Damon Albarn:
Damon's world
With three
new ventures on the go, not one of them with Blur, Damon
Albarn is busier than ever, he tells Ian Burrell.
The name of Damon Albarn's
latest project is Lif up Yuh Leg an Trample, and
he has certainly been lifting up his leg by running up
and down Portobello Road, west London, thus combining his
fitness regime with a few moments to think through a
hectic work schedule.
He arrives at our café
rendezvous dripping with sweat and slightly dishevelled,
but clearly invigorated by the current state of his
career, which has led him to a unique position in British
music. Still enjoying the afterglow of the success of
Blur's latest album, Think Tank, he is engrossed
in three new ventures, none of which involve the band
with which he made his name, but all of which have the
capacity for influencing and broadening musical taste.
These latest additions to
Albarn's CV have seen him sampling bacchanalian pleasures
in the Caribbean, and will take him later this month to
the backstreets of Lagos and one of the spiritual homes
of modern West African music. In between, he has been
working with a raft of rappers, and with Shaun Ryder, the
impecunious former Happy Monday, in the latest
collaboration by Gorillaz, Albarn's cartoon band that is
now even more popular than Blur.
The first product of
Albarn's latest labours will be Lif up Yuh Leg an
Trample, a collection from the cutting-edge artists
at the Trinidad and Tobago carnival, one of the wildest
parties in the global calendar. Damon was there in
February, smeared in coloured mud and swept up in the
writhing, human "Soca train", the vast
procession that chugs through the streets of Port of
Spain to a hybrid Soul-Calypso soundtrack for four days
and nights. "You come out of the night into the
carnival dawn as a multicoloured beast," recalls the
Blur frontman. "The only context I have for soca is
the Notting Hill Carnival, which, as a long-term
resident, I have been to for many years. If you live
round here, you do get at least a glimpse of what it's
like. But Trinidad enveloped our lives for four days - it
was nothing but carnival."
Albarn went to Trinidad
with Alan Scholefield and Mark Ainley, his partners in
the Honest Jon's record label, and owners of the Notting
Hill record shop of the same name, through which he is
raising the profile of artists from Africa to Iceland,
often in collaborations with his own work. In this
instance, he has helped to put a spotlight on artists
such as Denise Belfon, Dawg E Slaughter, and his personal
favourite Timmy (whose "Bumpa Catch a Fire"
prompted a singalong from the West Indies cricket captain
Brian Lara, when given a promo of the CD on Sunday).
As a musician, Albarn was
taken aback by the extraordinary work rate of the soca
artists during the period of the carnival. "One of
the things I found fascinating was that they have a week
to make an impact with these tunes, then they get top
billing at all the carnivals for the rest of the year. If
they don't make the impact in that week, it's going to be
a lean year for them. They are working their asses
off," he says.
Scholefield recalls that
Shurwayne Winchester, the winner of the "Road
March" competition for the most-played Soca tune on
the final day of the festival (known as Mardi Gras),
worked himself to exhaustion. "He sang his track for
eight or 10 hours. We saw him at one in the morning and
he was working his socks off, but he had flu for three
days because he had been working all week. The next day,
in the paper, he was being interviewed from bed, totally
overwhelmed."
The Honest Jon's party
based themselves in a flat above a funeral parlour, which
could have been convenient given that a multiple murder -
apparently linked to drugs - occurred across the street
at the end of their stay.
Albarn says: "All I
know is that I went to Trinidad and I really enjoyed it,
I really felt it. I'm looking forward to this year's
Notting Hill Carnival because I will know more of the
tunes. I am going to go mental when I hear Timmy - it
won't just be a passing sound at the carnival, it will
mean something to me."
He compares the partying
in Trinidad to the outpouring of steam from a pressure
cooker: "In Trinidad, there's quite a strong
government control over things, and there's a week when
everyone's allowed a certain freedom that would not
necessarily exist for the rest of the year," he
says. "The whole nature of the music in the soca
train is that everyone gets on and moves in a direction
of unity."
The album is an extension
of an earlier Honest Jon's project, London Is the
Place for Me, which highlighted the forerunners to
the modern Soca scene, the calypso singers, such as the
legendary Lord Kitchener, who came to Britain from the
Caribbean in the Fifties.
Lif up Yuh Leg an
Trample is timed to mark the 40th anniversary of
Notting Hill Carnival this year, and the 30th birthday of
the Honest Jon's record shop. Soca lyrics traditional
broach all manner of subjects, from current affairs to
sleeping around, and Albarn and Scholefield hope that the
album will provide listeners with a greater depth of
understanding of carnival than the perennial Notting Hill
image of a fat lady kissing a policeman.
Damon says: "The
British media has enormous preconceptions about it. If
you are going to take carnival seriously - and I don't
think it necessarily expects to be taken seriously - it
is an expression... music is there to remind people of
their origins and to lead the way forward to their
future."
The origins of the music
are largely African and, according to Albarn, the Honest
Jon's record label has grown "laterally" over
the last two years, with Nigeria being the common link to
many of its projects. He highlights the connections in
African and Caribbean music ("all the musicians that
went over on scholarships to Cuba from West
Africa"), while Scholefield points out that "in
the Fifties, London was a home for musicians from West
Africa and Trinidad playing calypsos"). "One
thing leads to another," says Albarn. "The
lovely thing about Honest Jon's is that we have a
completely open remit. In the next year, the truly
eclectic nature of the label will be to the fore."
The Nigerian connection is
largely the result of Albarn's friendship with Tony
Allen, the Paris-based Nigerian musician who was formerly
the drummer for Fela Kuti. "We are going to have
quite a few Nigeria-related records in the near
future," says Albarn. "That whole thing
initially came from when I wrote a song called
"Music Is My Radar" for Blur, and there was a
line in it about Tony Allen. Someone played that to Allen
and he got in contact with me and said, 'Do you want to
guest on one of the tunes on my Home Cooking
album?', which I did and we got on really well. We
decided to embark on what has now become quite an epic
project, and which rolls into Lagos in under two weeks'
time."
The Blur frontman
previously recorded Mali Music, another Honest
Jon's release on which he worked with local musicians
such as Afel Bocoum and Toumani Diabate. "The two
albums are unrelated," he says. "But what I'm
doing with Tony is informed enormously by the time I've
spent in Mali over the years. For example, some of the
lines that I have written, playing them to musicians the
last time I was in Lagos, they immediately recognised
them as cousins of the lines they play. It's a bizarre
way around, that an Englishman goes to Mali, goes back to
Britain and then goes to Nigeria and passes on something
that was already there anyway, but the question had not
been posed for a while."
Some of the tracks for the
Nigeria project are said by Scholefield to be
"fleshed out" versions of tunes recorded on
Albarn's album of first-cut demos, Democrazy (a
phrase he borrowed from Fela Kuti).
Damon appears frustrated
that Britain can be reluctant to open its ears to music
that is unfamiliar - particularly from Africa - whereas
francophone connections have helped to make Paris a
vibrant market for international artists. "The
dialogue between West Africa and France is still ongoing,
whereas in this country... well, in Nigeria at the moment
I think we are awakening a whole department of the
British Council that has been waiting for a phone call
for the last 40 years," he says. "It's like,
'What? We can actually do something other than exploit
their natural resources?'."
Albarn and Scholefield are
hoping to do a little to expand British musical tastes.
Albarn says: "There's no master plan at all. But we
do find that the more you get about and the more you
listen with intent to what people are actually saying and
playing, the more you find the connections that are
really valuable."
Damon, who himself was
exposed to global music by his parents, maintains that he
has "in some ways, some ongoing dialogue with youth
culture", and would like younger people in Britain
to take a greater interest in world music, but says that
at the moment, it just isn't there. "It really is a
shame, considering how unbelievably diverse this country
is."
He was clearly
disappointed by NME's treatment of his work in
Mali, after he agreed to allow the music magazine to
accompany him to West Africa for a performance at the
Institut National des Arts in Bamako. The article
concentrated on band tensions, lack of local interest and
Albarn's demeanour, rather than the Malian musical talent
he wanted to highlight. "I took the NME to
Mali when we were rehearsing, and I was just devastated
by the impression that they gave at the end. I'm trying
to open this up for people like myself, when I was
younger, and they are just putting the kibosh on it and
trying to relate it in context to The Strokes," he
says. "The NME doesn't go to Africa very
often, and I was really excited about the whole idea. At
the end, I felt absolutely... does it mean that
musicians' adventures around the world are destined to
remain in the broadsheets and in the travel sections of
magazines, and the kids never have access to this and are
perpetually force-fed crap?"
Then there is Gorillaz.
The next album from the secretive band, which performs
live behind a screen showing animated visuals, and is
fronted by Murdoc, a cartoon character with green teeth,
will probably be ready by the start of next year. It will
feature a track with Ryder, produced by the underground
New York hip-hop producer DJ Dangermouse, who famously
fused The Beatles' "White Album" with rapper
Jay-Z's The Black Album to make The Grey Album,
which became a hit through internet downloads.
The Gorillaz project will
also feature tracks from the daisy-age rappers De La
Soul, the leading British rhymer Roots Manuva, and the
Isle of Wight band The Bees. "It's going well; it's
getting there. I'm very happy with it at the
moment," Albarn says, somewhat hesitantly, before
adding mischievously: "They're definitely coming
back, no question about that. But then again, you know,
I'm not the band, I'm just helping with the music."
And with that, he lif's up
his leg and jogs off back to work.
'Lif Up Yuh Leg an
Trample' is out on Honest Jon's on 26 July
Ian
Burrell
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