by bit they started washing up on this beach...so I did what any musician would do...I just kind of dried them out, plugged them in and then miked them up....made a brand new track, out of the plastic synths that washed up on the shore...with a couple of guys out The Clash...I mean, what would you do...?
Another collaboration with Little Dragon - `To Binge' ends up as a beautiful duet between vocalist Yukimi Nagamo and 2D....
A Hawaiian version of melancholy.....yeah? You don’t see a lot of miserable Hawaiians, do you? It’s not known for its grim outlook on life... You don’t have any numbers do you...of any one you could call....? No? ....Oh well what's the next track...
The penultimate track on Plastic Beach is the "Cloud Of Unknowing" which features an incredible vocal from Bobby Womack....
...This track’s a mirror. The mirror of the opener.... The outro to the Intro, and a final reflection on the Plastic Beach. Bobby Womack’s performance on this song can still bring tears to my eyes. That mixture of hope and uncertainty in his voice – the age and the experience – the fear and the joy... Scuse me [LOUD SOUND OF MURDOC BLOWING HIS NOSE]
Where were we? Ah ....."The Hope". Billowing clouds of melancholic reflection. This song, like the Who's "Love Reign O'er Me" is the moment that gathers together the events of the album, the events of the world...and pauses for reflection. D'you know? It's a realisation that life on this beautiful planet is as fragile as the gossamer of a buttefly’s wings....Which isn’t quite right. Gossamer's is the fibrous material made of from spiders silk... so that doesn’t work.
But on this exit track, woven into the melancholic blanket are threads of golden hope....The future stretches out before us, a vast plain of pristine unbroken snow, an immaculate, untrodden landscape offering immeasurable potential and adventures unwritten.
Inevitably though that landscape always gets pebble-dashed once again with wonky boob jobs, close-ups of nostrils, talent shows, weight loss / gain issues, indignant politicians, adverts for insurance and more of all the rubbish we trail in our wake.
I’ve chosen to avoid describing the physical aspects of the landscape of Plastic Beach. The Wells of Bitter Tears, the Igloos of Madness, the Foothills of My Mind, the Whale of Disbelief...The Jizzy Castle.
But I thought, lyrically, it was necessary to include a little bit about The Cloud of Unknowing, as this great big black cumulonimbus has long been a feature of my environment. Sometimes you just can’t shift something as ominous as doubt...Still it does offer some hope: “waiting to see what the morning brings, it may bring sunshine on it’s wings.... Or maybe it’ll bring an oily seagull dropping its mess on another day.. Funnily enough, we went to some lengths to get the seagull sounds that open this track. We had to use a gull-wrangler and a special microphone to get exactly the right sound.
Finally we reach the end, track 16 'Pirate Jet'....
Here come the bulldozers, the big plastic bulldozers of hope...The Pirate jets...Maybe they’re coming in to level the land..."The people, the plastic eating people". Well you’ve got to end on a punchline haven’t you....it’s just a little drum roll, to punctuate the joke of life...Laugh and the world laughs with you, eh? EH? Cry and you’re on your own....
Pirate Jet takes the album out swinging. The curtain’s descending. It’s like something out of ‘Bugsy Malone’, a finale with shuddering jazz hands: “Did you like the show? It was called “PLANET EARTH”. It’s possible that what this one’s saying is: the job’s a good un’. We’re finished and now everyone’s evolved into plastic. Plastic Beach is now full up with Plastic People. A new breed of human....
Or maybe it’s saying: "It's kicking out time at the last chance saloon. And this is the last record we're playing tonight...Pirate Jet". D'you understand me? It’s a kind of “Always Look On The Bright Side of Life” tip. "It’s all good now, because we left the taps running for 100 hundred years...". I was thinking of ending on a cover of Hersham Boys by Sham 69 but it didn’t seem right somehow...
But y'know...I want to clear this up. Plastic Beach. It's not a green record. It's 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 not a judgement on the world... it's just a picture...."
Imagine looking down a telescope at the end of the pier. Way off in the distance is a little island, green and pristine. From back here it looks like hope...It's very possible it might end up exactly as we have. Just a hard ball of plastic floating in the middle of nowhere. Full of desire, clutter, oil-slicks and paperwork. But...At the moment it's empty, it's clean and it's naive, but it is filling up. Plastic Beach..it's another place, it's another way of looking at the world. And this is its soundtrack....
Not even King Canute can turn back a tide like that. The Island's just filling up, cd’s books, tyres, rubble, boxes, folders...everything’s just spilling forth. A tidal wave of our detritus... We're fit to burst. Or just....Evolving into plastic...
You must be incredibly proud of this album Murdoc - is it your best work to date?
Of course. I, like the world, am a work in progress, teetering, twittering, on the tightrope of evolution, bolstered by rum and tinctures, easing my way into an early grave, and trying to wring as much fun out of the present sunshine as possible, like anybody else. But the headstone should read well. I described this piece , this album, like the third panel of the Gorillaz triptych. Plastic Beach is my third most glorious panel....
I tell you what Plastic Beach is. It's a 4 dimensional postcard. A postcard from the edge? Yeah, maybe... but this is a postcard that comes to life.. A techni-coloured snapshot...of an alternate land.... And you know, I'm immensely proud of Gorillaz......I grabbed colours, philosophies, artistic thought from around the world and bundled it into one plastic Polaroid call an album. Pretty snazzy.
Look...on a less abstract thought....as communication distances get shorter...and quicker...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 for something anything, why not do it this way...getting all the brilliant people together and make a positive statement SOMETHING A BIT FUN! SOMETHING A BIT MUSICALLLLL!!!
And finally, what's all this fuss about something called 'The End Of Days'......
(Lights cigarette...): Oh...That...yeah...That’s a bit longer than five minutes ..I just noticed and it’s easy enough to point out, that since the beginning of time, each leap of evolution and innovation has taken a shorter and shorter amount of time. The Universe was created 14 billion years, Earth 4.5 billion years. Man arrived in its earliest state about 4.5 million years, and then we evolved into this state, Homo Sapiens around 200,000 years ago. The earliest cities appeared about 6-7000 years ago, over in Mesopotamia and then we’ve been at war since then really...right up until the last 100 years, and then we really kicked off. The population of the planet had gone from 1 billion to 7 billion in the last 100 years, and every single piece of digital information and technology has exploded in this last century. We’re crammed packed and it’s getting more and more. Escalating.. The overload. Humanity is now squeezed into this tiny plastic bubble...
Everything getting faster and faster whirling towards an inevitable conclusion, a single point on the horizon or in the middle of the ocean say. The entire of time and history and evolution is hurtling towards a single point. Point Nemo... Plastic Beach. That's what Plastic Beach is I reckon. The End of Days...the point of no return.....It's right here. It's right now....It's upon us.
Does that make sense? Yeah? Great. Right I’m off for a wazz. Great talking to you. And last one at the bar's a wanker....
THE END
Your last public performance as a band was in April 2006 with the Demon Days live shows in NYC - how do you feel now, looking back on those shows - surely very proud?
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 some animations, pre-recorded appearances, an explosive live band... A phantasmagoria of sounds, colours and assaults on the senses.... Even without my usual self-administered trinkets and tinctures I would’ve have found that experience quite er...'psychedelic'. So yeah, very proud. We brought the houses down....We should play there more often....
But then the band went their separate ways - did you instigate that?
Well, I instigated my own disappearance, certainly. I didn’t really care what the others got up to. After the show I stayed round long enough to goose some of the guests, throw down a couple of rums and then made a swirling disappearance off into the ether. POW! 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 want to have a long "Lost Weekend"...and somehow I managed to string it out for about three years.....It's amazing what kind of fun you can get up to with a Coutts credit card and a big bottle of Absinthe.....
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. I mean no other band really has to experience the kind of mind-numbing antics we go through. Possessions, assassination attempts, Grim Reapers, Madonna collaborations, floating islands, Black Clouds...that idiot 2D. I mean the last time I saw Noodle she was being shot by helicopters at as she parachuted off the floating island in the El Manana video...KaBoooM!! The whole thing just crashed into the ground and exploded. Haven’t seen her since. Still... Great video....
And Russel... As you know, he had his big, bad breakdown... seeing demons shooting out of the speakers. He was working on his solo album, just after the first Gorillaz record, a kind of hip-hop version of Pet Sounds but it just turned into his version of ‘Smile’. It sent him over the edge. His mind just turned to jelly. Sickly gloop oozing out the speakers, cherry stones vomiting out of the bass bins. Sent him krackers. He ended up living in Ike Turner's 'basement'. Which I thought was a euphemism for something else, until Ike Turner turned up to play on Demon Days.... So Russel, yeah, we only just managed to put him back together for the last album. I was in no hurry to hang around with him much more, once we’d done those Apollo shows.
And 2D... well, I don’t know or care what he got up to. He probably went back to his Dad's fairground in Eastbourne to work on the arcades...OH NO. Hang on. Tell a lie... I remember operating on him at Kong Studios. I chloroformed him and then stole all his organs. Hah hah hah.... I think it made him quite ill. Still he’s a great singer, lovely voice box. That’s why I got him back in on the new record...
But where were we...? Oh yeah...
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. Some people seem to make a career out of dining out. In fact the only way to keep things moving in some parts of that world is to make sure nothing gets finished. It’s like war really -just keep everything ticking along with no conclusions. I’d had enough too. I thought I’d scoop up my coppers, put on my ermine and go party.
We hear that various 'business deals' then didn't really work out well for you, leading to you putting Kong Studios up for sale in Nov 2007 - did you get any serious offers for the studio?
No, not serious offers. A couple of crank calls... some quacking noises down the phone and a few... er... delinquent enquiries from the more medicated part of our audience, but nothing more....
I had to sell the place. I loved Kong Studios, really, it was a fantastic hangout. It was the Gorillaz original HQ, the birthplace of my fantastic band. We all used to live there, me, Russel, Noodle... 2D. But I had to get rid of it....People were hunting me down, I’d just come back from a long trip to the demonic Underworld, about 6 months long. I only came back to pick up a can of mace. When I got back to Kong Studios I found the place collapsing, full of zombies, just a mess. It looked like Dawn of The Dead.
And I knew that all those other people we’re still looking for me, the underworld entities and the pirates, The Black Clouds, and the deranged fans turning up with the paternity suits and stuff... I had to move on from Kong. So I though I’d sell it...You’d think something like that would fly of the shelf. A gigantic disused haunted studio in the middle of nowhere? What’s not to love? I even put it on sale through the property website. But nothing. So I went about getting rid of it a different way...(evil laugh)
But these 'various business deals' you mentioned. Let’s just clear that up a bit shall we...
I'll tell you what happened. After Gorillaz split, I’d partied my way round the world, ruffling feathers and spilling drinks around the globe... But then the money kind of dried up. The Demon Days stuff had been expensive, and I’d invested in all these other things, stupid mobile phone companies, and get rich quick pyramid schemes... I bought a load of pyramids in Giza over in Egypt, but it turned out the guy who sold them to me - Bernie Madoff - was a crook, and the contracts weren’t worth the parchment they were written on....
I was broke. I needed to get some new funds coming in... So I tried my hand at various tricks and trades... And one of them was amateur arms dealing. That’s good fun! I bought a copy of 'As Used On The Famous Nelson Mandela' by Mark Thomas in a second hand bookshop. Great book. It shows you how very easy it is to push different weapons round the globe, by buying up old stock as countries upgrade, repainting them, relisting them and selling them on at a profit to other groups.
As long as the paperwork is done, should all be cool, right? It's basically what Governments do anyway. The British arms industry is the second biggest in the world. We’ll sell arms to anyone. Same all over. Every time any big country needs a weapons upgrade they just flog the old lot in a garage sale. I was just working as an independent trader.
The way I see it is, y'know, I knew they were duds. They were all damaged goods. They'd never work, so I was just trying to make a fast buck... As far as I can see I was doing something for er...'world peace' by selling on weapons that wouldn't work. I just happened to make a bit of cash in the process.
That did backfire though. I ran into to some er...'dissatisfied customers'. In particular an underground network group of pirates called "The Black Clouds", the ones I mentioned before. They’ve been after me since they appeared uninvited in that El Manana video. It was them in the helicopters, that turned up and shot the island down...
I smoothed it over with them at the time with promises of cheap weaponry, but after I stiffed them with the dud scuds, the blood between us turned very bad...
(Murdoc pauses)
But, yeah, the Bernie Madoff thing was a mistake for sure. I thought what with the economy fluctuating so chaotically, surely your money’s safe in pyramids? Apparently not. Still, I like to feel a little bit of my heart is entombed forever somewhere in Egypt. Next to Tutankhamen.
July 25th 2008 - a significant date Murdoc? Kong Studios burnt to the ground.......care to enlighten us on what happened there then.....?
Oh yeah...er...the 25th July 2008. That was the date of the Monkey King Opera at The Royal opera House... I remember it well. I would. It was the date I burnt Kong Studios down and then went to the Opera as an alibi!
I went along dressed to the nines, in a silky Victorian cape & silver-topped cane, and just guffawed loudly throughout the performance. I even started kicking the chair in front of me with my big Cuban heeled boots. I just want to draw attention to myself really, LOUD, make nice and sure everyone got a good look at me... Putting me far away from the scene of the crime... Arson doesn’t look good on the CV really.
As I said, I’d put the place up for sale, and to be honest Kong Studios is a piece of rock n’ roll history. National Heritage. It should be covered in blue plaques. But no-one was biting so WHHOOOOSSHH!!! I just torched the place. I blamed it on some local kids. I pocketed the cash and they all went to jail... (starts laughing) Which is funny really. I think they’re all still inside.
Sometimes you’ve just got to burn the past to make a new future. Out the ashes of Kong Studios, Plastic Beach rose like a big dirty swan. So that’s good.
So with the money from the insurance you can pay off some of your creditors, but you choose not to - correct?
Correct. Paying your debts off would be a tedious way to spend your illegally gotten gains. That’s not fun is it? No, 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 though, isn’t it? Big extravagant wastes of time...
You therefore now need two things - to get away from certain people and find a location for a new studio. What did you do next?
Yeah. I needed somewhere isolated. Really hidden. Somewhere not even Google could find me. I’d created a trail of destruction, a huge mess... As I said, The Black Clouds were on my tail. They were cheesed off about all the dud weapons and useless shooters I stiffed them with. None of the weapons worked. But they must have got their hands on a new batch because the next thing I know is that they’ve tracked me down. Bullets everywhere. Shooting out my windows, chucking mustard gas into my hotel room... going through my mail... I had to split.
So I needed somewhere, SOMETHING, unique....
So I hauled one of the helicopters from the ‘Feelgood Inc’ video, out of storage and fired it up. GNNNNGNNNNGGGG!!! I just scouted the globe, zipping around all over the place. Everywhere... Arctic tundra, Amazon jungle, down the back of the sofa... I searched on maps, visited secret locations, 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 landmass on the planet. No one would dream of looking for me there...You can really make as much noise as you want...
It was just a giant piece of rotten plastic in the middle of nowhere. The funny thing was it that it looked idyllic from far away... through the binoculars... a floating paradise! But once you got closer you could see 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... TA DA!!!
I was home again... I always make a lot of noise, where ever I am, and also I wanted somewhere I could bring girls and guests and make a big ol’ racket. Crank the stereo up to 2000!
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 glass bottomed- basement rooms, secret rooms, lighthouse towers... It makes Peter Gabriel’s ‘Real World’ studio look well... Really Rubbish! Plastic Beach is... Fantastiche!
But y'know. It’s not like these people, the guys that were after me, just disappeared into the sunset. They've tracked me down on Plastic Beach already. I’ve been shot at loads out there. One of them put a hole in my island the other day. In fact that's how our single 'Stylo' got leaked. Siphoned out of my island by some filthy Russian pirates. I’ll get ‘em back though... Don’t you worry... I’m good at stuff like that.
Did you start demo'ing as soon as you had assembled the studio on Plastic Beach?
Murdoc: No. Not really. When I first got there I just wandered up and down kicking the landscape. Playing with the echoes and marvelling at the enormity of the universe. You wouldn’t believe the view of the stars from out there...just amazing. Anyway I didn’t need a studio at first. Initially, I just started twanging away on Logic really, alone. 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.
Happy days! No expectations, just seeing what glory dribbled out of the fret-board. Then some of it started making sense, unfortunately. Over the weeks, the months, the melodies came into focus and the songs demanded to be ...finessed and defined. Yah Yah! Like errant children, wild and untamed, full of potential but with nappies full of excrement. Then bit-by-bit I built this ‘state-of-my-arse’ recording palace on the island, to cater for the whims of these tunes, and somewhere foxy to ship other collaborators out to. To Gorilla-rize up the snazzy tunes, and construct this towering mournful behemoth that sits in your CD slot today.
But I love the beauty of those early etchings. Staring into the vast, open chasms of the nocturnal universe, a skyful of dust and a gentle tune emanating from me and my minuscule soul. Mmmmmm... When you’re in that state, everything seems all ....isolated and correct.
(The warm smile on Murdoc's face blackens into a frown)
And 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! PROMOTION! RACING AGAINST WHAT? 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... I mean... it’s more important to have nice shiny hair than a decent tune these days!!! It makes me mad!!
SFX (Chairs and tables going over, room being smashed...)
January 2009 - you turn up unannounced on a live national radio station in the UK with collaborator Damon Albarn and play three new demo's on-air. In hindsight was this a clever idea or not?
Murdoc: Well... er... some of it was and some of it wasn’t. I spent a fair bit of time just mucking about that day. I’d brought one of those old bulb horns with me, that sound like this (horn effect) and I was parping it over someone else’s music. A bit juvenile I grant you but basically I guess not too dissimilar to what someone like Mark Ronson does.... It was just my version of his remixes... Take someone else’s music and then parp some horns over it...
But it was a great chance to play some of the demos. I unveiled three tracks. Tracks in progress...'Stylo', 'Electric Shock' and 'Broken'...They seemed to go down well. Apparently their switchboard exploded...Why did I do it? 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 and also....And .....also.......
Look. There was a coded signal in there. I needed to let someone know that I was ready to make the shift over to Plastic Beach. The Big Push. Playing those tracks was the signal. The hidden code...That I was at the radio station and that my man, my contact needed to meet me outside.
But yeah, backfired a bit because as soon as I left the studio a hail of bullets tore up the inside of my car. These other guys knew where I was at so. All hell brought loose... And, right, it was also what lead the Child Support Agency to track me down. They wanted me to pay up all this money to this band The Horrors...
So yeah, playing those demos just unleashed a tidal wave of attention. Good and bad...
So with everyone now back on your trail it's time to go back into hiding. Was this the time that you finally realised you could solve all your problems by putting Gorillaz back together again?
Yeah... ish. Well. Y’know.... 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... But y’know, yeah I thought it was time to release another one of my "long-playing emissions"...
See when Gorillaz is up and running everything’s sweet and dandy. I'm bulletproof. It just gives me everything I need. I can pay off the debtors, make swanky videos, and swan around the globe like I own the place, all the while playing my dirty thick black bass over some fantastic music. Mmmmmm...
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 too. 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....
So bit by bit, demo by demo, I started carving out the Plastic Beach record. When I had the foundations nice and solid, and sonically knew which way I was pointing the ship, I thought "it's time to get some entertainers on board", y'know... start to colour this picture in a bit more...
You are on Plastic Beach though, in the middle of nowhere - how on earth do you get the collaborators you want on the album to record with you?
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, Murdoc Niccals, at the helm... Not many people refuse an invitation.
So, for many of these cohorts, I sent out a whole load of 'Golden Tickets'; specially coded sparkly invites with our secret Plastic Beach location embossed on them. It had the map details, dress code, and the meeting place watermarked on to them, so the guests would know what was up. I sent copters out to pick them up one by one and fly them out. All like ‘top secret’ styleeee. Bit like Fantasy Island.
But it wasn’t all plain sailing. A couple of them refused so I had use another method of coercion. Well, chloroform and Rohypnol really. But as long as got what I needed I was fine. So who’s on the rack this time? Uhmmm... Lou Reed, Mos Def, Bobby Womack, Una Stubbs, Spin Ballback, Bashy and Kano, Little Dragon, Mark E. Smith, some exotic orchestras, bazooka players.... “Angel Trumpets and Devil Trombones...."
I mean, to be honest I treat my record collection like a catalogue now. Or a menu. I’ll have the number 58, the "Snoopy Doggy Dogg" with a little dollop of Lou Reed on the side. Actually, no, I’ll start with The Horrors then finish off with a big Bobby Womack ... I mean, it’s like that for us these days. As soon as I’ve mastered my little ‘DNA re-animation machine’, I’m going to start going through the back catalogue of all music’s history. I’ll be bringing back everyone from Otis Redding to Marvin Gaye, and each great legend in between.... I mean, I brought back Noodle, so who knows what I can do... I might even get a couple of 16th Century lute players on board... go all pastoral, like.
Late Jan 2009, you start recording the album on Plastic Beach. Is it true you started with UK band The Horrors, and that that session totally inspired you to make an album that eclipses everything you have done before?
Murdoc: Mmmm... Yeah well after the Zane Lowe thing I was contacted by the Child Support Agency. They track down wayward daddies, right? They wanted to talk to me about this group, of ... er... goth kids. “The Horrors.”. Turns out, DNA tests and everything, that I’m their dad. Their biological father! 5 separate kids from 5 different mothers, who’d have thunk it? 3 of them I can’t even remember...
But the fact that they all grew up and met each other and formed a band, and it’s actually good... well... What are the chances? Anyway. They said I owed them about £500,000 each in unpaid Child Support... Maintenance. Then it hit me like an anvil on the top of my pretty black-haired bonce... I know what I’ll do! I’ll stick them on the record. I’ll say I’m making a new Gorillaz album and say that, forget the 500 grand each, they can be on my new album...
So I sent them out a golden ticket each, and shipped the little buggers out to the island...There they were. The very first guests to be invited over to record on Plastic Beach.
Surprisingly the track turned out to be a monster. A whale of a tune. "Leviathan!" and, instead of filing it in the bin, I kept it. Actually that track, was the inspiration, the spring board for the whole new album. The combination of that track, some Arabic orchestra music I had pilfered and the tracks I stole from Damon’s Carousel project gave me three strong separate flavours... angles to come from. I had my Bermuda Triangle. My plastic beach vision. I would make a world wide album from the Plastic Beach location, something that took us right round the globe.
I was so full of excitement, my body was vibrating... just humming. MMMGGGGGGNNNNHGGGG!!! Might have just been the rum though....
Anyway, The Horrors stuck around for a few weeks before I had them boxed up and freighted back to Blighty... Lovely boys.
What happened to The Horrors track then? Will it see the light of day in the future?
No....I think the Horrors track will only come out at night. Mwhah Mwhah Mwhahh! But really, yeah, I’d like to think so. I think it’s a great tune. Like a great big monstrous whale hurtling round the bay, a sonic torpedo. Unleash the sonar Whale!!!
And I’ve already shot the video in the graveyards and cemeteries of Kensal Rise... With me floating around in the background in some stupid cape. I look like Nosferatu!....So hopefully the track will wash up on Plastic Beach at some point. Maybe on a B-sides or a C-sides album... Plastic Beach? C-sides? Did you see what I did there....No? Let’s move on.
Before we start talking about the tracks that have made the album, we need to talk about the rest of Gorillaz and how you got the band back together. Can we start with Noodle as after all, she has been reported as missing since the El Manana video....
Yeah ...yeah. I couldn’t seem to track her down.... I’m still not sure where she is... at the moment...So yeah, it was around maybe May 2007, I came round to thinking it would be time to assemble some new Gorillaz stuff. My pockets were empty, my liver enflamed but my head and my heart were full of grand schemes and intricate visions of a whole new Gorillaz assault. You listen to the charts and they’re still full of rubbish.
Seriously if I hear one more vocoder I'm going to have 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. It’s seemed right. And the only possible way out of the situation, with all these pirates and demons and people trying to squeeze my lute. When Gorillaz are up and running, I’m bulletproof, so to speak. So I had to go get Noodle back. I thought.
I mean, when I first started thinking about putting this all back together, y'know, I wanted to start with Noodle...Noodle was my greatest asset, she’s an outstanding guitarist, looks great and a brilliant songwriter. Noodle wrote most of Demon Days, y’know. I would’ve done it myself but I was in jail over in Mexico. I was innocent, of course, but it meant she had to do a lot of the last record herself. Until I turned up to fix it, and finish it off....
Anyway Noodle, ...I went back to the place that’d I last seen her, back in 2006. The scene of the El Manana video. The crash site. Where the floating island had been shot down, crashing to earth, in a ball of bullets and fire... However, there was nothing left other than the burnt-out remains of that Floating Island.
I did what I could. I scraped up some of Noodle’s DNA samples from the wreckage. Stuck it in a jar, just in case... You never know when something like that’s gonna come in useful...
And then I er... went back to Kong Studios, to see if there was any clues there or not....
When I got there Kong was a mess, a real bomb site, even by my standards. The place had been looted and various threats smeared on the wall in red paint or tomato sauce or something.... One of them said. "See you in Hell" and a red arrow pointing down. There were various threats sprayed all over the place. It looked like the members of the Manson gang had had one of their infamous sleepovers....
I didn't know Noodle was involved until I heard that radio signal, coming out the radio in the basement in Kong. And even then it took a while for me to twig. And then I kind of realised what happened... that maybe some of these Underworld goons had taken her.... so....
See Gorillaz have always had ties in with the Underworld. Spirit-possessions, and all that kind of stuff. I mean Del, The Ghost Rapper was the guest on our first big hit Clint Eastwood. So we’ve always been down with ghosts.
I’d struck a pretty tight deal with certain entities to get Gorillaz up the charts in the first place... A very er..Faustian pact... Mephistopheles and all that... I mean my very bass “El Diablo’ is hand crafted by the Lord of Darkness, Beelzebub himself. I mean you must remember I was born in a demonic nuthouse named “Balphagor Asylum” in the first place....
But once Gorillaz were big, The Big Man, Mr. B, he wanted his cut of the goods... Y’know? It’s funny. It doesn’t matter who or what you are everyone wants to be in a band. Especially Gorillaz.
But basically, y’know, royalties take time to come in... and I guess I didn’t pay my dues to those concerned on time.
And that wasn’t it... Erm...well...it...er...kind of turns out that some of those bombs, those weapons I'd been flogging were for some underworld entity....some devil by the name of "Malthus" or something. A demon of weaponry and underworld armourer. Although it might have been "Sabnock", actually. Whatever. I’m no good with names. It was some devil who’s into guns and stuff.
Turns out that some of the weapons I had sourced were for one of those two...He was pissed with me when the bombs didn’t really work. That’s when he sent those demon flunkies to come get me. At Kong, They found their way through Russel and his spirit-channelling abilities...He’s just an open porthole for that kind of stuff. Always has been.
But I wasn’t there so they grabbed Noodle instead. Turns out she got dragged off to some Underworld, "Hades"-type place, So I had to go looking for her....So it was up to me I guess to at least try and track her down.....downstairs so to speak.
After that y’know, I had to follow a different kind of trail.... (pause) And Go To Hell...
How to get to there? Number of methods...Stick on ‘Straight to Hell’ by the Clash, rub a little juniper on the temples, fast for 7 days... a few circles of salt....and some candles....using....well...Look.... It’s not like you just tootle off down some corridor. How you get there is a...long and complicated process that involves lobbing certain aspects of your psyche out into the abyss. But it’s a very real state. How ‘real’ others would consider that journey I don’t know. But if someone pokes you in your ‘third eye’ it still stings. (sniggers) And if someone stamps on your soul, stuffs it in a bottle and labels it "Murdoc Niccals: Do Not Open Until Hell Freezes Over" you’re still done for ...
I just looked up demon summoning in my spell book, a 15th century magical grimoire entitled "Pseudomonarchia Deamonum", opened up a portal and kind of tottered my way downstairs....
Anyway, I couldn’t find her. I spent six months or the equivalent there. But I couldn’t get hold of her. Maybe she found a way out of that one herself...
Still I had a Gorillaz album to make, and I needed 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!!!
When I got over to Plastic Beach I employed the services of a couple of top-notch genetic scientists, had them flown over, and guys from the ‘android robotic’ world and built a cyborg Noodle... It ain’t the real Noodle but it’s close enough for Jazz....
Also right, because I’m being shot at by all the various bastards, I made sure this one was armed to the teeth... She’s my own personal gunslinging, guitar playing bodyguard.....She can shoot bullets right out of her mouth y’know!!
What other band can stake claim to something like that?
Cyborg Noodle.....? what happens then if the real Noodle ever re-surfaced?
Ooooh....Now there’s a plot twist I haven’t seen coming. What’s the chances of that? Look. If Noodle’s alive it’d be great to see her back....In fact I could probably stick them together and have two Japanese female guitarists. Twins... One either side of the stage...
That’d be incredible....
But I've got a funny feeling that I haven’t heard the last from the real Noodle. The cyborg Noodle said her first words the other day....“Noodle!”, bless her metal socks. Just like the real thing... And I didn’t program any of that in so... as this cyborg version shares DNA with the real one, maybe they’re connected... maybe there’s some kind of organic, ‘psychic’ link between the two... Maybe the real Noodle can even ‘home in’ on this one, like some genetic tracking device....COME TO MUMMMY!!!! Who knows how this’ll pan out..!?
On to Russel then - how did you get hold of him?
Murdoc: I don’t think I have managed to get hold of him. He’s way too big....Ha ha ha ha ha....
I did kind of make an effort to track Russ down, but y’know...I only just managed to put him back together for the last album. His psyche’s very weak, very fragile.... You’ve got to understand that he’s been through a lot. Del, his best friend was shot dead in front of him, when he was still a teen. Del's spirit immediately took up residence in Russel’s body, and chose to manifest itself as a Ghostly Ghost Rapper. You heard him on "Clint Eastwood" and "Rock The House" back in the day, as I said.
But I just ended up programming the drums myself....Well...”nudge, nudge” “wink wink”....I actually did use a fair amount of Russel’s drum takes and programmes, bits and pieces of his that I’ve recorded over the years.... Some of it’s even from his solo album that never got finished. Great stuff...Now that would had been an exceptional album, probably would’ve launched his solo career.....but now it’s a Gorillaz record! So boo hoo for him.
Russel’s a dude, man. He took my band up a whole new level... But drummers... ten a penny... You can always find a drummer... You can hear them a mile off. If you’ve ever miked up a drum kit you’ll know how tedious it is.
Even if you’re Clyde Stubblefield all anyone else hears is... Bish! Bosh! Bash! Thud! Crash! It sounds like someone putting up a shed.
Anyway what Russel really brought was a whole range of hip-hop, soul, dub and classical stuff. Me and 2D, we’re into music but he was a musician. Incredible. Something way out of our league. Initially that was great. He turned me onto Schoolly D, Eric B and Rakim, Grandmaster Flash, DC Basehead, The Last Poets, Gil Scot Heron, loads of stuff. The Congos, Neu, Zapp, Morricone... I also got Holst, Hermann, Debussy, Messiaen... fantastic, glorious stuff, really rich. But I’ve soaked that up now. But all he’s come up with in the last couple of years is some old Wu Tang B-Side. So why do I need the rest of it? Ditch it. I can do what I need with Pro-Tools... and my tinnitus has cleared up too, funnily enough.
No, seriously. I just didn’t need Russel. Or Noodle. Not the original Noodle. I just built another. But y’know I’ve noticed this mysterious brown dome, way, way off in the distance...but it seems to be inching closer and closer to the island.... Still, probably nothing eh? The chances of that dome turning out to be Russel’s big bald head is ridiculous... isn’t it? So yeah, drummers? Who needs ‘em?
Seems slightly harsh- hope that doesn't comeback to haunt you......so finally 2-D?
Murdoc: 2D? Good grief. He’s harder to shift than herpes.... Y’know, whatever you think of him, his voice is an integral part of Gorillaz. You can get away with ditching lots of aspects of a band, skipping parts, put it down to ‘experimentation’: but you can’t switch the singer. Very few bands get away with that. Perhaps New Order... Maybe.
I’d pretty well done what I needed to, on Plastic Beach... but it was still missing that magic vocal touch. So it was time to bring in the larynx. The voice. I tracked 2D down to this flat he was renting...
No.1 Buckingham Place Road, London. It was the same place Patrick McGoohan’s character rented in Danger Man. Danger Man was the series before The Prisoner, that one in which he gets kidnapped and taken to a mysterious island village location. 2D was kind of asking for it by renting that place.... strange boy that he is....
Anyway, 2D had been renting the place for a while, over the summer of 2009, when I tracked him down. I realised I needed those vocals, that "melancholic soul", for the album. 2D refused. He wanted no part of a third Gorillaz campaign. Pffft!! As if he’s got a choice.
So I just copied the beginning, the opening sequence of The Prisoner! Gassed him out cold. Shipped him over to Plastic Beach and installed him in the room downstairs....
I used this wonderful thick turquoise 'valium gas'. Could knock out an elephant that stuff. I got it on eBay. Very effective....
I knew 2D has a crippling fear of whales - cetaphobia it's called - he can’t stand them. So I installed 2d in the glass-bottomed room in a sub-sea level of Plastic Beach with the whales on patrol. Just for safe keeping... Which is a bit mean. But that is how I roll!
I got the job done. Got his vocals on the tracks and it sounds incredible, a glorious performance... 'Career High'...'Purple patch'. He should be happy, grateful that I bothered to drag him over. Might have stung a bit. But I almost had him replaced with Englebert Humperdink, so he's lucky he's on there... Shall we hear a little of the record now...my throats getting very dry......
Let's go through the finished album now in running order - so track one, a beautiful orchestral piece to take us into Plastic Beach - how did that come about?
Ahhhh... The Orchestral Intro.....I needed something other-worldly to to open the record. This album’s been a while in the making and this was “The Big Reveal”. The curtains are going up on a brand new world, a vast new landscape to breathe in, and it needs to have that scope... It needed to be portentous, VAST and.... oceanic. But graceful... Like the morphine’s just gently kicking in as the listener glides into the Plastic Bay....MMmmmm...
Guitar bass and drums just weren’t gonna cut it.... I wanted to something that would.....reveal the majesty of the surroundings of this plastic retreat....... As the listener swoops across the landscape.... into the bay. Unaware of the events ahead....
And then the organics of the music descend into decay, a digital decay ...One of the trombones started to collapse towards the end, just coming off its coasters....Urrr! Urrr! Urrr! Urrr! Urrrr! Urrrr! Urrrr.... You can hear the trombone going rusty in front of your ears.
Like it was.... decaying, rusting ... a rusty trombone.....*rusty trombone*? Did I just say that...? Yes. I did.
Anyway this little symphony was recorded with the Orchestra Viva, the Sinfonia Viva, in Derby around April 2009. I can’t remember too much about the session other than the weather is abysmal in Derby. I recorded with them in the old Rolls Royce engine factory, where they built the engines for the World War II spitfires... Which strangely enough kind of fits the soul of all this... a bygone era, the remnants of war and planes and decay... It’s turned out nice again, though... So that’s alright.
And then we get into the plasticky stuff, the digital.... Vocoded emotion, the album’s evolving into plastic... Hurry Up!!! QUICK!!!
Track 2 is Welcome to the world of Plastic Beach with Snoop Dogg - tell us about that
'Welcome to The World of The Plastic Beach' with Snoop Dogg and the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. Snoop is unveiling the show here. He’s the Boss Dogg, mein host, the introductory MC, if you will. As you land on the island he welcomes you aboard.... to the world of the Plastic beach...y’know?
Snoop's the grand daddy, isn’t he? Doggystyle was for many people the record that really made the leap for them, got them in rap and G-funk ...along with De La Soul, who did the same kind of cross over with 'Three Foot High and Rising...' It's kind of a lineage from Sly and the family Stone.. The idea of mixing genres, styles, people, continents and bringing it all together to form something fresh and vibrant....something colourful.
The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble are from Chicago, a 9-piece brass group featuring 8 sons of Phil Cohran. Phil Cohran played trumpet with The Sun Ra Arkestra. The Hypnotic Brass are made up of all his sons. Which actually makes my revelation about my Goth boys The Horrors coming together pale into insignificance... They’re just a drop in the ocean compared to this lot. But this is a proper soundtrack: brass-laden, pimped out, plastic funk... mixing the organic with the plastic to form something new and shiny.....And who better to open up this world than Snoop?
Next is White Flag with UK rappers Kano & Bashy
...And The National Orchestra For Arabic Music, of course You can probably see where I’m heading with all this now... By positioning Plastic Beach as the most isolated point, a lonely sentinel post, I could look a full 360 degrees around the world, and grab little bits of everything from everywhere....
The plan with Plastic Beach, Gorillaz third album, would be to make it a worldwide collage. A map of the modern world...Via the guests I brought in and used, I could take little snapshots of the world, get different souls from around the globe and stick their essence onto the album. Plastic Beach would be a microcosm of the globe.
D'you get me? So White Flag opens with a lush and hypnotic Arabic orchestra. Recorded over in Beruit, around the end of March 2009. I went over there in disguise... I knew I wanted that part of the world on the record, so I fired up the helicopter again and left PLASTIC BEACH and headed for Beirut and Syria. I had to be in disguise because of all of these... elements that were after me...., so I chose a black burka as my disguise and flew out to Beirut to record with The National Orchestra For Arabic Music.
What a fantastic piece to lay on a so called 'pop album'...It’s fundamental to open people’s ears up to this aspect of the world... Because if you only read the papers or watch the TV the impression you get of that area is so very different.So it’s important to stick things like this out there....Just erode all this mis-information....GORILLAZ: We're a public service!
While I was over there various guides took me around the city. Which is an eye-opener...Y’know, the Israelis like to fly their jets really low over the city of Beirut once a month. It’s called “sabre-rattling”, buzzing the towns in order to pop out, the windows.
If they fly low and fast enough, it creates a sonic boom effect, taking out all the windows in the area. It’s a part of the atmosphere, and the relentless campaign to keep the city on its toes.
The city is like Port Royal, the old pirate town. Basically you can kind of get what you want, if you want to party in a war zone. Which I guess I did, in my own unique and singular style.
So this is just one angle on the record, one colour, but the thing is, right, whatever’s going down in a country... whatever they’re going through you can always find the core soul of the people in their music.
I guess this faintly surreal experience in Beirut and Syria got rolled into various themes on the album.
I took all these tapes back to Plastic Beach and what I wanted to do was then fly in something ....else- a British counterpart....a different balance...And who would fit the bill better than the British grime artists Bashy and Kano...??
What they bring to this is great- it’s what I loved about bands like The Specials: a true sense of the city... and so loose and buoyant...
I spotted Kano when Damon worked with him. on a track called London Town. I like to keep my ear to the ground. I can’t really help it really sometimes, because quite frequently I wake to find myself slumped there..... on the ground.
So I took ‘em over to Plastic beach and gave them a pen and paper, put the mic to their faces and said “Do IT!” “Say what you see” “SAY WHAT YOU SEE...”
And they described the scene as if they had just hit town, like a lonely cowboy. Or a a vacuum cleaner, or a whirlwind... A grimy wind blowing dancehall music over Arabic Orchestras. Just like that.
I watched all this unfold, while I was making Doctor Who quacking noises with my synth in the background....I wanted it to sound like an oily seagull being sick....
I had the same reaction when I first arrived here on The Beach. It looked like something out of a magazine... golden shores, bright sunlight: an idyll. But it’s not. It’s a gloopy mass of decay. Everything rotten swirling towards it... But you don’t see it at first. At first, it looks all good.
And y’know, if you arrived on a fresh beach, a clean slate... a new day...how would you feel? Clean, fresh, hopeful? Am I right, kids? ...But, bit by bit, these ‘islands of paradise’ fill up: wars, religions... crap... plastic.... drill baby drill! We just suck the life out of the places we inhabit and then move on, once it’s sunk... very... nomadic.
Plastic Beach looks like an escape, like a paradise, but it's actually a drain. It's where all the rotten bits of the world end up. They all get caught up in the grill at the end of the sewer. Plastic Beach is the blockage at the end of mankind’s drains. I think, though, that Kano and Bashy nailed the optimism and potential of Plastic Beach just right, in their little skit. Probably my favourite track on the album.... Apart from all the others.... My leg’s gone to sleep....
Rhinestone Eyes is track 4....
Rhinestone Eyes... This one was recorded in my little submarine. I’ve got this little personal submarine that I use to scoot round the Bay. I put 2D in it one day and took him for a spin, through all the murky quagmire of Plastic Beach. Even though he was terrified he managed to free-style this one.
I looped up the sonar noises my boat was making, made it into a rhythm and he just mumbled over the backing track. I soared round the sub-aquatic terrain and he sang his little mantra, about gargoyles and factories and electric towers and whatever...Came out quite well, don’t you think?.... 2D at his most wistful and boy-ish...
I nicked a bit of my own ‘Electric Shock’ track, and stuck it in here....with a little delay over the top.I think my sub’s probably the most indulgent ‘rock star’ item I’ve bought to date... but it’s essential round these parts.
Well, as the world gets wetter, and dry land gets scarcer that “70%” of water on the earth surface is beginning to look like a great big splashy playground. Vast areas of ripe ‘underwater real estate’ going untouched. To navigate these new terrains, you need something zippy to get around in, right?
Now personal submarines aren’t exactly new, I’ve had loads for ages, but the tipping point will come when someone starts mass-producing these things, making them affordable to all. It’s all going to kick off in the ocean world. Yeah, of course there’s going to be a whole load of accidents at first. Well, fatalities probably. Y’know, kids joy riding, underwater pile-ups, water rage, etc... but the long terms prospects? Very exciting. A sparkly new future!
But yeah, that was Rhinestone Eyes. I recorded it underwater. And it turned out all good....
Track 5 on Plastic Beach is also the first single from the album, `Stylo'. [It's an] Amazing track featuring vocals from the legendary Bobby Womack and Mos Def
.... Stylo. Yeah, this was the first single to come off this album. And in fact this one got stolen just weeks before the release... Some pirates shot up my island and nicked it, then leaked it online... You can’t plug holes like that anymore in the brave new digital world. This is a new sound for Gorillaz. An electro-ish ‘crack funk’ sound, with a little ‘bit of politics and a lot of soul going down...
With Stylo, I wanted the music to feel euphoric, whilst still putting across how precarious our tightly packed situation is now, worldwide. Where we’re at as a species on this overpopulated planet....“Coming on to the Overload. Overload. OVERLOAD.”....Can you feel it, Kids? CAN YOU FEEL IT?
The funny thing is, since man could pick up a pen and put his thoughts on paper we’ve always had a sense of the Apocalyptic. An imminent Doomsday...but y’know....yeah...I think something’s got to give...It’s like rubbing the impossible to burst!
I think you can hear that in Bobby Womack’s chorus, he just explodes into the track. How good is it to get Bobby Womack on the record...? This was the first recording he’s made in ...15... 20 years...so what an honour....for him. Only joking....Bobby said he only returned to do this Gorillaz track because his granddaughter said Gorillaz were cool. Which is true. We are...
Bobby came into the studio, and sang full pelt for 45 mins straight, laying down some different versions of “110th Street”, just to get warmed up. In between takes he told us some fantastic stories...He told us about the time he was partying at Ike Turner’s house, with the Stones, the Rolling Stones, and Ike ended up trapping The Stones in his mansion for 3 days... They were partying and everything at Ike Turner’s house, when Bobby found Ike in this room with all these TV screens. It turns out that he had cameras installed in every room, and had locked the doors so The Rolling Stones couldn’t get out. He was on his own, just watching them on the screens... I’d say it was a different world back then, but I’ve just realised that he’d accidentally stumbled on the format for Big Brother. I hope he got paid for that.
So the vocals for this we recorded this out in New York... Same time that I hooked up with Mos Def. He’s great; great rapper, great actor and a really vibrant presence. And him and Bobby work really well with 2D here, so the whole track came together. When I first met up with Mos it was at The Box Club in New York. He wouldn’t stop yapping about The Boogieman. I thought it was just the cocktails talking, but Mos said he’s a dark entity, a black-caped figure made up of all the evil in the world. A swirling black shadow, with a gasmask for a face. He is a war unto himself.
I shrugged and let Mos spill all this out, but I didn’t really take it in. I just wanted Mos on the album. So I put up with it. Turns out that Mos was right! We’ve got the Boogieman on film now. I’m definitely looking over my shoulder more often. No doubt that’s another battle I’m gonna end up having....In fact I tell you where you can see the Boogieman - he turns up in the footage we used for the Stylo video....
Anyway it doesn’t matter. It all got caught on film, so I used it as a video for the Stylo single... You can’t really buy press like that... And the Boogieman’s in there too. It’s enough to send a chill right down your spine. Look, why don’t you top my glass up, stick the record on and we’ll have a listen, eh? How about that?
Sounding like an advert, track 6 is the brilliant Superfast Jellyfish' with Super Furry Animals' Gruff Rhys and longtime collaborators De La Soul....
It is an advert. It’s a little plastic advert about life... I mean...what have we got: “Frozen Sushi”... “Superfast Jellyfish” .... “Plastic Chicken”...everything shrink-wrapped, freeze dried, covered in Formica...what are we building here. Y’know - and this is true, right - out of all the fast food in the world, it’s a proven statistic that ‘SuperFast Jellyfish’ is the fastest food known to man. I didn’t know this piece of information until I read it in a leaflet. About maybe 20,000 of these leaflets washed up on the Plastic Beach. All adverts for this ‘Superfast Jellyfish’ fast-food chain. Maybe it didn’t catch on....It’s funny what washes up on the beach there....
In fact one day, back in January, I was walking along and then I saw what appeared to be a couple of jellyfish, dried up and washed up on the shore.
Living things don’t really arrive on Plastic Beach so I was quite intrigued. I approached them to get a better look and then on closer inspection I realised they weren’t jellyfish at all. They were actually silicon implants. A pair of silicon implants. Some discarded silicon implants had washed up on the shore. Now this is the moment when you’re thinking about.....y’know the beach, this place, the world .....the very small leap in the evolutionary scale it would take for maybe silicon implant to morph, evolve into a living life form such as jellyfish...Or vice versa...Maybe life forms could even become silicon implants,...or these bits of jettisoned body parts over years would mutate into life forms of their own, something totally new......There’s enough of them in the sea now....it could happen.
I mean though, the stuff that’s floating around in there now is unbelievable, I mean, what kind of person chucks a pair of tits into the sea?
Just crazy. Anyway. It was great to get Gruff on the album....When you think about Gorillaz, it makes sense to have a Super Furry Animal on there doesn’t it? I’ve always loved them, so I sent a jet over to pick Gruff up and take him over here. And he whooshed his way over here, and along with De La Soul they put this thing together... A lot of fun this track. If you turn it up loud enough all the colours start spilling and washing out of the speakers... You could flood your room with a track like this.....Like something out of Fantasia....
And the good thing about our “Superfast Jellyfish”, is that’s it’s nice and shiny, it’s crunchy and it tastes just like chicken...and it comes with a toy....essential for any fast food. Why would you eat fast food unless you got a toy out of it...? I ask myself. So, Here’s Gorillaz with Superfast jellyfish......
Up next is "Empire Ants" with Little Dragon.....
Yes. A moment’s peace amongst the rush. After all that gooning about and splish-sploshing on the last track this is a chance to reflect, sailing out on the gorgeous inky blue waters of the night-time ocean....the blue lagoon...the nocturnal shore...mmmmm.
Which again just fragments into teeny tiny pixels slowing into more of the digital plastic funk... and in drifts Yukimi Nagano from Little Dragon, the girl who sings on this one.... The track emerges from the lagoon, tethers its boat to the shore and swims into the rush of the digital. I sampled a lot of this from the theme music to Tomorrow’s World. I subscribe to a very 70’s view of the future. So the song is dated but from the future. Or do I mean it’s futuristic but from the past?
It was actually 2D who got me into Little Dragon. He played me this lovely song of theirs called "Twice". Little Dragon are an electronic band from Sweden. So we requested their company for a couple of songs for the album. She sings with 2D on another track called "To Binge". 2D first heard this song "Twice" on the TV show Grey's Anatomy. So strangely even though it's a like delicate whisper of a tune, it always reminds him of being in hospital. Or being operated on. Probably by me...
Track 8 on Plastic Beach is "Glitter Freeze" with Mark E Smith of The Fall on vocal duties....
I really glad we managed to get Mark E. Smith on the record. I’m not sure he felt the same....but, y’know... sometimes I just get bored of asking people. Some of the collaborators I just kidnapped. “Here. Does this rag smell of chloroform to you?” “Er...Rohypnol, anyone?” He’s great. I love The Fall. He’s on this track called “Glitter freeze”. He wanted to do his part facing North. “Which way’s North from here?” I guess that’s his Mecca. I pointed South West, but he went with it anyway..... But we still used his question as a little intro...kind of like what we did with Shaun Ryder on DARE. Sometimes the greatest moments are those little mistakes that you catch in the mix.....when you’re just warming up....
On this track...Mark. E. Smith’s character, he’s the black wind of doom...the roaring pirate trader...keeping his crew under the cosh with rum, sodomy, the lash and weevil biscuits...The ghostly slave ship moored just outside the harbour........
If you fall asleep on his watch, he’s going to climb ashore, stick you in the hold, rip out the gold from your teeth and put you to work on his rum sodden pirate ship...."It waaarsssss The Glitter Freeezzee....ICE AGE!!!!!!"
Like 'Punk' on the first album, and 'White Light on Demon Days this is our noise, our rawkus section of chaos sailing in to frame and belching in your face...Every album’s got to have one...Otherwise it’s just a load of ballads.
Next up is `Some Kind of Nature' with the one & only Lou Reed.....
Actually, that’s not true. There was another Lou Reed pencilled for that track originally, but he wasn’t as good as this one. This Lou Reed’s a legend, from The Velvet Underground. I don’t think we could have got a better Lou in for the job here.....Not just any old Lou will do, you know.
I grew up on Lou Reed, and the Velvets. Well, not grew up because that still hasn’t happened but I did listen to them a lot when I was younger than I am now...And I loved Lou’s solo stuff, ‘Magic and Loss’ and ‘The Blue Mask’ and ‘Transformer’ of course. Produced by "Daviiiiidd Booowwieeeee".
It's funny. This track’s got a good ol’ sunshiny vibe. Like something off Sesame Street. Apparently Lou Reed is one of the only people to never appear, or refuse to appear, on Sesame Street. Or maybe it was 'The Muppets'... He refused ....I don’t know why...so it’s quite a coup that we got him on this....It was him or Oscar the Grouch. I think the best man one the job.
Anyway, I was very pleased when Lou agreed to do it. I recorded with Lou over in New York and he wanted to do his whole vocal thing in private, on his own. He ordered everyone out the studio. Me too. At one point he even tried to have himself kicked out, but he’s smarter than that. Anyway he ordered me out the studio. I just waited until he was up and running, getting his groove on, and then I crawled back in, under the mixing desk where he couldn’t see. I love Lou, but y’know: this is my album. I wanna know what’s going down....His track “Some kind of Nature”. Wow! Solid gold.
The last line, “All we are is stars” that 2D sang......That’s true, I’ve looked it up. In the history of time, as Earth spun out the Sun, basically formed out of a Solar Nebula, ‘a disc shaped mass of dust and gas’ that spun out of the Sun, it means that we, and all life essentially.... that’s what’s we’ve all evolved from. From the atomic material from stars....Nice thought. “All we are is stars”.....Here’s Bob with the weather....
Gorgeous melody on Track 10 - tell us about "On Melancholy Hill"....
Ermm welll....Melancholy Hill...That's a place on the island...The Melancholy Hill of Plastic Beach.... It's that feeling, that place, that you get in your soul sometimes, like....someone’s let your tyres down. A bit deflated. I usually get that around Tuesday morning. Clears up again maybe Thursday and I’m ready to start all over again...Bit it always seems quite real when I’m going through it...It’s nice to break up the album with something a little lighter...I think is also good to have something that’s a genuine pop moment on every album...And this is one of those.
One of 2D's best ever vocal performances is next: "Broken"....
Yes, though actually, another friend of mine ‘Barry the circus freak’ did a far more accomplished rendition of this track, but he wanted paying so I got 2D to do it....
Y’know sometimes it’s possible to break stuff so it’s unfixable. It’s just Broken. There’s no glue for a broken heart...Pass the rum, could you? Ow....Erm....I don’t really know what to say about this track, y’know...Like Frank Zappa said "talking about music is like fishing about architecture".
Yes, some things gets broken forever. But maybe they’re not broken. Maybe the kaleidoscope shifts, and ....er.....it's a new day...it's perfectly possible to restart the game...If....I’m rambling here.....but...Look. This track just works...I don’t want to talk about it...Is that, OK?
Track 12 is simply incredible - "Sweepstakes" with an amazing rap from Mos Def and is that Hypnotic Brass Ensemble providing the backing?
Why, yes, Sherlock I believe it is...The Hypnotic Brass brothers give us that full on Chicago brass muscle, turning this track out into a ‘Quincy Jones’ version of hip hop, MC’ed superlatively by Sir Most Definitely. Ah yes! Mos Def. An absolute gent. I first met him in The Box club on the Lower East side of NYC. I went over there to find him to try and get him on the record, y’know? I like his rap work...and I saw him in "Be kind Rewind". So yeah thought we needed that on the record. Some NYC perspective....
“Sweepstakes: you’re a winner.” Collect your little plastic prize at the counter. You’re a winner...There’s a lot of rubbish that gets dangles in front of people on this Earth, little plastic inducements to get you to dance and jump and do the things that people want you to...Making people feel like a winner is one of the best way of hooking them in.........
Track 13 is a special moment for fans of The Clash - the song `Plastic Beach' features both Mick Jones and Paul Simonon
Well...It's a special moment for fans of Gorillaz and the Clash.....How did this come about? Well, I had commandeered Paul Simonon from the Good, the Bad and The Queen. And it made sense. To er...See...Gorillaz were always influence by the Clash...and Big Audio Dynamite. It was my brother Hannibal who got me into the Clash.
It was him who broke my nose too, so I've got a lot to thank him for really. But being influenced by them one thing....Getting them back together, well Paul and Mick Jones, to work with us is just something else...Now the way I was thinking is, I’m in the middle of the ocean and what I’m really missing in this sub-tropic garbarged state is a bit of ‘West London’. As much as I wanted this record to include elements from around the world, I need this boat, this cruise ship to have a west London anchor. So I got a couple of anchors out The Clash.
They were always my favourite band, I loved how they took the heart and soul of punk and reggae smeared it in London graffiti and paint and then sailed it round the world. I don’t think that’s a million miles from what Gorillaz do now....We’re all in the same boat together. Which if you listen to this track you can hear.I always like to go for that ‘end of the pier’ feel - turquoise fog, melancholic funk, but this time I wanted it to sound like plastic...plastic....dreams...Casio, plastic beach...Styrofoam. What? All this stuff is fogging up my periscope...
I’ll tell you what happened on this track, and take it how you will.. Basically we started off like the Owl and The Pussycat sailing round in a little wooden boat...but the dream turned bad and the idyllic island.. the island started filling up....I knew this would happen...It’s inevitable...
But all these keyboards and synths and effects boxes started washing up on this shore...You ever wondered happens to funk bands when they split up...? Where the 80’s went...? what happens to all those synth basses...those cheap keyboards and all that mass-produced claptrap? Once the bands and the record labels and the industries collapse...they get chucked into the sea...It all gets dumped...but then...bit by bit they started washing up on this beach...so I did what any musician would do...I just kind of dried them out, plugged them in and then miked them up....made a brand new track, out of the plastic synths that washed up on the shore...with a couple of guys out The Clash...I mean, what would you do...?
Another collaboration with Little Dragon - `To Binge' ends up as a beautiful duet between vocalist Yukimi Nagamo and 2D....
A Hawaiian version of melancholy.....yeah? You don’t see a lot of miserable Hawaiians, do you? It’s not known for its grim outlook on life... You don’t have any numbers do you...of any one you could call....? No? ....Oh well what's the next track...
The penultimate track on Plastic Beach is the "Cloud Of Unknowing" which features an incredible vocal from Bobby Womack....
...This track’s a mirror. The mirror of the opener.... The outro to the Intro, and a final reflection on the Plastic Beach. Bobby Womack’s performance on this song can still bring tears to my eyes. That mixture of hope and uncertainty in his voice – the age and the experience – the fear and the joy... Scuse me [LOUD SOUND OF MURDOC BLOWING HIS NOSE]
Where were we? Ah ....."The Hope". Billowing clouds of melancholic reflection. This song, like the Who's "Love Reign O'er Me" is the moment that gathers together the events of the album, the events of the world...and pauses for reflection. D'you know? It's a realisation that life on this beautiful planet is as fragile as the gossamer of a buttefly’s wings....Which isn’t quite right. Gossamer's is the fibrous material made of from spiders silk... so that doesn’t work.
But on this exit track, woven into the melancholic blanket are threads of golden hope....The future stretches out before us, a vast plain of pristine unbroken snow, an immaculate, untrodden landscape offering immeasurable potential and adventures unwritten.
Inevitably though that landscape always gets pebble-dashed once again with wonky boob jobs, close-ups of nostrils, talent shows, weight loss / gain issues, indignant politicians, adverts for insurance and more of all the rubbish we trail in our wake.
I’ve chosen to avoid describing the physical aspects of the landscape of Plastic Beach. The Wells of Bitter Tears, the Igloos of Madness, the Foothills of My Mind, the Whale of Disbelief...The Jizzy Castle.
But I thought, lyrically, it was necessary to include a little bit about The Cloud of Unknowing, as this great big black cumulonimbus has long been a feature of my environment. Sometimes you just can’t shift something as ominous as doubt...Still it does offer some hope: “waiting to see what the morning brings, it may bring sunshine on it’s wings.... Or maybe it’ll bring an oily seagull dropping its mess on another day.. Funnily enough, we went to some lengths to get the seagull sounds that open this track. We had to use a gull-wrangler and a special microphone to get exactly the right sound.
Finally we reach the end, track 16 'Pirate Jet'....
Here come the bulldozers, the big plastic bulldozers of hope...The Pirate jets...Maybe they’re coming in to level the land..."The people, the plastic eating people". Well you’ve got to end on a punchline haven’t you....it’s just a little drum roll, to punctuate the joke of life...Laugh and the world laughs with you, eh? EH? Cry and you’re on your own....
Pirate Jet takes the album out swinging. The curtain’s descending. It’s like something out of ‘Bugsy Malone’, a finale with shuddering jazz hands: “Did you like the show? It was called “PLANET EARTH”. It’s possible that what this one’s saying is: the job’s a good un’. We’re finished and now everyone’s evolved into plastic. Plastic Beach is now full up with Plastic People. A new breed of human....
Or maybe it’s saying: "It's kicking out time at the last chance saloon. And this is the last record we're playing tonight...Pirate Jet". D'you understand me? It’s a kind of “Always Look On The Bright Side of Life” tip. "It’s all good now, because we left the taps running for 100 hundred years...". I was thinking of ending on a cover of Hersham Boys by Sham 69 but it didn’t seem right somehow...
But y'know...I want to clear this up. Plastic Beach. It's not a green record. It's 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 not a judgement on the world... it's just a picture...."
Imagine looking down a telescope at the end of the pier. Way off in the distance is a little island, green and pristine. From back here it looks like hope...It's very possible it might end up exactly as we have. Just a hard ball of plastic floating in the middle of nowhere. Full of desire, clutter, oil-slicks and paperwork. But...At the moment it's empty, it's clean and it's naive, but it is filling up. Plastic Beach..it's another place, it's another way of looking at the world. And this is its soundtrack....
Not even King Canute can turn back a tide like that. The Island's just filling up, cd’s books, tyres, rubble, boxes, folders...everything’s just spilling forth. A tidal wave of our detritus... We're fit to burst. Or just....Evolving into plastic...
You must be incredibly proud of this album Murdoc - is it your best work to date?
Of course. I, like the world, am a work in progress, teetering, twittering, on the tightrope of evolution, bolstered by rum and tinctures, easing my way into an early grave, and trying to wring as much fun out of the present sunshine as possible, like anybody else. But the headstone should read well. I described this piece , this album, like the third panel of the Gorillaz triptych. Plastic Beach is my third most glorious panel....
I tell you what Plastic Beach is. It's a 4 dimensional postcard. A postcard from the edge? Yeah, maybe... but this is a postcard that comes to life.. A techni-coloured snapshot...of an alternate land.... And you know, I'm immensely proud of Gorillaz......I grabbed colours, philosophies, artistic thought from around the world and bundled it into one plastic Polaroid call an album. Pretty snazzy.
Look...on a less abstract thought....as communication distances get shorter...and quicker...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 for something anything, why not do it this way...getting all the brilliant people together and make a positive statement SOMETHING A BIT FUN! SOMETHING A BIT MUSICALLLLL!!!
And finally, what's all this fuss about something called 'The End Of Days'......
(Lights cigarette...): Oh...That...yeah...That’s a bit longer than five minutes ..I just noticed and it’s easy enough to point out, that since the beginning of time, each leap of evolution and innovation has taken a shorter and shorter amount of time. The Universe was created 14 billion years, Earth 4.5 billion years. Man arrived in its earliest state about 4.5 million years, and then we evolved into this state, Homo Sapiens around 200,000 years ago. The earliest cities appeared about 6-7000 years ago, over in Mesopotamia and then we’ve been at war since then really...right up until the last 100 years, and then we really kicked off. The population of the planet had gone from 1 billion to 7 billion in the last 100 years, and every single piece of digital information and technology has exploded in this last century. We’re crammed packed and it’s getting more and more. Escalating.. The overload. Humanity is now squeezed into this tiny plastic bubble...
Everything getting faster and faster whirling towards an inevitable conclusion, a single point on the horizon or in the middle of the ocean say. The entire of time and history and evolution is hurtling towards a single point. Point Nemo... Plastic Beach. That's what Plastic Beach is I reckon. The End of Days...the point of no return.....It's right here. It's right now....It's upon us.
Does that make sense? Yeah? Great. Right I’m off for a wazz. Great talking to you. And last one at the bar's a wanker....
THE END