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 Back to: Archive · 2003
Long player

From the Times magazine, 19 April 2003. By Nigel Williamson. Cover photograph by Peter Marlow.


Morocco, October 2002. Above the door of the barn which is serving as Blur's temporary recording studio, someone has chalked the words "Think Tank". Inside, surrounded by banks of computers and a mixing desk half the length of a cricket pitch, Damon Albarn and producer Ben Hillier are recording the dark and menacing vocal to The Outsider, one of the 28 songs under consideration for the band's new album. The song's mood is further enhanced when Albarn decides to try recording the vocal through a walkie-talkie. He takes it outside into the Moroccan night to increase the sense of detachment. Back in the studio his disembodied voice floats eerily through the monitors and the effect is brilliant.


Taped to the walls are sheets of paper listing the 28 tracks, with comments written alongside each one. Most do not yet have titles and are merely numbered. Next to one unfinished song listed as track nine, Albarn has written "De La Soul style". To which his girlfriend, the artist Suzi Winstanley, has added the graffiti, "you wish".


With most of the backing tracks completed in London, Albarn has decamped to Morocco for a month to write the lyrics and record the vocals. With him are bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree, both licensed pilots who flew themselves to Marrakech in their own plane. On the mixing desk is taped a headline clipped from a newspaper which reads: "Only Norman wins in this sleazy tale", a jokey reference to the presence of Norman "Fatboy Slim" Cook, who has joined them to co-produce two tracks.


Albarn is still not happy with The Outsider, when Winstanley appears in the studio. At the time, he's doing a headstand on the studio floor in the hope that a rush of blood to the head might give him inspiration. He tells her he thinks the problem lies with the lyric and that the second line doesn't scan properly. She suggests a minor alteration and demands a co-writing credit. Their two-year-old daughter Missy arrives and the lyric has to wait. As he bids her goodnight, I pick up his handwritten lyric sheet. Across the top, like a schoolmaster marking an essay, he has written in bold, "Improve".


To finish their first album in four years, Blur have taken a month's lease on a splendidly appointed palace, a 20-minute drive out of Marrakech at Dar Nejma. The main rooms are grouped around an open courtyard, although at night an electrically operated sliding roof encloses the space at the push of a button. There's a swimming pool and a tennis court and meals are taken communally - mostly spicy tagines cooked by the Moroccan chef.


Daylight hours are passed in leisurely fashion. Alex James - once a notorious bon viveur but at present not drinking - has installed his personal yoga teacher (dubbed "The Guru") and spends much of the day working on his karma. Dave Rowntree fills his spare time with Arabic lessons and gentle exercise on the bicycle he has flown out from London.


Albarn is a relentless bundle of energy and good humour. He's first up in the morning, beating the Berber rugs scattered around the Think Tank studio. He's there to give Missy her breakfast. Then he goes for a swim, before he bullies everyone into the daily game of Venice Ball - a Blur invention that is a cross between soccer and volleyball. Albarn, stripped to the waist, is by far the most enthusiastic player and disputes every point. To everyone else's amusement, he ends up on the losing side almost every day.


But he's here to work. By afternoon he's in the studio, where he stays until 3 or 4am. He's the first up next day. "I never thought the 'getting it together in the country' approach to making music worked," he says. "I thought you had to be in a city to get that energy. But we've found it here and I think we've made a great record."


In a few more days, the record is virtually complete. James takes a hire car to the Moroccan seaside resort of Essaouira for a holiday. Albarn flies to Bamako in Mali to meet some African musicians he hopes to record. And I take the British Airways flight back to London with Rowntree. On the way, he suggests it has been the easiest, least conflict-strewn record Blur have made. "Damon's so much more relaxed these days," he says. Then he chuckles. "But he's still so competitive. If he was here and I wanted him to carry my bag on to the plane, I'd just say, 'This is really heavy. I bet you couldn't carry it.' And he'd say, 'Who says I can't? I'll show you.' He falls for it every time."


Indeed. In June 2002, five months before the Morocco trip, I bumped into Albarn at a party. He asked what music I was listening to and, knowing the reaction it would produce, I said Coldplay, adding that their new album was the best British rock record since Blur's last release. It worked like a charm. "Right," he said. "If you think that's good, you're coming down the studio tomorrow to hear our new stuff." At 11:30 the next morning, I turned up at his Ladbroke Grove studio. Some of the tracks were little more than demos, yet it was instantly obvious that his confidence was not misplaced.


The invitation to Morocco offered a further insight into the modus operandi of the man who has emerged as the most intelligent and interesting British pop star of the past decade. For in the four years since we last heard from Blur, it has been remarkable to watch Albarn expanding his musical horizons far beyond the insular world of Britpop. These days you're just as likely to see him at a concert by the Brodsky Quartet or Africa's Orchestra Baobab as at a rock gig. There has been a film soundtrack with Michael Nyman and spectacular success with his hip-hop off-shoot Gorillaz (which has out-sold Blur by several million in America). He's set up his own record label, released the acclaimed world music fusion album Mali Music, sung with Ibrahim Ferrer of Cuba's Buena Vista Social Club, collaborated with Nigerian drummer Tony Allen and travelled to China to hear the split-tone singers of the Mongolian steppes.


In many ways, his startling development has come as a surprise. Seven or eight years ago, Pulp's Jarvis Cocker was widely held to be the cleverest of the Britpop crew, the "arty one" most likely to be doing interesting things in 20 years' time. Yet, disappointingly, he has come up with little of note since the 1995 album, Different Class. It was more predictable that after their early triumphs, Oasis would end up repeating themselves. Yet who could have imagined from the chirpy mannerisms of Blur's Parklife that Albarn would mature into the David Bowie of his generation, with a seemingly endless capacity to absorb new ideas and come up with something fresh?


Now, after all the various extracurricular activities which he refuses to call side projects ("to me it's all music and all the records I make are equally valid"), comes Blur's seventh album and first since 1999, Think Tank. Following the departure of guitarist Graham Coxon, who was controversially sacked last year, the group is today more than ever a vehicle for Albarn's musical vision. And the result is the most adventurous, challenging and finest record of Blur's career - something virtually no other British band has been able to say seven albums into its career since the Beatles released Revolver


To Albarn, this notion of linear progress is of crucial importance. "The day Blur makes an album that's not better than the last one is the day we quit," he had told me in Morocco. Four months later and on the verge of the new album's release, I remind him of the comment, as he cooks lunch in his west London home.


"I'm not doing it for the money. I couldn't justify the chaotic life I lead if I wasn't producing something decent at the end of it. It wouldn't be worth the hassle," he reasons. "I get impatient with people who repeat themselves because if you have to do that it means you didn't say it clearly enough the first time. You have to go out and find your sense of identity as a musician. I'm still looking for that and I expect I'm going to spend my whole life doing it. But hopefully through that process of searching, you find yourself."


When talking to James and Rowntree, I had been told that the official line on the departure of Graham Coxon is that there is no official line. They simply don't discuss it. But Albarn goes off-message to reveal that it was an old-fashioned power struggle. "We weren't fighting. But Graham got to a position where he just wasn't comfortable with me calling the shots. That's why he's not in the band any more. He wants to call his own shots, which is fair enough. For me it was no shock when we came to the parting of ways." Are they still friends? "I'd love to get back to the relationship we had when we were younger, because we were amazingly good mates. But it's been a long time since Graham and I were close," he admits. "People decide to go off and do different things. It's not a big deal. Most people just listen to the record and don't even know who's in the band. I think that's the way it should be, really."


Yet Coxon's departure has undeniably changed the Blur sound and the dynamics within the group. James and Rowntree are an accomplished rhythm section, but, without Coxon, Albarn is now "calling the shots" more powerfully than ever. Was that his intention? "I do what I've always done. The only thing is I've had to play a bit more guitar because there's no guitarist. And apart from Graham, the only guitar players I've watched closely are the Africans like Lobi Traore and Afel Bocoum who played on the Mali record. So I think some of that has rubbed off and makes it sound different."


But he concedes that without Coxon, Think Tank was the "easiest" album Blur have ever made. "It's so childish saying 'I did this on the album' or 'I did that'. The only thing that matters is what comes out. The focus on individuals in our society is all wrong. How on earth are we going to get on with each other in this world if we can't all see each other as equal?" He laughs at his own question. "I know that's a ridiculous thing for me to come out with in my huge kitchen in my big house in west London. But I don't know what else to say."


Modesty is an attribute few would have associated with Albarn earlier in his career, when he put in more than his share of time as a bumptious pop star with plenty of attitude. It would perhaps have been odd if the craziness of the Britpop years had not turned his head. But pop stardom either makes you into a tantrum-throwing monster for life, or you get over it and come out the other side a better and wiser human being.


As he chops the onions, cooks the spaghetti, conducts an interview and attempts to keep Missy amused, it is obvious that Albarn has opted for the latter course. he'd moved into the house only three days earlier and unpacked boxes are everywhere. In three days' time, he's off to America to play Blur's first live dates in more than three years. Yet after lunch, he plans to spend the afternoon putting up a bed in one of the spare rooms. In terms of the use of his time, it makes no sense. Except that it keeps him grounded, a quality he has learnt to value.


Four years ago, after he split with long-time girlfriend Justine Frischmann (a break-up which he chronicled in some detail on Blur's last album", he met Suzi Winstanley. Unlike Frischmann, the singer with the now disbanded Elastica, she was not part of the rock'n'roll world and has undoubtedly brought stability into his life, particularly after they had a child.


"Being a dad is the best thing that ever happened to me. There's nothing that compares to that and of course it's changed me," he says, as Missy demands to know if lunch is ready. "Soon," he reassures her. So how does he feel he has changed? "I'm a lot less insecure and I've become a lot more committed to what I do. That has made me better at my chosen craft, which is writing songs. I try to live my life with my family as much as possible. You have to make it as normal as you can for them, so there won't be any more huge tours. But I still haven't been able to shake off the need once in a while to get horrendously drunk and make a tit of myself."


Albarn insists his other projects have enhanced his work with Blur. "It's a journey and everything you learn along the way is added to what you do. Dave and Alex should go out and work on other people's records. They're a brilliant rhythm section and they're playing better than ever without Graham. He is such a strong musician, I think it was a bit intimidating at times for them."


Albarn is dismissive of Britpop and Blur's early work. "Parklife? That was a joke," he says. "It was a satirical record. It should be filed in the record shop under comedy, alongside Monty Python." And yet the record helped to define an era, as film-maker John Dower documents in his recent Live Forever, which features Albarn, the Gallaghers and Jarvis Cocker talking at length about the Britpop years. The Blur singer is not enamoured with the film, which takes its name from an Oasis song. He also takes exceptions to comments made by his old sparring partner Noel Gallagher, who once said that he hoped Albarn would contract Aids and die.


"Why was it called Live Forever? It should have had a neutral title," Albarn complains. "And it's the same old bullshit. Noel has got Tourette's syndrome whenever my name is mentioned." He goes into an hilarious impersonation of Gallagher effing and blinding.


In the film, Gallagher complains that the over-privileged southerner obviously didn't have a paper round as a kid and, therefore, Oasis were somehow more "real" than Blur. "It's like a comedy show, isn't it? I'm not going to respond by saying whether I had a paper round. It's ridiculous." Paper round or not, much of the resentment towards Blur stems from an inverted snobbery in the rock world which objects to the fact that they are nice, middle-class boys who did not, like the Gallaghers, grow up on a council estate, and spend their time breaking into cars and stealing radios.


The class divide still rattles Albarn, whose father was a lecturer in Islamic art and whose mother was a theatrical designer. "Yes, I was blessed because my family stayed together and there were lots of books in the house. But I grew up in Leytonstone. It wasn't a country mansion with servants. It irritates me that people think that."


Books in the house? Another commonly voiced criticism is that Albarn is somehow "too clever for his own good". "I don't even know what that means," he says contemptuously. "Are they saying it's better not to be intelligent and have no knowledge of other things outside pop music? So let's close all the schools and burn the books. Let's have more shopping malls and mindless television and give everyone free sedatives. How can anybody be too clever?"


His recent role in the anti-war movement has also attracted criticism. Most of his critics are probably unaware that he comes from a long line of peace activists and that his grandfather was a conscientious objector in the Second World War. "People threw eggs at him in the street." Albarn was meant to speak at the big anti-war rally in London in March but grew too emotional to take the platform. "My dad was with me and as we marched we started talking about my grandfather. He died a year or two ago in an old people's home. He went on hunger strike because he didn't want to go on living. I'd never grieved for him properly and it all came out."


Needless to say, he doesn't subscribe to the view that pop stars should keep their meddling noses out of politics and leave such concerns to the chattering classes. But he does believe that if you're going to speak out, you should know what you're talking about.


"If people ask my opinion I have to say what I think. It's about democracy and it's our life and our world. But when I saw people like Chris Martin saying 'No war' like a slogan at the Brits, it was pathetic. That's what gives musicians a bad name. These are serious issues. People shouldn't reduce it to a soundbite."


At that point, Missy reappears and lunch is served. This is going to annoy all his critics like hell. But not only is the middle-class, too-clever-by-half Damon Albarn the most interesting, creative and thoroughly decent pop star of our times. He's also a rather fine cook.