I’VE got to know Damon Albarn pretty well over the years but I’ve never seen him this cross.
In the year Covid-19 has decimated performing arts, he feels compelled to speak out for the next generation whose hopes and dreams have been shattered.
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The Blur and Gorillaz star is positively seething over the now infamous Government ad that read, “Fatima’s next job could be in cyber. She just doesn’t know it yet.”
Those words were set on a picture of a young ballet dancer tying her shoe above the slogan “Rethink. Reskill. Reboot.”
Though the ad was hastily removed after causing much embarrassment to everyone right up to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, it struck a nerve.
“This retraining nonsense is bordering on callous,” roars Damon via pandemic-friendly Zoom.
“If someone’s studied ballet or music or theatre, they simply don’t have an option to recalibrate their lives.
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“For ballet, they probably started when they were three or four and are totally dedicated to it . . . like footballers or gymnasts.
“Find a new career ‘in cyber’. What does that even mean? It’s ridiculous as well as bad English.
“People’s dreams are as important as their physical health.
“The human spirit is the thing that can sustain us through this. By undermining it, you’ll make people more ill.”
This retraining nonsense is callous. If someone has studied ballet or music or theatre, they can’t just recallibrate their lives
That said, Damon stresses the need to stay positive, now more than ever.
“I have to be positive!” he cries.
“What else am I to do, lie down and die? That could happen but until it does, I’d like to go out blowing a fanfare for the future and for the young.
“They’re the ones that we need to take care of.
“The whole idea of being a human is to nurture the next generation, not to hold it back.
“To preserve the older generation doesn’t make any sense to me and I’m precariously close to it now,” says the 52-year-old.
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“My parents are in their Eighties and I would do anything to care for them but at the same time, their grandchildren are very important.
“There’s been a terrible eye-off-the-ball attitude to the young, partly because they don’t suffer from the symptoms in the way older people do.
“The elephant in the room is their mental health and their feelings of hopelessness about what is possible in the future.
“So stop being insensitive and start looking in a more holistic way at what running a country means.”
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Damon also calls on the Government to rethink the policy of “putting less funding into what they call ‘soft subjects’ in schools”.
He’s allowed himself time to dwell on these issues because, he explains, “I’m not on social media so I don’t react to stuff in ten seconds.
“It allows me to think about things a bit more, to consider my answers,” he adds, while, it must be said, getting quite emotional.
As for his 21-year-old daughter Missy, he says: “Thankfully she’s creative, so she’s just getting on with it.
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“She’s in London now and I’m with her at the moment.
“She lived in America for a year, which was fantastic for her, and when she came back, she’d grown up so much.”
I’m speaking to Damon as he prepares to release the fruits of his lockdown labours, Song Machine Season One: Strange Timez by the world’s best-known virtual band, Gorillaz.
The multimedia project involves chief co-conspirator, animator Jamie Hewlett, and countless guests including Elton John, The Cure’s Robert Smith, Top Boy rapper Kano and American stars Beck and St. Vincent.
I can only glimpse his head and shoulders on my Zoom screen but Damon’s beanie, beard and chunky glasses give the impression of a survivalist in a post-apocalyptic drama.
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He’s on the top floor of his studio in the shadow of London’s Westway, in quarantine having just got back from Paris where he staged his new opera, Le Vol Du Boli, with Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara.
The show made Damon more keenly aware of the healing power of music in difficult times.
Though his own position is secure after decades of recognition for countless and varied projects, he frets about the struggle facing up-and-coming artists denied income from live performance during the pandemic.
“Music is food for the soul,” he affirms.
“And the soul is what keeps you healthy and happy. Music is what I do and I’ve been very lucky to continue doing it but I also try to facilitate it for as many others as I can so they might carry on.
“If we lose our musicians, they won’t come back and we lose our culture.
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“All my life, I’ve been tremendously proud of being English for our music and our multiculturalism. They come hand-in-hand.
“Take the bands that inspired me most, like The Specials . . . we need influences like them in society.
“I’m biased because I’m a musician but, believe me, music is the primary universal language of this planet.
“Flippant, ill-conceived tweets about people retraining are just not helpful at this time.”
I was picked up from primary school in Elton’s huge pink limo to go to a birthday party. It’s stayed with me all my life
On that note, I ask Damon how 2020 has treated him personally.
“I’m pretty sure there will be a few twists and turns before we’re singing Auld Lang Syne together again,” he replies.
“But work-wise I’ve been very productive to be absolutely transparent . . . in fact, maybe more than usual because there’s been less moving about.”
On March 19 (the date is still etched in his memory), Damon moved to his farm in Devon as lockdown loomed.
“I took my family and my parents to live down there,” he says.
“I made that leap into the unknown where we’re shielding the old.”
He bought his rural retreat in 1995, perhaps no coincidence that it was the same year that Blur released their bucolic hit Country House.
Elton’s on board The Pink Phantom
ONE of the new Gorillaz songs, The Pink Phantom, is a glorious collaboration with Elton John and American rapper 6Lack. It comes with a fascinating back story, described here by Damon Albarn . . .
“I’ve always loved Elton John and there’s an old personal story as to why he’s on that track.
“It starts in late 70s when I was picked up from my primary school George Tomlinson in Leytonstone in Elton’s huge pink Phantom V. A few months earlier, he had done a tour of the USSR but had been paid in coal and had no money to pay his musicians.
“His percussionist Ray Cooper, who was a family friend of ours, was given the Phantom V as his payment so he picked me up to take me to a birthday party as a treat. It’s always stayed with me.
“I mean, my parents’ car was a second-hand Cortina and I was obsessed with cars then. I knew them all.
“On the back seat of the Phantom, as an extra, Elton had left a few 7-inch singles for me and one of them was Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. I used to play that and, for a while, I thought he’d written that song. Anyway, I told this story to Jamie (Hewlett) last year so he said, ‘You’ve got to do a tune with Elton! And you’ve got to put that story into the song’ and that’s what I did in my slightly weird way.
“Elton claims the car wasn’t pink. It was definitely pink! I’ve actually known him for many years and he’s always been incredibly supportive, as he is with many, many musicians. He’s a tour de force, a really lovely human being and I’m very honoured to have worked with him.
“I’ve got to know him much better during this period. I love the tune, I absolutely love it. I can’t wait to perform it with him, maybe one day soon.”
- Gorillaz Song Machine Season One: Strange Timez is out tomorrow.
‘IT’S NOT BIG AND FLASH’
“It’s our family home really. It’s been a source of inspiration for me for much of my life, right next to the sea and I love it,” he enthuses.
“So, having that option was really wonderful and obviously lockdown in rural Devon is very different to lockdown in a big city.”
First big task for Damon when he got there was to create a studio in a barn so that the workaholic in him could keep going.
“It’s not big and flash,” he reports.
“Luckily, I’d had the roof redone last year so it was dry.
“These days it’s quite easy to move a studio. You just need a computer, a small mixing console and whatever instruments. And I had the space in Devon to do it.”
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He describes a typical day in the early weeks of restrictions.
“So, I was getting up in the morning, going to get food, preparing food, going to the studio, coming back at lunch, cooking, going back to the studio, coming back and cooking again for the family at night. I was busy!”
Damon recalls how he would keep up with the “relentless” Covid news but soon looked for ways to escape it.
“I used to go down to the sea and watch the sunrise, listen to the birds, then go back and watch the sunset,” he says.
“So yeah, I stopped watching TV, just made music, cooked, hung out with my family . . . and watched the sunrise.”
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“To spend time with my parents, especially now they’re in their eighties, has been fantastic.
“I was also very lucky that I got to know the locals much better than I had in the previous 20 years.
“I’d always been someone who just appeared for a couple of weeks a year.”
I’d always imagined Damon’s Blur bandmate, bassist Alex James, as the band’s principal foodie, what with his cheese-making exploits and his annual festival with Jamie Oliver.
But the Britpop band’s frontman is proud of his prowess in the kitchen.
“Going into lockdown, I was reasonable,” he explains.
“It’s not that I’m a more accomplished cook now, I’m just more efficient and confident.
“I can cook most things and my baking is a lot better but still with room for improvement.
“It’s very hard to bake in an Aga because the heat’s not consistent — the things you learn!”
Damon’s time in his hastily kitted-out barn studio has been spent continuing the Gorillaz Song Machine project which began late last year.
The idea was to release songs, superbly animated by Jamie Hewlett as ever, as YouTube episodes when they were ready. Though appearing at first to be a collection of eclectic and entertaining singles, Damon suddenly sensed that, “Wow! We’ve made a really good album.
“I’ve realised during this period that if you’re able to do what you love doing, you are so lucky.
“You owe it to everyone else to work really hard.”
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