Just after he found fame with the sitcom Mork & Mindy, Robin Williams
released an album of his stand-up comedy called Reality ... What a Concept.
It’s a phrase that comes back to me as Damon Albarn explains the upcoming
Gorillaz shows at the Manchester Opera House. You could argue that they’re
not really Gorillaz shows at all, since the cartoon band of that name won’t
be playing. Or you could argue they’re the most real Gorillaz shows you’ll
ever see, precisely because there won’t be the pretence of a cartoon band
playing. On five consecutive nights from November 1, to promote the
Manchester International Festival, Albarn and the real musicians who made
the album Demon Days will play it, in its entirety. The band will be visible
only in silhouette, but the album’s guest stars — including Shaun Ryder, De
La Soul, Roots Manuva and Martina Topley-Bird — will all really appear.
To make things even stranger, two puppets of “band members” Murdoc and 2D will
be sitting in a box — in a homage to the grumpy-old-men Muppet characters
Statler and Waldorf — making sarcastic comments about this “other” band
attempting to play “their” music. And, for a further touch of unreal
reality: on one of the nights when Gorillaz (the human beings) play
Manchester, Gorillaz (the cartoons) will be performing in Portugal at the
EMA awards, where the band are up for five prizes. On that night only, the
Murdoc and 2D puppets won’t be in their opera-house box. How could they be?
They’ll be in Portugal! “It’s a tiny detail nobody will notice,” says Jamie
Hewlett, the co-creator of Gorillaz, “but it’s fun.”
Of course it is. Albarn and Hewlett have broken all the rules of the music
industry. They have created the most manufactured band of all time, but one
that’s credible and cool. They’ve put together an adventurous, innovative,
cross-cultural, genre-hopping sound, the kind that normally finds only a
cult audience, and sold millions. They’ve found a huge audience of kids, yet
can attract cutting-edge artists such as Roots Manuva to collaborate with
them. So, having broken all the rules of the real world, they delight in
sticking very firmly indeed to the made-up rules of their own.
The real world, however, is gradually catching up with Hewlett and Albarn’s
imaginations. Thanks to advances in technology, the EMA show will see a
new-look Gorillaz. No longer two- dimensional cartoons, Murdoc, 2D, the
drummer, Russel, and the guitarist, Noodle, will appear as three-dimensional
animations. Hewlett, the man behind all the Gorillaz visuals, is
understandably excited: “We’re doing something that’s never, ever been done.
We’re going to have the animated characters on stage. I suppose they’re like
super-holograms. It’s what we’ve dreamt about doing since we began Gorillaz.
It’s looking incredible. Mind you, for the effect to work, everyone has
their places where they’re allowed to go and where they’re not. If you ran
behind them, shining a torch at them, it would probably all go horribly
wrong.” Fair enough, but if you ran around on stage shining a torch at Shaun
Ryder, things probably wouldn’t go that well either.
This new 3-D animation technique is being developed for the Gorillaz tour
scheduled for 2007 — it will take that long to create all the visuals. “Then
the idea is that it goes off touring by itself,” says Hewlett. “We can
personalise it for different countries, different cities, and we’ll create a
tour story of what’s happening as they go round the world. We can write the
tour from hell: fights, musical differences, people walking out. Then there
could be a film of the tour ... But, basically, we’re going to have to stop
having ideas, otherwise it’s never going to end.”
This is the one imbalance in the Gorillaz partnership. Once Albarn makes a
Gorillaz album, he can, for the most part, get on with other projects (he’s
working on a musical with the National Theatre, an opera with Beijing Opera
and a solo album, and is making noises about starting the next Blur CD).
Hewlett has the more labour-intensive job of delivering the videos for each
single, creating the tour and the visuals for performances such as the EMAs,
and any spin-offs that occur to the pair.
That aside, theirs is a well-balanced working relationship. “It’s the greatest
band I’ve ever been in, just in the sense that it’s so balanced and
harmonious,” says Albarn, as we chat in a cafe over the road from Honest
Jon’s, the Notting Hill record shop. “Everyone can concentrate on the bit
they love the most. We can’t step on each other’s toes because we don’t work
in the same environment. I know that everything Jamie will do, I’ll like. It
may not be exactly what I would have done, but the trust is there.” The pair
share a world-view: Albarn’s dark lyrics chime perfectly with a man who came
to fame drawing the post-apocalyptic comic strip Tank Girl. And, at the
centre of a high-tech empire, both work in an endearingly old-fashioned way.
Albarn’s music begins life on cheap four-track cassette machines, played on
an acoustic guitar; Hewlett draws in pencil, on paper, at a desk liberally
scattered with books of Ronald Searle cartoons. Searle, the creator of St
Trinian’s, seems an unlikely influence until you remember that he honed his
talent drawing fellow prisoners in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.
Searle would surely approve of the anti-war sentiments in the next Gorillaz
single, Dirty Harry, out next month. Hewlett shows me a rough cut of the
Dirty Harry video, including live action of a military vehicle rumbling
through a desert. Oddly, it sports a grey cross. “I wanted the Red Cross, to
show the characters were doing some good out there,” Hewlett explains, “but
the Red Cross weren’t happy. So a poor guy had to go through every frame
changing it to a green cross. Then I think we got a call from a
pharmaceutical company, threatening to sue us, so he had to change it all
again, to a grey cross. I think we’re all right now.” These aren’t the only
compromises Hewlett has to make: “We have quite a good relationship with MTV
— you have to have a good relationship with MTV if you want your records
played in America. We wanted Dirty Harry to be the first single off the
album. MTV said, ‘We love the song, but it’s a bit risky for a first
single.’ So we put it back to the third.” Hewlett is clearly slightly uneasy
about this relationship, but also a pragmatist: “There’s no point in doing
all this hard work if nobody ever sees it. And they have been good to us.
They let us do an MTV Cribs” — the series in which wealthy stars show
viewers round their tasteless, blinged-up homes. The Gorillaz take is due to
be aired in late November. Again, Hewlett shows me a rough cut. It is a
ruthless, hilarious mickey-take of the series and the pretensions of its
usual guests. Murdoc spends much of it in the bathroom, urinating long and
loud; Noodle won’t let the cameras into her room. “It’s a hateful, hateful
programme,” says Hewlett. “It’s the perfect thing to poke fun at.” I
double-check that both of those hatefuls are on the record. He thinks for
barely a second. “Yes, because it is bloody hateful.”
While Murdoc’s ego runs wild in MTV Cribs, Albarn’s remains in check in the
Gorillaz project. You might have expected the front man in him to want to
get back in the spotlight at the Manchester gigs. But he’s not ready to be
unmasked. “I think the problem is that I find it difficult to sing and play
at the same time. Graham has always been able to do it,” he says, referring
to Blur’s former guitarist, Graham Coxon. “I just can’t. I can ’t put them
together. By being at the back, I can actually manage it — headphones on,
head down, really concentrating. But I can’t do that and worry about
connecting with the audience.
“Also, I got sick to death of the ritual of per- forming,” he says. “I never
really liked the last Blur tour. I hated playing the old material. I just
found that really depressing without Graham,” he adds. “It was a painful
experience to play songs that belonged to a band where one member was
missing. It was easy to do stuff from Think Tank, but they were the only
bits I looked forward to.
“I think Demon Days can work live as a piece. Lots of records can. Some are
just a series of songs, but when you’ve gone to a lot of effort to create
the ebb and flow, it’s a shame to split it up with, ‘Here’s a hit from five
years ago.’ Artists can evolve; why don’t musicians? They feel they have to
play the old songs, and that stultifies music. I’ve seen so many of my
contemporaries who, to make the big shows work, have to load them with the
past, so they never really move forward.” With these thoughts, Albarn has
done the hardest part of my job for me. I don’t have to ask if he misses
Coxon, or try to extract a comment about his old sparring partners, Oasis.
But, perhaps realising he’s come perilously close to reopening that old
debate, he changes tack. “Having said all that, I’m just finishing another
record, which I will play live next year” — the solo album. Will that be out
soon? “As soon as the Gorillaz record stops selling, that one will come
out,” he says. Could be a while, then.
Gorillaz play at Manchester Opera House, Nov 1-5; the single Dirty Harry
is out on Nov 21
