Yo Ho Ho: Gorillaz Sail Back...
Q, January 2010
“It's a time-honoured trick. Jay-Z retiring from music, the last Streets album, Led Zeppelin never to re-form, The Libertines split... sooner or later, these things come back together with great aplomb. You're no one until you split up and re-form, are you? It just ramps up the drama when you do return. I can reveal, though, categorically, Plastic Beach will be the last Gorillaz album ever released. You've heard it from me... direct.”
- MURDOC NICCALS
April 6, 2006. New York City. Gorillaz play the final show in support of their Demon Days album . A worldwide triumph, it has taken them across 40 cities in the US and seen them perform alongside many of their numerous collaborators, including Shaun Ryder, Ike Turner and a virtual Dennis Hopper at the Manchester Opera House. It has sold some six million copies, to add to the six million sold of their eponymous 2001 record. It has spawned a Number 1 single in the shape of the Shaun Ryder-mumbled DARE and a Number 2 with happy-sad pop whirler Feel Good Inc. Along the way singer 2D, bassist Murdoc Niccals, guitarist Noodle and drummer Russel Hobbs have performed with Madonna at the Grammys (Niccals wore a battered bus driver's cap, a cape and Y-fronts), broadcasted an “alternate Queen's Speech” on Christmas Day (subjects addressed: the demise of the London Routemaster bus; the non-demise of James Blunt) and been courted by film mogul Harvey Weinstein, who proposed a Gorillaz movie to be overseen by Terry Gilliam - the director of 12 Monkeys, appropriately enough.
Then there were the on-tour antics of the band themselves. Niccals, the celebrated Satanist and self-appointed group-leader, whose absinthe-gurgling and womanising got so out of hand that at one point Gorillaz were regularly getting their windows shot out by a notoriously unstable blonde rock singer, whom Niccals had allegedly impregnated during “a mad three day bender” (“It wasn't me, sunshine, it was Steve Coogan,” he explained.) Hobbs, who passed his time customising the carcasses of endangered animals struck down by Gorillaz' tourbus with the addition of “bass bins, under-lighting and alloy wheels”. Teenage Japanese guitar prodigy Noodle, who was almost obliterated when a lighting rig collapsed near her head, an “accident” suspected to have been either caused by Paula Cracker, the band's dismissed original guitarist, or Niccals's estranged dad, Jacob. And 2D, whose arrested mental development and band-whipping boy status allows history to record little more rock'n'roll than a minor footwear/plumbing incident (“2D - getting your sandal trapped in a drain doesn't constitute an assassination attempt,” Niccals would later chide his bandmate).
But after playing the fifth of five nights at New York's celebrated Apollo Theatre, Gorillaz disappeared. Their last video, 2006's El Mañana, featured Noodle wandering around a floating island in the sky, before apparently being bombed to death by helicopters. Two of the band's most frequent collaborators, Blur singer Damon Albarn and comic artist Jamie Hewlett, seemed to suggest it would be the last we'd hear from them. In November 2007 Albarn told Q that the next Gorillaz project “won't be called Gorillaz”. A Gorillaz autobiography, Rise Of The Ogre, was published. Ominously, none of the band showed up to the launch.
With Albarn and Hewlett involved in hit “circus opera” Monkey:Journey To The West, hopes seemed to fade of Gorillaz rising from the mist. “I'm bored of drawing those characters,” Hewlett said, of his role lending a hand with sleeve artwork and directing videos. There was talk instead of Carousel a new music venture for Albarn and Hewlett that would combine live action and animation and feature a roster of marquee-name collaborators (that one sounded a bit too familiar - did Gorillaz need a good lawyer?).
Rumours leaked from Gorillaz' Essex recording facility, Kong Studios, none of them were good. Niccals had invested $6bn of Gorillaz' profits in Bernie Madoff's pyramid scheme. He'd bought shares in a mobile-phone gambling company. And he'd been selling second hand weapons to third-world dictators. Now Niccals was broke. To add injury to insult, in July 2009 Kong Studios burned down. “I was collapsing faster than the music industry,” Niccals was quoted as saying.
So it's with some surprise that late one recent afternoon, while Q is minding Q's own business on New York's Lower East Side, Gorillaz once again make their presence felt. A burgundy 1978 Lincoln Continental creeps along behind us, and purrs to a halt. One blacked-out, bulletproof back passenger window slides down, and Murdoc Niccals peers out. He stares for a moment, then ushers us inside. It would be good to report that he looks well, but that would be a lie. And there's no point in making things up. His dark grey hair is now jet-black (a dye job?). His skin is an unhealthy shade of green (is there a healthy shade of green?). Now nudging 44, the Stoke-on-Trent-raised Black Sabbath enthusiast is looking a touch wrinkly under the eyes. Niccals's driver looks unnervingly like Harold Sakata, the Bond actor who played Oddjob. The Pretty Things' 1968 concept album SF Sorrow drifts out of the car's stereo. The ashtrays are overflowing, the floor littered with books: Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, Steven Hawkinz' A Brief History Of The Donk. Unnervingly, Q's photograph is gaffer-taped to the headrest in front of Niccals.
So, naturally, our first question: Gorillaz - what happened?
“I guess we were sick of the sight of each other,” Niccals growls. “The Demon Days album was over. And that was a long haul anyhow. There's always the talk of movies and other things. But that's usually all it is. Just talk. Some people make a career out of dining out. I've had enough, too. I thought I'd scoop up my coppers, put on my ermine and go party.”
Now, after four long years, Gorillaz are back. At least, 50 per cent of them are. Niccals has tracked Q down to say as much. Now based at Point Nemo in the South Pacific, the “Oceanic point of inaccessibility”, the place furthest from land on Earth, the Satanic bassist has spent the last 18 months holed up inside a mammoth Tracy Island-style HQ, atop Plastic Beach - a floating island made up of the world's rubbish. From this rotting hideaway, he has overseen a singular roll call of musical talent for Gorillaz' comeback album, named after their new base. Plastic Beach features collaborations with Lou Reed, Snoop Dogg, Mark E Smith, De La Soul, Mos Def, Bobby Womack, The National Orchestra Of Arabic Music and Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, a Chicago-based nine piece jazz collective, eight of whom are the sons of Phil Cohran, trumpeter with Sun Ra's legendary Arkestra. The Horrors were briefly involved. So was the Bee Gees' Barry Gibb. Neither made the final cut; though Mick Jones and Paul Simonon did - recording together for the first time since The Clash, on the righteous title track, Plastic Beach.
The resulting 16-track record is Gorillaz's most glorious work yet. From freewheeling Snoop Dogg-drawled opening track Welcome To The World Of The Plastic Beach and the Bobby Womack electro-boogie of first single Stylo to the Lou Reed-powered Some Kind Of Nature, it's a terrific record. “It makes Demon Days seem like a warm-up act,” Niccals agrees. “So at least I can say we've stepped our game up...”
And if Russel Hobbs is missing in action (Niccals had to program the drums himself) and if Noodle is now a Kalashnikov-totting android built from the DNA of the original girl-guitarist, and if 2D is currently being held captive by Niccals against his will on Plastic Beach... Well, that's just the way things have turned out.
“I like to think of myself as The Gorillaz,” says Niccals. “You take me out of this set-up and, well, you've just got three bell-ends staring at the camera...”
But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
They say that necessity is the mother of invention. By that token, Plastic Beach (the album) was a cast-iron requirement. Niccals had to get the band back together. A string of bad investments had left him on his uppers. “I bought a copy of As Used On The Famous Mandela: Underground Adventures In The Arms And Torture Trade by Mark Thomas. Great book. It shows you how easy it is to push weapons round the globe, by buying old stocks as countries upgrade, repainting them and selling them on at a profit to other groups. The British arms industry is the second biggest in the world. We'll sell arms to anyone. The way I see it is, y'know, I knew they were duds. I was just trying to make a fast buck...” That plan backfired, and Niccals found himself pursued by some dissatisfied customers - notably an underground network of pirates called The Black Clouds. They'd been after him ever since they appeared uninvited, dropping bombs on Noodle in the El Mañana video. For a time he pacified them with the promise of more cheap weaponry. But after stiffing them with dud scuds, the blood between them turned very bad.
What about his pyramid scheme? Not so easy to justify getting involved in that one, surely? “Yeah, the Bernie Madoff thing was a mistake for sure. I met this balding old fart in Hooters. You start at the bottom, you get to the top: that's how he sold it to me. He said he had documents and everything, proving he owned a bunch of pyramids in Giza. I thought, What with the economy fluctuating so chaotically, surely your money's safe in pyramids? They've been around for centuries. But his word wasn't worth the parchment it was written on.”
Broke, Niccals realised there was only one thing for it: to put Gorillaz back together. They'd always been his biggest money earner. He started by looking for his greatest asset, Noodle - Demon Days' main composer. There was no sign of her at the El Mañana video site, the last time she was seen alive. Just the remains of the floating island. So he scooped up some of her DNA from the wreckage and put it in a jar. He continued to dig into her disappearance. It turned out she'd been dragged off to an underworld, Hades-type place; a botched kidnap attempt by netherworldly entities that had come via the spirit-channelling Hobbs to grab Niccals, only to make off with Noodle instead.
In May 2007, Niccals - armed with his spellbook, the 15th-century grimoire Pseudomornarchia Deamonum - opened a portal and spent six months wandering the netherworld. There was no sign of Noodle. He returned to find Kong Studios in a state of disrepair, collapsing and overrun with zombies. “So I put it up for sale. It's a piece of history. But no one wanted it.” Instead, he torched it and used the insurance money to escape and set up Plastic Beach.
Using one of the helicopters from the Feel Good Inc video, Niccals started scouting the oceans and Arctic tundra, looking for somewhere isolated enough for him to go missing for a while. He found what he was looking for at Point Nemo, the furthest point from any landmass known to man. “What attracted me to the disgusting rotting landfill in the middle of the ocean? Mmm. Who knows? I think it found me... It's a magnet for all things rotten. I needed somewhere isolated. Somewhere not even Google could find me.”
Over the next few months, Niccals had various surviving bits of Kong Studios shipped out to this mysterious location. He built a Playboy Mansion-style base on Plastic Beach, a monstrous towering structure to house everything from his new HQ to a state-of-the-art recording studio. “Over the months, the melodies for a new album came into focus and the songs demanded to be... finessed and defined. Like errant children. Full of potential but with nappies full of excrement.” He drew up a guest list of collaborators. “I treat my record collection like a menu: I'll have the Snoop Dogg with a little dollop of Lou Reed on the side.” Selected guests were sent “golden tickets”, exclusive invites to join Niccals on Plastic Beach. Other times, he'd travel in disguise to discreet locations to meet with musicians. Collaborators were sworn to secrecy. “Anyone who doesn't spend this kind of time and dedication making an album these days is short-changing you,” he huffs.
As we circle the block, Niccals apparently making sure we're not being followed, his phone rings. He takes the call, then covers the mouthpiece - asking Q if we'd mind grabbing some cigarettes from a kiosk. “Lucky Lungs, with the black tops.
When we return, the car's gone.
In January last year, Murdoc Niccals appeared alongside Damon Albarn on Zane Lowe's Radio 1 show. They played three new Gorillaz demos: Electric Shock, Broken and Stylo. It was an on-air experiment that seemed to backfire when it became apparent more people were listening than they thought. Not least Gorillaz' label EMI, who wondered what the pair were playing at - airing unreleased songs at a time when record companies scarcely need more help inviting people to download their music for free. As an own goal, it seemed up there with Bono blaring upcoming No Line On The Horizon songs out of his window, and onto his neighbour's mobile phone. Niccals doesn't agree. “A mobile phone, eh? Pfft! That was just a press scam,” he coughs, when we meet up a fortnight after our New York encounter, at the former site of Kong Studios, on a hilltop in Districtshire, Essex. “Me going on Zane Lowe belching out a couple of rough-cut demos? I'd put that down to supreme confidence. Who's my competition this time? Daffy from N-Duckz?”
Anyway, the Zane Lowe appearance did result in one indisputable bit of bad news - Niccals getting a call from the Child Support Agency. Once Gorillaz' name with The Horrors, whose untitled contribution to Plastic Beach will sadly now go unreleased, the Child Support Agency were hot on their heels. Turns out Niccals is The Horrors' dad. “Five different kids from five different mothers, all from one superstar father, who came together to form a Krautrock-gothic rock'n'roll band initially rejected as lightweight B-movie wannabes, then hailed as visionary sound pioneers? What are the chances?" he says. “Pitch this to Channel 4!”
The CSA wanted £500,000-per-Horror. An embarrassing situation for all concerned? "Not really. I come from an era of domestic violence, so if one of them cheeke me I simply struck them to the floor and used my cane to beat them. Tough love. But they're a fantastic group. A shining endorsement for absent fathers everywhere.”
Niccals is a big fan of Sea Within A Sea, the eight-minute long, chorus-less first single from The Horrors' last album, Primary Colours. “It's exactly what music's missing. Eight-minute singles!” This chimes in with something Damon Albarn said last year, about wanting to make “the most pop record I've ever made, but something with some depth to it.” A reaction to The X Factor, he posited, and its accompanying “celebrity [and] voyeurism, [that's become] the most essential thing in people's lives." Would Niccals agree? Can Plastic Beach be taken as Gorillaz' pro-pop, anti-X Factor manifesto?
“I tell you what,” he says. “I've seen a few demons in my time but I ain't ever seen one like Simon Cowell. Music should be food for the soul, not turds for the mind. He's getting you to pay, with phone voting, to choose the thing he's going to sell you. And he'll roll his eyes while he's doing it. Big queen.”
We wander around the wreckage of Kong. Niccals picks up a lyric book from 2D's bedroom. Flicking through, he tuts “You know, right, I heard about this Susan Boyle phenomenon,” he announces, suddenly animated - or, perhaps, more animated. “But I hadn't seen any 'SuBo' action. So I YouTubed it. And yeah, she's got a voice. Juxtaposed with a face like a hairy suet. War and celebrity. That's the culture of this planet. Susan Boyle at the top of the chart history the same week all those extra troops are sent to Afghanistan? It makes you want to weep.”
His eyes narrow. Q feels another theory coming on. “Now, this is important. Global warming - the next push is that it'll be made essential to 'reduce the population' of the planet. Old-school Nazism. What'd you think happened at the end of the Second World War? That they all just took off their hats and stopped being Nazis? Google 'Operation Paperclip'. This isn't even secret information. But y'know, keep watching The X Factor, voting for Jedward and knocking back your cheap supermarket beers. Y'know, 'everything's cool'. “This album ain't an anti-X Factor statement, though,” he sighs. “Not for me, anyway. How duff would that be to make that your goal?”
Making Plastic Beach took Niccals all over the world. In March 2009, he recorded in Beirut with The National Orchestra of Arabic Music, wearing a burka. “A bit crass. A bit Carry On... Up The Khyber. But I needed to make sure no one recognised me. Those pirate swine, they're everywhere.” In April he was in Derby collaborating with the Sinfonia ViVa orchestra. May found him at New York burlesque club The Box, recruiting rapper Mos Def while dressed in a naff Humphrey Bogart disguise of an old Macintosh and “a pair of stupid hipster shades - the type of cack those R&B stars wear when nobbing about on video sets.” Then there was Lou Reed, who he got together with the same week, in a rented Brooklyn studio. Was he as sour-faced as his legend dictates? “No. He was bouncing around the room like Christopher Biggins,” Niccals says. “What d'you think? He's a whole bunch of laughs... We talked about his range of spectacles, Lou's Views. I guess they just help him to look at things in a different way.”
When Niccals couldn't travel to his collaborators, or couldn't shepherd them to him, he'd employ a third method. “Some I kidnapped. Mark E Smith, here, does this rag smell of chloroform to you? He's great.
He's on a track called Glitter Freeze. He wanted to do his part facing north. [Smith's barked lyric] 'Which way's north from here?' I think that's his Mecca.”
Bit-by-bit the album came together. And if some collaborators just didn't work out - “Barry Gibb turned up to sing, but he had an ear infection. A 'Garry Bibb', it turned out. He picked it when he swam over to
Plastic Beach. He looks like Dog The Bounty Hunter now”- there were more than enough that did. “Getting Paul [Simonon] and Mick [Jones] in took it up another gear,” Niccals says. “Now I'm the Gorillaz bass player, and that ain't gonna change. But I thought, if I could get those two back [in a studio] together, first time since The Clash, I'll play kazoo or some other piece of rubbish.”
That said, Niccals did face one crisis of confidence. In April last year he considered throwing in the towel - and joining Girls Aloud. “I thought, Me, Cheryl, Sarah, Nadine... the other two. That's a party right there. Stick Jaki Liebezeit from Can on drums. Me on bass. Ideally, I'd have [post-punk guitarist] John McGeoch on guitar. [Magazine's] Dave Formula on keyboards. Girls Aloud up front. They'd really knock it out of the park.”
Then there was the time last June when Niccals snuck into Damon Albarn's London studio. With Blur at Glastonbury, it was a perfect cover to steal the demos for the new Blur album. He kept the best bits for Plastic Beach, binned the rest and effectively slammed the door on any new album plans Blur had.
“No, that was a misprint. A rumour,” Niccals corrects. “It wasn't a Blur album. It was a project Damon was working on called Carousel. 'A gentle, mournful eulogy to a mythical, esoteric England; a breeze from damaged fairgrounds and broken piers'. It sounded like the theme to Trumpton to me.”
He lights his umpteenth Lucky Lungs and enhales. “I'm only joking. I love Damon and his music's great. Or I wouldn't have stolen it, would I? I took what I needed, filed the rest in a skip, and came up with Plastic Beach.”
In late January, Q receives its own invite to Plastic Beach. One of the “golden tickets” arrives, handed over by a postman who looks suspiciously like the “Oddjob” driver from New York. Inside the envelope there's a note saying, “Well done, you've passed” with instructions to meet at 2D's old flat, 1 Buckingham Palace Road, London. 2D had been renting the place for a while, over the summer of 2009, when Niccals tracked him down. He realised he needed his vocals, his “melancholy soul”, for the album. 2D refused. So Niccals had him gassed and shipped over to Plastic Beach. Q is pondering this information, when Niccals asks us to wait in the living room and goes outside. “Ready?” he shouts. Then a thick turquoise “valium gas” fills the room.
Next thing, we're in a speedboat - Niccals is the skipper. It's the dead of night. He's singing to himself, swigging rum while manning the wheel. “Almost there, mate. Go back to sleep. Not long now.” There's another blast of gas.
It's morning when we come to. We're in the lounge of Gorillaz' Plastic Beach HQ. Niccals is in the recording room, feet up on the desk, twiddling away on B-sides, wisecracking away. The Lord of his manor. The cyborg Noodle is here, too. With Niccals being menaced by the Black Clouds throughout 2009, he took action and built a new Noodle from her salvaged DNA. Cyborg Noodle was good enough to scatter guitar genius all over the new album before she was posted as Niccals' personal bodyguard, loaded to the hilt with guns and ammo. Then there's 2D. Pop trivia dictates he has an irrational fear of whales. But that hasn't stopped Niccals holding him captive in a glass-bottomed boat. Bit cruel, isn't it? "Not 'a bit.' Very. But that's me. I'm an evil sod. I wear black because it's the colour of my soul. My heroes are people like Bill Sykes and Nosterafu.”
Still, the last laugh may not be his. Recently Niccals has begun noticing disturbing things about Plastic Beach. Odd items sticking out of the island. Bits of planes, large dinosaur bones, telephone boxes, a piece of a Sinclair C5. Root closer and it gets odder still. The Hinderburg wreckage, NASA rockets, a Sphinx, bits of the Titanic. All of mankind's history smashed into one heathen lump to create a Doomsday Atlantis, Niccals reckoned. Waking up on the island last Christmas, he found the skies black, the shores cracked and weeping. Then he discovered a book, The Plastic Beach. A 13-chapter history of man from The Big Bang to present day, it detailed every disaster to befall humanity - the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Great Plague, two World Wars... Niccals realised with horror his ancestors appeared in every era. The book even documented his own arrival on Plastic Beach, though the last chapter, The End Of Days, was missing. “That was the moment that turned my blood to jam,” he says. “The future's ripped out... it's missing.”
Niccals reckons The End Of Days must be upon us. “Gorillaz will now party like it's round about 2010,”
he grimaces. “The end of all things.” His plans for the year, he says: “Just stayin' alive, man. I reckon Gorillaz will be touring too, so that should be fun.” Rumours say they'll be headlining Coachella. And what about Glastonbury? “I went to see Bowie there when he first played. Hawkwind were headlining. I was only 5. Who knows? If I did have plans, I wouldn't tell you...”
If, as Niccals says, Plastic Beach is Gorillaz' final album, what's he most proud of? “Rubbing out these boundaries. Making rappers work with rockers and old soul heads, putting them with animators, writers, those... technology gonks. I see the phrase 'Gorillaz-style project' in every cross-genre, multi-person collaboration now. They always miss the point. It always just sounds like the inside of a pub to me. Look, I've done my best here. If Gorillaz were a triptych, Plastic Beach would be my third and final, most glorious panel. The grand finale. My requiem. The rest is up to you.”
He gives Q the evil eye. “I saw Q's Artists Of The Century. How d'you justify whatshisface... Mika? Or Pink?” He sighs.
“I'm just done with it.”
And with that, he's gone.
Then he's back.
“But what am I most proud of? If I can put that Girls Aloud band together I think I might achieve something really special.”
Now - how do you get off this place?
THE CREW
Mick Jones
Who: Former Clash guitarist and vocalist
Track: Plastic Beach
Mick Jones: “I umm-ed and ahh-ed when I was approached, as I always do, but it seemed interesting and contemporary and I was keen to work with Paul Simonon [ex-Clash bandmate]. I like the idea of ??a cartoon band. I liked the Beatles cartoons when they were on. The Jackson 5 had one, too. There was never an offer for a Clash cartoon, funnily enough.
“Our song's the title track. What's it sound like? It's like an island continent, a plastic beach, maybe, with some submarine sounds. And I know it's not a recognised genre of music.
“It's a few years since Paul and I played together, and that was at a wedding. It was a nice experience to look over my shoulder and see him. We didn't argue as much as we used to. We were wrapped up on our track in a day, no nonsense, and then went down the pub for a pint.”
THE CREW
Bobby Womack
Who: Soul legend best known for his 1973 hit Across 110th Street
Tracks: Stylo, Cloud Of Unknowing
Bobby Womack: “I never heard of Gorilla [sic] before I got the call. I got hold of their material and it was just so different I thought it would be a spark for me - a lift and a challenge.
“Cutting Stylo was like nothing I've done before. They told me to sing whatever was on my mind. I was in there for an hour going crazy about love and politics, getting it off my chest.
“I'm diabetic, and after an hour I could feel myself passing out. Last thing I remember is thinking, Lord, don't let this happen to me. They walked me to the couch and gave me a banana. In two or three minutes, I woke up and said, Let's go again. They said, No, we got it on tape.
“I know I musta freaked them out because it freaked me out. Murdoc kept a straight face. He said, I'm telling you, man, you're my idol. I said, Well, don't kill your idol!”.
THE CREW
Mos Def
Who: US rapper and actor
Track: Stylo, Sweepstakes
Mos Def: “Without sounding hyperbolic, I think that Plastic Beach is one of the greatest pop albums ever. It's going to extend the legacy of Gorillaz in a very positive way.
“I'm on two tracks, though it doesn't do any service to these songs for me to give a verbal description. I haven't really heard popular music like this before.
“Stylo is me and Bobby Womack, which was pretty exciting in itself. I mean, it's Bobby Womack. The other is Sweepstakes, which we did in one take. I based the lyrics on a character who runs the arcades on Plastic Beach. Bobby Womack listened to it while I was there. When the track was finished, he said, Someone call the fire department. I think that meant he liked it.
“We were all in a pretty motivated state. I was just glad to be there - love is electric, as Bobby Womack said on one song.”
THE CREW
Gruff Rhys
Who: Frontman with Super Furry Animals and Gorillaz-esque side-project Neon Neon
Tracks: Jellyfish, Leviathan
Gruff Rhys: “I've always admired Gorillaz. I think the thing that makes them so special is the insanity of it all. Not many people could pull it off - the sound, the concept, the people they've roped in.
“The first I heard was a telegram from Murdoc. It was quite a feat finding their studio because it's not on the map. Even Google doesn't know where it is. In fact, the second time I was due to go there I didn't even manage to show up.
“I ended up singing and playing guitar on a couple songs. The first is Jellyfish, which is a breakfast song,
a breezy, early morning track that makes you want to eat cornflakes. I'm possibly on a song called Leviathan, too. That was more of a night-time song, a three o'clock in the morning, speeding down the autobahn evading West German police-type track.”
THE CREW
De La Soul
Who: New York hip hop legends and guests on Gorillaz' 2005 hit Feel Good Inc .
Songs: Jellyfish, Float Tropics
Kelvin “Posdnous” Mercer: “It was a no-brainer to work with Gorillaz again. Feel Good Inc opened up a whole new crazy bunch of opprotunities for us. We've been initiated as honorary Gorillaz. It's a pleasure to be called that and fit into their mad world.
“The main track we're on is Jellyfish, which sounds like a souped-up, underwater commercial. It's a short but fatty song. We spent a week in the studio in total and tried a few ideas - another was called Float Tropics, a cool, bass-filled, loopy song. I was drinking a lot of nettle tea during the sessions. It has a funny taste, like there's a little bit of sea in it.
“Murdoc always wants to challenge what's brought to Gorillaz - he's very demanding. We want to get him involved in our next album. It's time he returned the favour.”
THE CREW
Little Dragon
Who: Gothenburg-based electronic soul upstarts
Songs: TBC
Yukimi Nagano: “Plastic Beach will be so much bigger than an album because there are so many different angles to it. Walking into their studio was like walking into a playground - there were instruments from all around the world and an ocean of synthesizers. We were in awe of it all, hungry to try them all out.
“We worked on a couple different things, writing and coming up with ideas. Everything was very spontaneous and playful. One had kind of a heavy beat and a repetitive sense to it, the other one was more of a classic pop song.
“It was a really relaxed, very chilled atmosphere. There was a lot of table tennis being played. Who was the best? Murdoc had the skills - I guess he's been practising. And the guys in my band are bad losers ”.
THE CREW
Kano
Who: UK rapper who collaborated with Damon Albarn on his album London Town
Track: White Flag
Kano: “The track I'm on is called White Flag. I've never heard anything like it before. It's got me and Bashy rapping on it but it's not a grime sound. It's very uplifting, it makes you smile. I'm pretty sure we're going to be the first people ever to rap over The National Orchestra Of Arabic Music .
“I've been a Gorillaz fan since Demon Days. When I got the opportunity to be a part of it I knew it had to be done. Me and Bashy were sick with the flu when we were in the studio. We weren't feeling great, the music was out of our comfort zone, it could have been a complete disaster. But Murdoc says we captured something that day. He says it's amazing.
“The album itself is groundbreaking. It would have been easy for them to make Demon Days part two, but this is something else entirely.”
- MURDOC NICCALS
April 6, 2006. New York City. Gorillaz play the final show in support of their Demon Days album . A worldwide triumph, it has taken them across 40 cities in the US and seen them perform alongside many of their numerous collaborators, including Shaun Ryder, Ike Turner and a virtual Dennis Hopper at the Manchester Opera House. It has sold some six million copies, to add to the six million sold of their eponymous 2001 record. It has spawned a Number 1 single in the shape of the Shaun Ryder-mumbled DARE and a Number 2 with happy-sad pop whirler Feel Good Inc. Along the way singer 2D, bassist Murdoc Niccals, guitarist Noodle and drummer Russel Hobbs have performed with Madonna at the Grammys (Niccals wore a battered bus driver's cap, a cape and Y-fronts), broadcasted an “alternate Queen's Speech” on Christmas Day (subjects addressed: the demise of the London Routemaster bus; the non-demise of James Blunt) and been courted by film mogul Harvey Weinstein, who proposed a Gorillaz movie to be overseen by Terry Gilliam - the director of 12 Monkeys, appropriately enough.
Then there were the on-tour antics of the band themselves. Niccals, the celebrated Satanist and self-appointed group-leader, whose absinthe-gurgling and womanising got so out of hand that at one point Gorillaz were regularly getting their windows shot out by a notoriously unstable blonde rock singer, whom Niccals had allegedly impregnated during “a mad three day bender” (“It wasn't me, sunshine, it was Steve Coogan,” he explained.) Hobbs, who passed his time customising the carcasses of endangered animals struck down by Gorillaz' tourbus with the addition of “bass bins, under-lighting and alloy wheels”. Teenage Japanese guitar prodigy Noodle, who was almost obliterated when a lighting rig collapsed near her head, an “accident” suspected to have been either caused by Paula Cracker, the band's dismissed original guitarist, or Niccals's estranged dad, Jacob. And 2D, whose arrested mental development and band-whipping boy status allows history to record little more rock'n'roll than a minor footwear/plumbing incident (“2D - getting your sandal trapped in a drain doesn't constitute an assassination attempt,” Niccals would later chide his bandmate).
But after playing the fifth of five nights at New York's celebrated Apollo Theatre, Gorillaz disappeared. Their last video, 2006's El Mañana, featured Noodle wandering around a floating island in the sky, before apparently being bombed to death by helicopters. Two of the band's most frequent collaborators, Blur singer Damon Albarn and comic artist Jamie Hewlett, seemed to suggest it would be the last we'd hear from them. In November 2007 Albarn told Q that the next Gorillaz project “won't be called Gorillaz”. A Gorillaz autobiography, Rise Of The Ogre, was published. Ominously, none of the band showed up to the launch.
With Albarn and Hewlett involved in hit “circus opera” Monkey:Journey To The West, hopes seemed to fade of Gorillaz rising from the mist. “I'm bored of drawing those characters,” Hewlett said, of his role lending a hand with sleeve artwork and directing videos. There was talk instead of Carousel a new music venture for Albarn and Hewlett that would combine live action and animation and feature a roster of marquee-name collaborators (that one sounded a bit too familiar - did Gorillaz need a good lawyer?).
Rumours leaked from Gorillaz' Essex recording facility, Kong Studios, none of them were good. Niccals had invested $6bn of Gorillaz' profits in Bernie Madoff's pyramid scheme. He'd bought shares in a mobile-phone gambling company. And he'd been selling second hand weapons to third-world dictators. Now Niccals was broke. To add injury to insult, in July 2009 Kong Studios burned down. “I was collapsing faster than the music industry,” Niccals was quoted as saying.
So it's with some surprise that late one recent afternoon, while Q is minding Q's own business on New York's Lower East Side, Gorillaz once again make their presence felt. A burgundy 1978 Lincoln Continental creeps along behind us, and purrs to a halt. One blacked-out, bulletproof back passenger window slides down, and Murdoc Niccals peers out. He stares for a moment, then ushers us inside. It would be good to report that he looks well, but that would be a lie. And there's no point in making things up. His dark grey hair is now jet-black (a dye job?). His skin is an unhealthy shade of green (is there a healthy shade of green?). Now nudging 44, the Stoke-on-Trent-raised Black Sabbath enthusiast is looking a touch wrinkly under the eyes. Niccals's driver looks unnervingly like Harold Sakata, the Bond actor who played Oddjob. The Pretty Things' 1968 concept album SF Sorrow drifts out of the car's stereo. The ashtrays are overflowing, the floor littered with books: Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, Steven Hawkinz' A Brief History Of The Donk. Unnervingly, Q's photograph is gaffer-taped to the headrest in front of Niccals.
So, naturally, our first question: Gorillaz - what happened?
“I guess we were sick of the sight of each other,” Niccals growls. “The Demon Days album was over. And that was a long haul anyhow. There's always the talk of movies and other things. But that's usually all it is. Just talk. Some people make a career out of dining out. I've had enough, too. I thought I'd scoop up my coppers, put on my ermine and go party.”
Now, after four long years, Gorillaz are back. At least, 50 per cent of them are. Niccals has tracked Q down to say as much. Now based at Point Nemo in the South Pacific, the “Oceanic point of inaccessibility”, the place furthest from land on Earth, the Satanic bassist has spent the last 18 months holed up inside a mammoth Tracy Island-style HQ, atop Plastic Beach - a floating island made up of the world's rubbish. From this rotting hideaway, he has overseen a singular roll call of musical talent for Gorillaz' comeback album, named after their new base. Plastic Beach features collaborations with Lou Reed, Snoop Dogg, Mark E Smith, De La Soul, Mos Def, Bobby Womack, The National Orchestra Of Arabic Music and Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, a Chicago-based nine piece jazz collective, eight of whom are the sons of Phil Cohran, trumpeter with Sun Ra's legendary Arkestra. The Horrors were briefly involved. So was the Bee Gees' Barry Gibb. Neither made the final cut; though Mick Jones and Paul Simonon did - recording together for the first time since The Clash, on the righteous title track, Plastic Beach.
The resulting 16-track record is Gorillaz's most glorious work yet. From freewheeling Snoop Dogg-drawled opening track Welcome To The World Of The Plastic Beach and the Bobby Womack electro-boogie of first single Stylo to the Lou Reed-powered Some Kind Of Nature, it's a terrific record. “It makes Demon Days seem like a warm-up act,” Niccals agrees. “So at least I can say we've stepped our game up...”
And if Russel Hobbs is missing in action (Niccals had to program the drums himself) and if Noodle is now a Kalashnikov-totting android built from the DNA of the original girl-guitarist, and if 2D is currently being held captive by Niccals against his will on Plastic Beach... Well, that's just the way things have turned out.
“I like to think of myself as The Gorillaz,” says Niccals. “You take me out of this set-up and, well, you've just got three bell-ends staring at the camera...”
But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
They say that necessity is the mother of invention. By that token, Plastic Beach (the album) was a cast-iron requirement. Niccals had to get the band back together. A string of bad investments had left him on his uppers. “I bought a copy of As Used On The Famous Mandela: Underground Adventures In The Arms And Torture Trade by Mark Thomas. Great book. It shows you how easy it is to push weapons round the globe, by buying old stocks as countries upgrade, repainting them and selling them on at a profit to other groups. The British arms industry is the second biggest in the world. We'll sell arms to anyone. The way I see it is, y'know, I knew they were duds. I was just trying to make a fast buck...” That plan backfired, and Niccals found himself pursued by some dissatisfied customers - notably an underground network of pirates called The Black Clouds. They'd been after him ever since they appeared uninvited, dropping bombs on Noodle in the El Mañana video. For a time he pacified them with the promise of more cheap weaponry. But after stiffing them with dud scuds, the blood between them turned very bad.
What about his pyramid scheme? Not so easy to justify getting involved in that one, surely? “Yeah, the Bernie Madoff thing was a mistake for sure. I met this balding old fart in Hooters. You start at the bottom, you get to the top: that's how he sold it to me. He said he had documents and everything, proving he owned a bunch of pyramids in Giza. I thought, What with the economy fluctuating so chaotically, surely your money's safe in pyramids? They've been around for centuries. But his word wasn't worth the parchment it was written on.”
Broke, Niccals realised there was only one thing for it: to put Gorillaz back together. They'd always been his biggest money earner. He started by looking for his greatest asset, Noodle - Demon Days' main composer. There was no sign of her at the El Mañana video site, the last time she was seen alive. Just the remains of the floating island. So he scooped up some of her DNA from the wreckage and put it in a jar. He continued to dig into her disappearance. It turned out she'd been dragged off to an underworld, Hades-type place; a botched kidnap attempt by netherworldly entities that had come via the spirit-channelling Hobbs to grab Niccals, only to make off with Noodle instead.
In May 2007, Niccals - armed with his spellbook, the 15th-century grimoire Pseudomornarchia Deamonum - opened a portal and spent six months wandering the netherworld. There was no sign of Noodle. He returned to find Kong Studios in a state of disrepair, collapsing and overrun with zombies. “So I put it up for sale. It's a piece of history. But no one wanted it.” Instead, he torched it and used the insurance money to escape and set up Plastic Beach.
Using one of the helicopters from the Feel Good Inc video, Niccals started scouting the oceans and Arctic tundra, looking for somewhere isolated enough for him to go missing for a while. He found what he was looking for at Point Nemo, the furthest point from any landmass known to man. “What attracted me to the disgusting rotting landfill in the middle of the ocean? Mmm. Who knows? I think it found me... It's a magnet for all things rotten. I needed somewhere isolated. Somewhere not even Google could find me.”
Over the next few months, Niccals had various surviving bits of Kong Studios shipped out to this mysterious location. He built a Playboy Mansion-style base on Plastic Beach, a monstrous towering structure to house everything from his new HQ to a state-of-the-art recording studio. “Over the months, the melodies for a new album came into focus and the songs demanded to be... finessed and defined. Like errant children. Full of potential but with nappies full of excrement.” He drew up a guest list of collaborators. “I treat my record collection like a menu: I'll have the Snoop Dogg with a little dollop of Lou Reed on the side.” Selected guests were sent “golden tickets”, exclusive invites to join Niccals on Plastic Beach. Other times, he'd travel in disguise to discreet locations to meet with musicians. Collaborators were sworn to secrecy. “Anyone who doesn't spend this kind of time and dedication making an album these days is short-changing you,” he huffs.
As we circle the block, Niccals apparently making sure we're not being followed, his phone rings. He takes the call, then covers the mouthpiece - asking Q if we'd mind grabbing some cigarettes from a kiosk. “Lucky Lungs, with the black tops.
When we return, the car's gone.
In January last year, Murdoc Niccals appeared alongside Damon Albarn on Zane Lowe's Radio 1 show. They played three new Gorillaz demos: Electric Shock, Broken and Stylo. It was an on-air experiment that seemed to backfire when it became apparent more people were listening than they thought. Not least Gorillaz' label EMI, who wondered what the pair were playing at - airing unreleased songs at a time when record companies scarcely need more help inviting people to download their music for free. As an own goal, it seemed up there with Bono blaring upcoming No Line On The Horizon songs out of his window, and onto his neighbour's mobile phone. Niccals doesn't agree. “A mobile phone, eh? Pfft! That was just a press scam,” he coughs, when we meet up a fortnight after our New York encounter, at the former site of Kong Studios, on a hilltop in Districtshire, Essex. “Me going on Zane Lowe belching out a couple of rough-cut demos? I'd put that down to supreme confidence. Who's my competition this time? Daffy from N-Duckz?”
Anyway, the Zane Lowe appearance did result in one indisputable bit of bad news - Niccals getting a call from the Child Support Agency. Once Gorillaz' name with The Horrors, whose untitled contribution to Plastic Beach will sadly now go unreleased, the Child Support Agency were hot on their heels. Turns out Niccals is The Horrors' dad. “Five different kids from five different mothers, all from one superstar father, who came together to form a Krautrock-gothic rock'n'roll band initially rejected as lightweight B-movie wannabes, then hailed as visionary sound pioneers? What are the chances?" he says. “Pitch this to Channel 4!”
The CSA wanted £500,000-per-Horror. An embarrassing situation for all concerned? "Not really. I come from an era of domestic violence, so if one of them cheeke me I simply struck them to the floor and used my cane to beat them. Tough love. But they're a fantastic group. A shining endorsement for absent fathers everywhere.”
Niccals is a big fan of Sea Within A Sea, the eight-minute long, chorus-less first single from The Horrors' last album, Primary Colours. “It's exactly what music's missing. Eight-minute singles!” This chimes in with something Damon Albarn said last year, about wanting to make “the most pop record I've ever made, but something with some depth to it.” A reaction to The X Factor, he posited, and its accompanying “celebrity [and] voyeurism, [that's become] the most essential thing in people's lives." Would Niccals agree? Can Plastic Beach be taken as Gorillaz' pro-pop, anti-X Factor manifesto?
“I tell you what,” he says. “I've seen a few demons in my time but I ain't ever seen one like Simon Cowell. Music should be food for the soul, not turds for the mind. He's getting you to pay, with phone voting, to choose the thing he's going to sell you. And he'll roll his eyes while he's doing it. Big queen.”
We wander around the wreckage of Kong. Niccals picks up a lyric book from 2D's bedroom. Flicking through, he tuts “You know, right, I heard about this Susan Boyle phenomenon,” he announces, suddenly animated - or, perhaps, more animated. “But I hadn't seen any 'SuBo' action. So I YouTubed it. And yeah, she's got a voice. Juxtaposed with a face like a hairy suet. War and celebrity. That's the culture of this planet. Susan Boyle at the top of the chart history the same week all those extra troops are sent to Afghanistan? It makes you want to weep.”
His eyes narrow. Q feels another theory coming on. “Now, this is important. Global warming - the next push is that it'll be made essential to 'reduce the population' of the planet. Old-school Nazism. What'd you think happened at the end of the Second World War? That they all just took off their hats and stopped being Nazis? Google 'Operation Paperclip'. This isn't even secret information. But y'know, keep watching The X Factor, voting for Jedward and knocking back your cheap supermarket beers. Y'know, 'everything's cool'. “This album ain't an anti-X Factor statement, though,” he sighs. “Not for me, anyway. How duff would that be to make that your goal?”
Making Plastic Beach took Niccals all over the world. In March 2009, he recorded in Beirut with The National Orchestra of Arabic Music, wearing a burka. “A bit crass. A bit Carry On... Up The Khyber. But I needed to make sure no one recognised me. Those pirate swine, they're everywhere.” In April he was in Derby collaborating with the Sinfonia ViVa orchestra. May found him at New York burlesque club The Box, recruiting rapper Mos Def while dressed in a naff Humphrey Bogart disguise of an old Macintosh and “a pair of stupid hipster shades - the type of cack those R&B stars wear when nobbing about on video sets.” Then there was Lou Reed, who he got together with the same week, in a rented Brooklyn studio. Was he as sour-faced as his legend dictates? “No. He was bouncing around the room like Christopher Biggins,” Niccals says. “What d'you think? He's a whole bunch of laughs... We talked about his range of spectacles, Lou's Views. I guess they just help him to look at things in a different way.”
When Niccals couldn't travel to his collaborators, or couldn't shepherd them to him, he'd employ a third method. “Some I kidnapped. Mark E Smith, here, does this rag smell of chloroform to you? He's great.
He's on a track called Glitter Freeze. He wanted to do his part facing north. [Smith's barked lyric] 'Which way's north from here?' I think that's his Mecca.”
Bit-by-bit the album came together. And if some collaborators just didn't work out - “Barry Gibb turned up to sing, but he had an ear infection. A 'Garry Bibb', it turned out. He picked it when he swam over to
Plastic Beach. He looks like Dog The Bounty Hunter now”- there were more than enough that did. “Getting Paul [Simonon] and Mick [Jones] in took it up another gear,” Niccals says. “Now I'm the Gorillaz bass player, and that ain't gonna change. But I thought, if I could get those two back [in a studio] together, first time since The Clash, I'll play kazoo or some other piece of rubbish.”
That said, Niccals did face one crisis of confidence. In April last year he considered throwing in the towel - and joining Girls Aloud. “I thought, Me, Cheryl, Sarah, Nadine... the other two. That's a party right there. Stick Jaki Liebezeit from Can on drums. Me on bass. Ideally, I'd have [post-punk guitarist] John McGeoch on guitar. [Magazine's] Dave Formula on keyboards. Girls Aloud up front. They'd really knock it out of the park.”
Then there was the time last June when Niccals snuck into Damon Albarn's London studio. With Blur at Glastonbury, it was a perfect cover to steal the demos for the new Blur album. He kept the best bits for Plastic Beach, binned the rest and effectively slammed the door on any new album plans Blur had.
“No, that was a misprint. A rumour,” Niccals corrects. “It wasn't a Blur album. It was a project Damon was working on called Carousel. 'A gentle, mournful eulogy to a mythical, esoteric England; a breeze from damaged fairgrounds and broken piers'. It sounded like the theme to Trumpton to me.”
He lights his umpteenth Lucky Lungs and enhales. “I'm only joking. I love Damon and his music's great. Or I wouldn't have stolen it, would I? I took what I needed, filed the rest in a skip, and came up with Plastic Beach.”
In late January, Q receives its own invite to Plastic Beach. One of the “golden tickets” arrives, handed over by a postman who looks suspiciously like the “Oddjob” driver from New York. Inside the envelope there's a note saying, “Well done, you've passed” with instructions to meet at 2D's old flat, 1 Buckingham Palace Road, London. 2D had been renting the place for a while, over the summer of 2009, when Niccals tracked him down. He realised he needed his vocals, his “melancholy soul”, for the album. 2D refused. So Niccals had him gassed and shipped over to Plastic Beach. Q is pondering this information, when Niccals asks us to wait in the living room and goes outside. “Ready?” he shouts. Then a thick turquoise “valium gas” fills the room.
Next thing, we're in a speedboat - Niccals is the skipper. It's the dead of night. He's singing to himself, swigging rum while manning the wheel. “Almost there, mate. Go back to sleep. Not long now.” There's another blast of gas.
It's morning when we come to. We're in the lounge of Gorillaz' Plastic Beach HQ. Niccals is in the recording room, feet up on the desk, twiddling away on B-sides, wisecracking away. The Lord of his manor. The cyborg Noodle is here, too. With Niccals being menaced by the Black Clouds throughout 2009, he took action and built a new Noodle from her salvaged DNA. Cyborg Noodle was good enough to scatter guitar genius all over the new album before she was posted as Niccals' personal bodyguard, loaded to the hilt with guns and ammo. Then there's 2D. Pop trivia dictates he has an irrational fear of whales. But that hasn't stopped Niccals holding him captive in a glass-bottomed boat. Bit cruel, isn't it? "Not 'a bit.' Very. But that's me. I'm an evil sod. I wear black because it's the colour of my soul. My heroes are people like Bill Sykes and Nosterafu.”
Still, the last laugh may not be his. Recently Niccals has begun noticing disturbing things about Plastic Beach. Odd items sticking out of the island. Bits of planes, large dinosaur bones, telephone boxes, a piece of a Sinclair C5. Root closer and it gets odder still. The Hinderburg wreckage, NASA rockets, a Sphinx, bits of the Titanic. All of mankind's history smashed into one heathen lump to create a Doomsday Atlantis, Niccals reckoned. Waking up on the island last Christmas, he found the skies black, the shores cracked and weeping. Then he discovered a book, The Plastic Beach. A 13-chapter history of man from The Big Bang to present day, it detailed every disaster to befall humanity - the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Great Plague, two World Wars... Niccals realised with horror his ancestors appeared in every era. The book even documented his own arrival on Plastic Beach, though the last chapter, The End Of Days, was missing. “That was the moment that turned my blood to jam,” he says. “The future's ripped out... it's missing.”
Niccals reckons The End Of Days must be upon us. “Gorillaz will now party like it's round about 2010,”
he grimaces. “The end of all things.” His plans for the year, he says: “Just stayin' alive, man. I reckon Gorillaz will be touring too, so that should be fun.” Rumours say they'll be headlining Coachella. And what about Glastonbury? “I went to see Bowie there when he first played. Hawkwind were headlining. I was only 5. Who knows? If I did have plans, I wouldn't tell you...”
If, as Niccals says, Plastic Beach is Gorillaz' final album, what's he most proud of? “Rubbing out these boundaries. Making rappers work with rockers and old soul heads, putting them with animators, writers, those... technology gonks. I see the phrase 'Gorillaz-style project' in every cross-genre, multi-person collaboration now. They always miss the point. It always just sounds like the inside of a pub to me. Look, I've done my best here. If Gorillaz were a triptych, Plastic Beach would be my third and final, most glorious panel. The grand finale. My requiem. The rest is up to you.”
He gives Q the evil eye. “I saw Q's Artists Of The Century. How d'you justify whatshisface... Mika? Or Pink?” He sighs.
“I'm just done with it.”
And with that, he's gone.
Then he's back.
“But what am I most proud of? If I can put that Girls Aloud band together I think I might achieve something really special.”
Now - how do you get off this place?
THE CREW
Mick Jones
Who: Former Clash guitarist and vocalist
Track: Plastic Beach
Mick Jones: “I umm-ed and ahh-ed when I was approached, as I always do, but it seemed interesting and contemporary and I was keen to work with Paul Simonon [ex-Clash bandmate]. I like the idea of ??a cartoon band. I liked the Beatles cartoons when they were on. The Jackson 5 had one, too. There was never an offer for a Clash cartoon, funnily enough.
“Our song's the title track. What's it sound like? It's like an island continent, a plastic beach, maybe, with some submarine sounds. And I know it's not a recognised genre of music.
“It's a few years since Paul and I played together, and that was at a wedding. It was a nice experience to look over my shoulder and see him. We didn't argue as much as we used to. We were wrapped up on our track in a day, no nonsense, and then went down the pub for a pint.”
THE CREW
Bobby Womack
Who: Soul legend best known for his 1973 hit Across 110th Street
Tracks: Stylo, Cloud Of Unknowing
Bobby Womack: “I never heard of Gorilla [sic] before I got the call. I got hold of their material and it was just so different I thought it would be a spark for me - a lift and a challenge.
“Cutting Stylo was like nothing I've done before. They told me to sing whatever was on my mind. I was in there for an hour going crazy about love and politics, getting it off my chest.
“I'm diabetic, and after an hour I could feel myself passing out. Last thing I remember is thinking, Lord, don't let this happen to me. They walked me to the couch and gave me a banana. In two or three minutes, I woke up and said, Let's go again. They said, No, we got it on tape.
“I know I musta freaked them out because it freaked me out. Murdoc kept a straight face. He said, I'm telling you, man, you're my idol. I said, Well, don't kill your idol!”.
THE CREW
Mos Def
Who: US rapper and actor
Track: Stylo, Sweepstakes
Mos Def: “Without sounding hyperbolic, I think that Plastic Beach is one of the greatest pop albums ever. It's going to extend the legacy of Gorillaz in a very positive way.
“I'm on two tracks, though it doesn't do any service to these songs for me to give a verbal description. I haven't really heard popular music like this before.
“Stylo is me and Bobby Womack, which was pretty exciting in itself. I mean, it's Bobby Womack. The other is Sweepstakes, which we did in one take. I based the lyrics on a character who runs the arcades on Plastic Beach. Bobby Womack listened to it while I was there. When the track was finished, he said, Someone call the fire department. I think that meant he liked it.
“We were all in a pretty motivated state. I was just glad to be there - love is electric, as Bobby Womack said on one song.”
THE CREW
Gruff Rhys
Who: Frontman with Super Furry Animals and Gorillaz-esque side-project Neon Neon
Tracks: Jellyfish, Leviathan
Gruff Rhys: “I've always admired Gorillaz. I think the thing that makes them so special is the insanity of it all. Not many people could pull it off - the sound, the concept, the people they've roped in.
“The first I heard was a telegram from Murdoc. It was quite a feat finding their studio because it's not on the map. Even Google doesn't know where it is. In fact, the second time I was due to go there I didn't even manage to show up.
“I ended up singing and playing guitar on a couple songs. The first is Jellyfish, which is a breakfast song,
a breezy, early morning track that makes you want to eat cornflakes. I'm possibly on a song called Leviathan, too. That was more of a night-time song, a three o'clock in the morning, speeding down the autobahn evading West German police-type track.”
THE CREW
De La Soul
Who: New York hip hop legends and guests on Gorillaz' 2005 hit Feel Good Inc .
Songs: Jellyfish, Float Tropics
Kelvin “Posdnous” Mercer: “It was a no-brainer to work with Gorillaz again. Feel Good Inc opened up a whole new crazy bunch of opprotunities for us. We've been initiated as honorary Gorillaz. It's a pleasure to be called that and fit into their mad world.
“The main track we're on is Jellyfish, which sounds like a souped-up, underwater commercial. It's a short but fatty song. We spent a week in the studio in total and tried a few ideas - another was called Float Tropics, a cool, bass-filled, loopy song. I was drinking a lot of nettle tea during the sessions. It has a funny taste, like there's a little bit of sea in it.
“Murdoc always wants to challenge what's brought to Gorillaz - he's very demanding. We want to get him involved in our next album. It's time he returned the favour.”
THE CREW
Little Dragon
Who: Gothenburg-based electronic soul upstarts
Songs: TBC
Yukimi Nagano: “Plastic Beach will be so much bigger than an album because there are so many different angles to it. Walking into their studio was like walking into a playground - there were instruments from all around the world and an ocean of synthesizers. We were in awe of it all, hungry to try them all out.
“We worked on a couple different things, writing and coming up with ideas. Everything was very spontaneous and playful. One had kind of a heavy beat and a repetitive sense to it, the other one was more of a classic pop song.
“It was a really relaxed, very chilled atmosphere. There was a lot of table tennis being played. Who was the best? Murdoc had the skills - I guess he's been practising. And the guys in my band are bad losers ”.
THE CREW
Kano
Who: UK rapper who collaborated with Damon Albarn on his album London Town
Track: White Flag
Kano: “The track I'm on is called White Flag. I've never heard anything like it before. It's got me and Bashy rapping on it but it's not a grime sound. It's very uplifting, it makes you smile. I'm pretty sure we're going to be the first people ever to rap over The National Orchestra Of Arabic Music .
“I've been a Gorillaz fan since Demon Days. When I got the opportunity to be a part of it I knew it had to be done. Me and Bashy were sick with the flu when we were in the studio. We weren't feeling great, the music was out of our comfort zone, it could have been a complete disaster. But Murdoc says we captured something that day. He says it's amazing.
“The album itself is groundbreaking. It would have been easy for them to make Demon Days part two, but this is something else entirely.”