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Over the past couple of days I’ve been fielding inquiries from colleagues and friends keen to ascertain how a three-dimensional being goes about interviewing a pair of two-dimensional characters from the world’s foremost cartoon band. It’s fine, I tell them. Even at two dimensions, that’s one more than you can hope for when talking to the Strokes or Razorlight.

Of course, I can’t divulge how we straddled the dimensional chasm. Just as with Andy McNab or the “fake sheikh” Mazher Mahmood, secrecy was key to the operation. Was it the real 2-D and Murdoc that I met? Undoubtedly. How did they seem? A year of American success appeared to have healed much of the tension that has plagued the pair through a friendship encompassing Mexican correction centres, two near-fatal accidents involving Murdoc’s Vauxhall Astra and, of course, Murdoc’s relentless undermining of 2-D’s attempts to settle down with a nice girl.

Happily, 2-D has now forgiven Gorillaz’ bass honcho for scaring off Rachel Stevens after 2-D had managed to get to “first base” with the singer. “It wouldn’t have worked anyway,” 2-D assured me. “There were six more people in the relationship.”

What? The other ex-members of S Club 7? “Hyurgh.” 2-D has quite the filthiest laugh you’ve ever heard.

The rise of Gorillaz as pan-media polymaths continues with the group’s new book The Rise of the Ogre (“It’s a coffee-table book inasmuch as it weighs more than a coffee table”).

And, in 2007, Hollywood beckons. Jamie Hewlett, whose pen brought the band to life, suggests that the next album will be a soundtrack to the group’s celluloid debut. Terry Gilliam has declared himself keen to work on the project. But when asked about it 2-D and Murdoc were coy, opting to dwell on the highlights and lowlights of their six years at the top.

“Sometimes,” averred Murdoc, “I think it’s all been downhill since the night I squired Dannii and Kylie Minogue out of the 2002 Brits Award show and back to my Winnebago for a night of unbridled lust and Scrabble.”

Other concrete plans over the next year revolve primarily around scones — “both swan-shaped ones and the normal ones” — and, for Murdoc, “anything else as long as it doesn’t involve having to go back to Stoke-on-Trent, where I grew up.”

Surely Stoke isn’t so bad, I suggested. Slash from Guns N’ Roses was born there? Alton Towers is close at hand? “But they throw you out of Alton Towers at teatime. That’s why Slash left for LA. What kind of paradise city is that?”

Rise of the Ogre is published by Riverhead

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