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From timesonline.co.uk, 30 March 2007. By Pete Paphides.

Dolly Parton and Michael Jackson had to go to the trouble of building theme parks in their images. But as long as there's a West-way over the market stalls of Ladbroke Grove, Damon Albarn won't have to go to the trouble. He's been living amid these reggae and bric-à-brac emporiums, among the African and Asian groceries of London W11 for so long that the view outside Café O'Porto has come to resemble the one inside his head. Or at least it is if the dubwise Dickensian jazz of his project the Good the Bad & the Queen is anything to go by.

The point is compounded within seconds of his first sip of coffee. Paul Simonon pulls up to the pavement on his Harley Davidson, but Albarn has already slipped across the road in pursuit of something he has just spotted in a nearby antique shop. It's a sign bearing the original Victorian imprint of the Royal Empire Society. When he returns, Albarn holds up his new purchase. "Old London's disappearing," he smiles, "but I'm doing my bit to try and buy what's left."

He's trying his best, but in a few days even he won't be able to stop the venue immortalised by Simonon's old band the Clash from succumbing to the developers. This weekend, the Good the Bad & the Queen will be the penultimate band to grace the stage at the 88-year-old venue. If they raise the house lights during History Song, you might spot a few eyes misting over. Three white men and a black man in Hammersmith Palais, urging us to understand the present by seeking recourse to our history.

It's easily forgotten now, but back in 1999, before he made records with Toumani Diabate (Mali Music) and De La Soul and Ike Turner (Gorillaz' Demon Days), the notion of a multiculturally savvy Albarn was amusing enough to attract the derision of his own bandmates. When Albarn flew to Jamaica to gather ideas for the project that he and Jamie Hewlett turned into Gorillaz, Blur's bassist Alex James memorably referred to him as "the blackest man in West London".

For Simonon, Albarn's authenticity was no more an issue than that of the Clash when they recorded Junior Murvin's Police & Thieves. "I was at Gorillaz' first show at the London Scala, when the musicians were silhouetted behind a curtain. I thought it was a great idea."

But, of course, even at the outset of Gorillaz, hindsight had yet to decide what Albarn would become famous for. His hubris in taking on Noel and Liam Gallagher before they went supernova was still a source of embarrassment. "Every day, wherever I went," he told me back then, "I'd be walking down the street and people would open their windows and turn the speakers to face out so that I could hear..." He couldn't bring himself to say it, but it was pretty clear that he wasn't referring to Shed Seven.

Eight years on, much has changed - a seven-year-old daughter, more than seven million sales in America - but Albarn still doesn't refer to them by name. In every other respect, however, the subject of Oasis appears to be causing him a lot less distress. Did he read about the Gallaghers' reasons for accepting their Lifetime Achievement Award at the Brits last month? "What was it [Liam] said?" ponders Albarn, launching into a rather good impersonation of the Oasis singer, " 'I'd rather f***in' have it while I've got all me f***in' hair, not like that c*** from Blur.' " No pangs of envy then from a singer who feels it should have been him up there collecting the prize? "That award, that's it, isn't it? It's the end. A gold watch at 39. And with a medley?! Come on guys! We can do better than medleys." In fact, the longer you talk to him the more you realise that it's not the Gallaghers themselves he takes exception to but their willingness to bask in the comfort zone of their own success. The scorn is identical to that he heaped upon the character in Blur's Country House, who cashes in his chips in exchange for a life of leisure. If you're not going to work, what are you going to do?

It's a question to which Albarn has found no satisfactory answer. Most of the money accrued from Gorillaz' Stateside success has already been spent on converting a nearby factory into an animation studio. Work has already begun on the studio's maiden project. Commissioned to do so by the Manchester International Festival, Albarn and Hewlett have set about adapting the 16th-century Chinese tale Journey to the West. Surely it would have made sense for the festival organisers to have commissioned the city's monobrowed prodigal sons - especially since the story centres around the cocksure leader of a monkey tribe. For a rock opera, maybe - "but that was the last thing anyone wanted," explains Albarn. "Not that it's this highbrow thing. It's the story that anyone of our generation recognises as [the Japanese TV adventure series] Monkey."

"One thing Damon and I have in common is that we treat it like a job," says Simonon. The 55-year-old has thrown himself into his art, painting his locale in all sorts of different ways. "London, for me, might be a plate of bacon and eggs or it might be the gasworks." His apocalyptic depiction of the burning capital graces the CD booklet of The Good the Bad & the Queen. "You can't sit around waiting for a good idea," he continues. "The true test is the days when you don't feel like working, that's when you should be there anyway, pushing into new territory. Someone put out a box set of Clash singles last year and what struck me was how we didn't repeat ourselves. I see that in Damon and what I also recognise in me - a reluctance to repeat myself."

Possibly on account of that reluctance, Albarn never imagined that he would want to follow in the footsteps of Parklife with another London album, albeit one as different as The Good the Bad & the Queen. His guitarist, Simon Tong, recalls how he accompanied Albarn to Nigeria, where they hooked up with sometime Fela Kuti accomplice Tony Allen to make an Afrobeat record. "Looking back," Tong remembers, "[Damon] was confused. He couldn't find a lyrical angle." The sometime Verve guitarist says that the turning point came with the arrival of producer Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton - who junked one of the songs for sounding like "something off The Lion King". Ouch. "But honesty is what you want from a producer," Tong smiles.

With Simonon on board, Burton suggested that Albarn forsake some of Allen's rhythmic assault to make room for something a little more home-grown. Albarn responded with a cache of dreamy requiems to changing London, among them Green Fields and The Bunting Song. Great, but it must have taken guts to erase so much input from a drummer described by Brian Eno as "the greatest who ever lived".

On the phone from his home in Paris, however, Allen is modesty itself. "The way Damon makes sounds, it's genius," he says. "You give him something and he always wants more. I don't mind, because I am the same with my own musicians. You don't want to show your hot side, but sometimes you have to."

In fact, there's something reassuringly predictable about Albarn's "hot side". Having written about the deleterious effects of the National Lottery with 1995's It Could Be You, he says that everything he feared it would do to Britain has come to fruition. "You only need to turn the television on to see it. If you just win that ticket, everything will be all right. If you just get on that talent show, then it's all sorted. But life is not like that. It's actually shocking that Simon Cowell is one of the most recognisable Englishmen in America, this self-styled Nero of trash culture."

But, I suggest, with post-boy-band pop and cabaret dreck coopted into the world of prime-time television, the space left vacant can be filled by groups such as the Good the Bad & the Queen. This, it turns out, was the wrong thing to say. Having put up with me (and the rest of the world) calling his band the Good the Bad & the Queen, Albarn can stand it no longer. "Actually, you can't call us the Good the Bad & the Queen. It's just the name of the album."

Nonetheless, I put it to Albarn, a Freur-style problem remains. I remind him about an early incarnation of the techno pioneers Underworld, who had a squiggle for a name. Realising that radio DJs who couldn't pronounce their name were unlikely to play their record, they hastily called themselves Freur.

"Personally," Albarn contends, "I don't think it is a problem. I just think it's perceived as a problem."

"Trust me," I say, "It's a problem. I've got no idea what to call you."

"The problem is," explains the singer, "that having a band name makes you feel like, 'Oooh! We're a band!' I'm a bit over that really."

There's no doubting the sincerity of his intentions, but at the same time you wonder if his band would be in the Top 75 if they had bothered to think of a name. A simple marketing ploy, but one that appears to have worked wonders for even rubbishly named bands such as Keane.

Albarn momentarily looks at his phone, which tells him there's a Chinese choir waiting outside his studio. But as he rises to leave, inspiration strikes, in the form of his new purchase. "All right then, how about next time, we call ourselves that?" It fits, I say - and off he goes, running down Golborne Road with his Royal Empire Society sign. At that point, he's never seemed more like himself.