Smash hit

Albarn insists that he is not financially secure and still needs to earn a living, but he seems impeccably unmotivated by personal gain. In the Blur days, he always split the songwriting royalties with the others, despite the fact that he wrote most of the songs on his own. Jamie Hewlett gets half of everything that Gorillaz makes, including the proceeds of the CDs, though he contributes nothing to the music. Albarn’s manager, Chris Morrison, tells how when he and Hewlett put together the all-star Gorillaz live show, Demon Days, in 2005, Albarn declined the offer of a six-figure sponsorship deal with Motorola: “Damon said when you do things like that for money, it always comes back to bite you.” The show ended up just breaking even. Albarn also turned down a lucrative bid for Blur to re-form to headline this year’s Glastonbury festival, because he “just didn’t fancy it”. (The rapper Jay-Z was hurriedly drafted in as a replacement.)

Albarn says he relished the fact that “we weren’t getting paid properly for Monkey. Just a nominal fee, because that meant it had to be something we were sure we really wanted to do”. When asked what a “nominal fee” might represent to a man who has sold around 30m albums in his career to date, Albarn laughs. “Not enough if you’ve built an organisation around yourself with over 20 employees and you’re also paying for orchestras and flights and stuff. The original fee didn’t even cover our expenses.”

If Monkey does well down at the O2, however, Albarn says, “We might make some money. Then we’ll send it round the world. Like Mamma Mia!” He laughs uproariously at this thought, although the way some of his gambles have paid off recently – particularly Gorillaz, the world’s first platinum-selling, comic-strip pop band – it would hardly come as a total surprise if Monkey were to turn into the world’s first Chinese-language hit musical.

“It took a lot of time and money and people, and it’s been a big roll of the dice,” Albarn concludes with another of those blue-eyed piratical grins. “I like rolling dice.”

Damon Albarn was born in London in 1968 to parents who were in touch with, though not acid-blasted leaders of, the capital’s “underground” in-crowd. His mother, Hazel, worked as a stage designer for Joan Littlewood’s company at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, near the family’s Whitechapel home. His father, Keith, was, among other things, tour manager for the jazz-rock trio Soft Machine. One of Damon’s earliest memories was of watching the band in concert in the south of France.

“Dad took them down to Nice to play on the beach,” he says. “He put a load of petrol in the bay and when they were on, he lit it. Not very PC, but it looked amazing.”

Fine art, rather than rock music, was Keith’s first love. He had a gallery for a while in Kingly Street in London, where fashionable types like Yoko Ono would hang out; and he also presented the TV arts review Late Night Line-Up. After moving into education, specialising in Islamic culture, Keith Albarn became principal of various art colleges and faculties in Essex, including North East London Polytechnic in Walthamstow, where he taught Ian Dury.

His son loved all of it. “I spent my whole life from when I was in nappies going to private views. The art-school environment was my whole life. My parents gave me all the bits that go with being bohemian, all the art, but not the lifestyle. My mum often says to me, ‘We were a lot more grown-up then than you are now.’ ” (He remains close to his parents, who have a house in Devon near to his own.)

In what probably counts as the only significant failure of his life to date, Damon Albarn bungled his 11-plus and went to a comprehensive in Colchester, where he was noticed by his soon-to-be best friend, Graham Coxon. Coxon was impressed by Albarn’s singing in a school production of West Side Story. “I just couldn’t believe his confidence. His family definitely encouraged him to be expressive, and to show off at dinner. Damon had developed a sort of quirky misbehaviour that was unusual in a kid-mischievous way, but not sweary or rude.”

Albarn’s easy-going disobedience, coupled with his brass-necked self-belief, didn’t play well at Stanway Comprehensive – “I was very unpopular, especially with the teachers,” he says – and eventually led to him and Coxon retreating into music. The pair spent all their breaks in a Portakabin playing piano and guitars and, when they could get hold of it, the school synthesiser. After sixth form, Albarn briefly attended Joan Littlewood’s E15 drama centre, where he decided that he couldn’t act for toffee, and he then enrolled on a part-time music course at Goldsmiths in southeast London. Here his friend Coxon was already hanging out with future stars of the Britart movement, such as Damien Hirst, as well as a bass guitarist who was later to become a prominent pin-up of Britpop, Alex James. “I only went to Goldsmiths,” Albarn says, “so that I could hang out in the bar with Graham and Alex and Damien, and that generation of artists.”

Soon after Blur had started to make their presence felt, Albarn met and fell in love with a fellow guitarist, a tall, dark rich kid called Justine Frischmann, who played in the group Elastica. Frischmann proved to be highly influential, partly because, as Albarn puts it, “between her and Graham I had a crash course in the essential nature of being cool in pop”, and also because she introduced him to the groovy west London quarter of Notting Hill/Portobello, where she owned a house and where he has lived ever since he moved in with her in 1990.

They stayed together for eight years and, as Britpop took off, became the movement’s flagship couple.

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