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Deconstructing Damon
 I HAVE spent much of the
year trailing Blur across several continents. I was there
in Morocco when they recorded Think Tank. I’ve seen
them play half a dozen times on tour, including the tense
first American date in Austin, Texas, when the Iraq war
was about to kick-off and Alex James was missing because
the American authorities had refused him a visa.
I’ve interviewed frontman Damon Albarn at length,
including in his west London home, and come to regard him
as the most interesting and creative pop star of his
generation.
It has been an
extraordinary year for the band. The former Britpop
champions began 2003 with many doubting their will and
capacity to survive. Guitarist Graham Coxon had left in
acrimonious circumstances and Albarn appeared distracted
by fatherhood, his cartoon hip-hop group, Gorillaz, world
music projects, his role in the ‘stop the war’
campaign and anything else he could dream up to escape
his allotted role as a tabloid-fodder pop star.
Yet Blur end 2003 on a
high. Think Tank, the album the group eventually released
in April after a four-year hiatus, may not have sold in
quite the numbers that records such as Parklife shifted
at the height of the Britpop war with Oasis. But it has
been widely hailed by critics as the most challenging and
adventurous of their career and has just won a
prestigious Q award as album of the year.
Much of this year has been
spent on a sell-out world tour promoting the record.
Between the sound checks and the tour buses, bass player
Alex James found the time to get married. Even
Britain’s attempt to land a spaceship on Mars, a
project co-sponsored by James and drummer Dave Rowntree,
is on target. Only the bid to stop the Iraqi war can be
deemed a failure. But on that, the group was divided,
anyway. "I’m from Colchester, which is a
garrison town," Rowntree points out. "So I
didn’t necessarily take the same view as
Damon."
You might imagine that
getting back on stage with Blur again and reconnecting
with the band’s legions of adoring fans might have
rekindled Albarn’s appetite for the trappings of
stardom. But not a bit of it. His latest wheeze in his
seemingly endless desire to deconstruct his own pop
celebrity is the release of Democrazy, one of the most
extraordinarily non-commercial albums a major artist can
ever have released.
Recorded last summer while
on tour in America, it consists of a wasted-sounding
Albarn warbling a bunch of improvised, unrehearsed and
half-formed song ideas into a four-track tape machine in
his hotel room. Untouched by subsequent studio tinkering,
it’s not so much lo-fi as no-fi. The tracks
can’t even really be called demos, for they’re
several notches below even that level of
non-sophistication. One of them is called ‘Half A
Song’, which is a considerable exaggeration. Another
track sounds like he’s recorded his hotel room door
chime. On yet another, you hear what sounds like someone
using the bathroom.
Albarn makes no effort to
sing in tune and the lyrics are spontaneously random
observations ("I was at the Niagara Falls today, and
they really didn’t make me want to jump in,
that’s good’). The instrumentation is
rudimentary - acoustic guitar, melodica and up-turned
wastepaper basket for percussion. He knows it’s
going to alienate mainstream Blur fans, which is why the
record is appearing on vinyl only in a limited edition of
5,000 copies. When his old Oasis enemies Noel and Liam
hear it, they will fall about laughing, convinced Albarn
has finally lost his marbles.
And yet there’s
another view. Listen closely and you can detect how these
inchoate ideas could easily be worked up into mature
songs, for within them are snatches of great tunes and
cleverly inventive rhythms bursting with imagination.
It’s maddening to hear them left so undeveloped. But
then you realise that every great Blur song from
‘Country House’ to ‘Beetlebum’ must
have started life like this. And heard in that context,
Democrazy is a fascinating insight into the raw stuff of
the creative process.
Whether you regard it as
hugely audacious or incredibly self-indulgent will depend
on your view of Albarn. But few artists of similar
stature can ever have exposed themselves quite so
fearlessly. When I first heard Democrazy, I was shocked
by its nakedness and his neck-on-the-block bravery in
releasing it. So when I spoke to him on the way to a Blur
gig in Madrid, I felt compelled to ask what on earth had
possessed him.
"It’s a mad
idea, I know," he answered. "But I felt it was
time people should put records out like this because it
deconstructs everything the music industry has built up.
I didn’t pre-write anything at all. I just turned
the tape on and ran with what ever came into my head. So
it’s all first takes and it’s amazing what you
can come up with."
The record is not coming
out on EMI’s Parlophone label, Blur’s regular
corporate home, but on Albarn’s own boutique
imprint, Honest Jon’s. What does EMI think of it?
"Well record companies are bound to get terribly
nervous about something like this," he concedes.
"That’s why it’s coming out in a very
limited way. I don’t want to upset people because I
know they’ll find it hard to listen to. But there
are tunes there that you could turn into hits. I thought
it would be really interesting to show people a whole
side to the music-making process they never get to hear.
I hope this gives other artists the confidence to do it.
I’d like to make it a series."
That Albarn has emerged as
the smartest and most adventurous British pop star of the
past 10 years has caught many by surprise. At the time of
Britpop, he appeared just another brash and bumptious pop
star with plenty of flash and attitude. Pulp’s
Jarvis Cocker was widely held to be the cleverest of the
Britpop crew, the ‘arty one’ who was most
likely still to be making interesting records in 20 years
time. Yet disappointingly, Cocker has come up with little
of note since his 1995 Mercury Prize-winning album
Different Class and it has been Albarn who has
enthusiastically expanded his musical horizons far beyond
the insular world of Britpop.
Unlike Suede, Pulp and
Oasis, all of whom have seemed content to repeat
themselves with ever diminishing returns, Albarn sees
music as "a journey". "The day Blur make
an album that’s not better than the last one is the
day we quit," he says. "I get impatient with
people who repeat themselves because if you have to do
that it means you didn’t say it clearly enough the
first time. You have to go out and find your sense of
identity as a musician. I’m still looking for that
and I expect I’m going to spend my whole life doing
it. I don’t think you ever arrive. But hopefully
through that process of searching, you find
yourself."
These days that search
means Albarn is as likely to be found at a concert by the
Brodsky Quartet or Africa’s Orchestra Baobab as at a
rock gig. In the gap since Blur’s 1999 album 13, he
wrote a film score with Michael Nyman, created the
hip-hop off-shoot Gorillaz (which in America has out-sold
Blur by several millions), started his own record label,
travelled to Africa to record the world music album Mali
Music, duetted with the Cuban star Ibrahim Ferrer of
Buena Vista Social Club fame and collaborated with
Nigerian drummer Tony Allen. Many wondered if he would
ever make another Blur record.
Then came Think Tank,
which confirmed his capacity to absorb new ideas and come
up sounding fresh and different every time. Yet when his
non-Blur activities are referred to as side-projects,
he’s swift to issue a correction. "To me
it’s all music and all the records I make are
equally valid. I like white rock music. But its
insularity sometimes annoys me. There’s a much
bigger world of music out there and it’s
shortsighted and blinkered not to embrace it."
Today Albarn looks back on
the chirpy cockney character of Blur’s earlier work
with something approaching distaste. He dismisses
Parklife as "a joke, a satirical record that should
be filed in the record shop under comedy, alongside Monty
Python".
And he denies Blur were
part of a movement that set about creating a specifically
British pop identity in response to American early 1990s
grunge. "I was simply trying to paint a picture of
what Britain was becoming with the lottery and karaoke
and everything. It was an imaginary Britain but it became
true and it saddened me to see what was happening."
With the benefit of
hindsight, that there was more to Albarn than met the eye
should have become evident when Tony Blair attempted to
hijack Britpop to New Labour’s ‘cool
Britannia’ cause. While Noel Gallagher was flattered
to accept an invitation to Downing Street and appeared on
newspaper front pages sharing a joke and a glass of
champagne with the Prime Minister, Albarn declined on the
grounds that he felt he was being used.
"I met Tony Blair
privately and he wanted to know what ‘the
youth’ felt. I told him he should ask them. He said
that as we were selling so many records, we could do
business together. Now what does that mean? It was
totally cynical. They were trying to use our energy to
the greater glory of New Labour."
If that left a bad taste,
by last winter Albarn was on a total collision course
with the New Labour establishment over Blair’s
support for American military action against Iraq. He was
due to speak in Hyde Park on the rally in March when a
million people took to the streets of London in protest
at the imminent war. In the event, he was too emotional
to deliver his speech.
"My grandfather was a
conscientious objector in World War Two when it really
meant something. People threw eggs at him in the street
and called him a coward. He was a qualified architect and
they took away his practice.
"My dad, who also
refused the draft, was with me on the march and we
started talking about my grandfather. He died in an old
people’s home. He went on hunger strike because he
didn’t want to go on living. I’d never really
grieved for him properly and it all came out."
Albarn has been careful to
portray his political views as his own and not those of
Blur. "I’m not going to turn round and
contradict him in public," Rowntree says. "But
anyone who knows us knows we’re not Damon’s
poodles."
Yet since Coxon’s
departure, it is clear Blur are now almost solely a
vehicle for Albarn’s vision. "We’re just
here to support Damon, basically," Alex James
admitted to me one day in the recording studio in
Morocco. Both he and Rowntree agree that Think Tank, the
first album without Coxon, was the easiest and most
conflict-free record Blur have ever made. It is pretty
obvious the reason was because without their former
guitarist, there was nobody willing to contradict Albarn.
The singer himself insists
Blur are a democracy. But he appears to contradict this
view when I ask him about Coxon’s departure.
"We weren’t
fighting. But Graham got to a position where he just
wasn’t comfortable with me calling the shots,"
he says. "That’s why he’s not in the band
any more. He wanted to call his own shots, which is fair
enough. For me it was no shock when we came to the
parting of ways."
The rest of the band
sensibly know it’s in all their interests to let
Albarn push Blur in whatever new directions he thinks
fit. As Rowntree puts it: "You have to have one
person who enjoys standing up there and saying,
‘Look at me.’"
- Blur play Barrowlands, Glasgow
(0141-552 4601) on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Think Tank is out now.
Democrazy will be released on December 1
Nigel
Williamson
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