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Back to: Archive · 2007

From Mojo magazine, cover date: June 2007.
Words: Danny Eccleston. Pictures: Pennie Smith.

Damon Albarn's hotel looks out on a familiar scene. Coots and tufted ducks bob on the river as varsity oarsmen scull by, a coxswain barking into a bull-horn. The weather is dull and mild, and only the flattish skyline - with nary a Gherkin in sight - reveals that this is not London SE1, but Austin, Texas - home of the South By Southwest music convention. Across the river, bells toll loudly for seven o'clock. Weirdly, it is a tape recording of Big Ben.

America is doing its best to make Albarn and his bandmates feel at home, although its media is understandably confused by aspects of his latest project: a nameless group touring an album called The Good, The Bad & The Queen - a ghostly song cycle about London that brings together ex-Clash bassist Paul Simonon, former Verve guitarist Simon Tong and Nigerian Afrobeat legend Tony Allen on drums, but sounds nothing like the previous work of any of the constituents.

"Everything new confuses people," proclaims Damon Albarn loftily, sipping a piña colada. "The whole system is geared to interpreting new stuff by new people, not new stuff by old people. It's an anomaly. But you know, I specialise in the anomalies in this game."

Albarn grins a single-gold-toothed grin. His multi-platinum success as the musical brains behind cartoon hip-hop pop group Gorillaz has given him greater wealth - and power - than he enjoyed even at Blur's mid-'90s peak, but it is a status begrudged by some. Attempting to turn Albarn's profound eclecticism into a negative, Noel Gallagher recently accused his old nemesis of "jumping on every bandwagon going", and there are others who hope to live to see him fall properly on his face. So when Albarn and co premiered their project at north London's venerable Roundhouse venue in October 2006, Gallagher must have thought Christmas had come early. A clunky album run-through broadcast live on BBC Radio 1, it spotlit a stroppy Albarn stopping a song mid-flow to publicly carpet the band. If anyone imagined Albarn had grown too big for his boots, here, surely, was the evidence.

"Certain viewers interpreted that as some kind of ego trip," grumbles Albarn today. "But it was our fourth ever gig! A leader has to f***ing put the law down. You have to say, You will not make that f***ing mistake again."

All grist to those who doubted how much of an authentic "band" Albarn's project could really be - although subsequent shows have presented a rather more united front. On this North American jaunt - Toronto, New York, Washington DC, Austin today, New Orleans tomorrow - the group seem more than reasonably relaxed and, better still, finding more to explore in the peaks and troughs of The Good, The Bad & The Queen with every show. Last night, a headlining slot at Stubbs' Barbecue justified their pick-of-the-day billing with a haunting, swampy glower of a set ("Do they rock any harder?" wondered one flummoxed fan). Today, playing an inauspicious fashion mag showcase in the mid-afternoon they surprised themselves with something very different: something vibrant, joyous even.

"People ask, 'Is this a superband?'" says Tony Allen. "I want nothing of this supergroup business. We're just making music, coming from different directions, and the point where we meet, that is where it is. There is no ego anywhere."

The legend that is Tony Allen has four girls on his lap. They are not groupies, alas, but the Demon Strings, the string quartet who have filled out the band's sound so successfully over recent shows. Squashed in a people carrier, the band are heading into East Austin - the clapperboard antithesis of the centre's bourgeois indie mecca - where they've been invited to a barbie by Joe Strummer's cousin, Iain Gillies. More than anyone, Allen has had reason to wonder about TGTB&TQ. While the project in essence began when Albarn contributed a vocal to Allen's 2002 album, Home Cooking, and took some shape in Lagos over 2004 with Tong, 22 Nigerian musicians and Allen's typically busy Afrobeat bassist, César Anot, it was Albarn who deemed the initial results disappointing. "At times I was thinking, When oh when are we going to finish this album?" says Allen. "And Damon would be laughing!"

Back in London, with Paul Simonon strapping on his bass for the first time since 1991, the songs took on a cloudier, more English hue, and now it is only when the band wheel out the off-album Dog House as a first encore that they play anything remotely Afrocentric. Other band members suggest that Allen did not come immediately to terms with this rearrangement and note his initial suspicion - later rescinded - of another of Albarn's invitees, producer Brian 'Dangermouse' Burton, who favoured their darker songs and nixed anything that "sounded a bit too Lion King". "This is something new," argues Allen. "It is not commercial music. It's not rock. It's not funk. It's not pop. It's strange. To come together, Damon and I, we have to sacrifice something, but no one is telling anybody what to play. We have to... look for it. Look for what is fitting..."

Allen is 66 years old and moves slowly, but only by choice. Otherwise, the only hint to his age is a faint milkiness to the eyes and a fainter air of distaste regarding the demands of promo. He smells permanently of flowers and exudes an authority that derives from a lifetime's devotion to music. "My mother was Ghanaian, and I loved the music from Ghana - highlife. E.T. Mensah was the first. The highlife bands from Ghana inspired a lot of us in Nigeria. It was musically very, very rich. Then as time goes I started listening to jazz, Blue Note. Art Blakey was my idol."

Allen, a radio engineer, took up the drums and fell in with Nigerian jazz firebrand Fela Kuti, inventing a music that merged highlife with jazz, James Brown funk and Fela's political convictions. Ten years of incendiary music and terrifying showdowns with the generals who ran Nigeria followed. At times Kuti and his entourage were under siege in his commune/compound, the Kalakuta Republic. "Kalakuta was created right in front of me, and demolished right in front of me, by the government," says Allen. "Fela's Shrine is still Kalakuta. I saw a lot of atrocities committed by the government, just for speaking the truth."

Today, Allen splits his time between Paris and Lagos. You'd think TGTB&TQ would be a walk in the park compared with what has gone before but for Allen, it seems, music is always a serious matter. "Music is a message you know?" he explains, gently. "If you write it down in a newspaper, then tomorrow it is gone. But on a record, it will stay there forever and ever. Music is indelible."

It is 1am, somewhere along Interstate 10 between Texas and Louisiana, and the tour bus holding the men behind TGTB&TQ lurches wildly, causing tumblers of rum and ginger to slosh up and down the aisle. Syrian rapper Eslam Jawaad jaws with touring brass'n'keyboard maestro Mike Smith. On a poster above the cigarette-singed sink, an American GI cradles a coffee mug beneath the legend: "HOW ABOUT A NICE BIG CUP OF SHUT THE F*** UP?" Above the hubbub, jammed upright between floor and ceiling, six-foot-odd of Paul Gustave Simonon wrestles songs out of his iPod, which he annotates for the entertainment of all. Studio One rockers give way to The Who's Mary-Anne With The Shaky Hand ("Listen to the flamenco section! Amazing!"). Then we're on a peculiar route that takes in Rolf Harris's Wild Colonial Boy, Roger Miller's England Swings, Anthony Newley's There's No Such Thing As Love and - making Bowie's debt to Newley as clear as day - David Jones's London Boys.

Simonon, says MOJO and Clash court snapper Pennie Smith, was "born posing". This turns out to be very nearly the literal truth.

"When I lived in Brixton, I used to go to school in an American Civil War infantryman's cap, the Union side," recalls the man himself. "I was obsessed. Never took it off."

Today, the 51-year-old's style is defiantly rudeboy. The pinstripe suit is sleek, the black trilby lists rakishly to starboard, and the ready grin is rendered more disreputable by the missing upper incisor. "I wasn't looking to join a band," he says of making the TGTB&TQ team. "There were always rumours about The Clash getting back together... but I think Joe had the best idea. We should wait 'til we were all 80."

After the collapse of The Clash Mk II in the wake of 1985's Cut The Crap, Simonon took up with ex-Whirlwind singer Nigel Dixon in Latin-and-rockabilly influenced Havana 3AM, but their single, self-titled 1991 album disguised a grim human story. "We were in El Paso in February 1987," recalls Simonon, "to write and search for motorcycles. Nigel wasn't feeling too good so we saw a local doctor. He told him he'd be dead by Christmas." Dixon and Simonon returned to London for a second opinion - confirmed as a malignant melanoma - and operations on Dixon's lymph glands. "We managed to make an album and tour - which is what Nigel wanted to do. He made it to 1991, so he got a few more years than he feared."

Simonon retreated from music, leaving Havana to guitarist Gary Myrick and returning to the art studies he'd neglected in order to join The Clash. "I went to the British Museum, the V&A, evening classes, day classes, just to draw. The museums were the best places to learn - you don't have to pay the model and it doesn't fidget."

Despite the 14-year hiatus, his impact on his return to music in 2005 - with Albarn's post-Gorillaz project floundering - could not have been more seismic. "He brought his weight and edge," explains Simon Tong. "And a darkness. But it wasn't just his sound. He had an idea of what the songs should be about, became like the artistic director of the group. With Gorillaz Damon has [comic artist] Jamie [Hewlett], in Blur he had Graham. Now he has Paul."

Damon 4 Paul; Paul 4 Damon. They talk of having "found each other", and look a right pair with their matching dental irregularities and front door keys swinging inexplicably from strings around their necks. As the tour rolls on and each show sees Simonon nudge closer to the singer during the terrace swing of '80s Life, or hold the frontline as Albarn disappears behind the piano for Kingdom Of Doom, it strikes you suddenly that for all of Albarn's bullishness and Simonon's apparent self-possession they both need each other like crazy. "We're like brothers really," says Simonon of their bond. "I like the fact that he won't be pinned down, and he brings value and integrity to whatever he does."

"We're never a dull moment, me and Paul," says Albarn in turn. "Both like black music, both know what it's like to be too pretty for your own good when you're young. I love him, of course! What's there not to love about Paul Simonon?"

New Orleans' 9th Ward could use some of that love. Nineteen months since Hurricane Katrina brought her deluge to its streets, armed householders occupy trailers outside the gutted abodes they're still rebuilding plank by plank. Spraypaint crosses mark many buildings, with code numbers to indicate the state of origin of a particular rescue team, or allude inscrutably to the number of human dead. Other messages are more easily decoded: "Dog On Roof" or "You Loot, We Shoot". Karen Misconish of New Orleans radio station WTUL is showing the band around and telling chilling tales. Of a friend whose route out of danger was blocked by soldiers charged with keeping evacuees from poorer neighbourhoods out of more affluent banlieues. Of another who could not speak of what he'd seen for six months after.

Elsewhere in New Orleans, the city's notoriously festive population are maintaining their traditions with verve.

March 19, St Joseph's Day, means Super Sunday, a mini Mardi Gras where feather-bedecked dancers and dressed-down marching bands celebrate the bond between escaped slaves and the local Indian tribes who would take them in. Despite unsavoury warnings by their label, our grumpy tourbus driver and most of the inhabitants of Austin, band and crew are doing the tourist bit, on foot, without being murdered. Even when the Demon Strings go missing - they boogied off thataway with a trombonist and two men dressed as birds of paradise - there is no panic or search party. It seems that it's not always necessary to kowtow to a legend.

"Legends are rubbish," Albarn agrees later. "And being a legend is not acceptable, either. Look at Tony Allen. He's still doing good music. That's acceptable, anything else is unacceptable. It's like Paul McCartney - brilliant in The Beatles, but what since? Nothing. It's like someone in their sixties going, 'I got nine A's at 'O' Level. F***ing woo to you!"

Don't you think most artists believe they're still doing good work? "I think they lost their minds somewhere down the line and took it far too seriously. How can you think you are really important when there are billions and billions of people exactly the same as you on the planet?"

Is that Paul McCartney's problem?

"He doesn't get out enough. And I know this is a bit out of order but who in their right mind would've married a one-legged brass?" Albarn reels, horrified by his own gall. "What I mean by that is, let's forget about legends and look at people as they are today. And we'd be a lot better as a society if we could do that."

This is a typical Albarn paradox. The self-importance of pop musicians is his current bugbear, but he can be as guilty as any. "I had a wake-up call, personally, after Parklife," he recalls. "Everyone takes for granted now bands being successful, but you know, it was Nirvana, Blur and Oasis that made that possible. Film benefited, art benefited, everyone benefited. There wouldn't have been 'Brit-art' without Britpop. The problem comes when the subculture of the alternative enters the mainstream and nothing is created in the void left behind."

To give Albarn his due, it's hard to identify interesting voices of dissent in the current pop scene. And though he's never modest ("it's no f***ing use just us being good"), neither is he blind to his own errors.

"I've made hundreds of mistakes," he concedes. "I've made two bad records. The first record, which is awful, and The Great Escape, which was messy. The Kaiser Chiefs' new record sounds a bit like The Great Escape in that it sounds a bit empty. Sometimes records are like that if you try too hard to repeat your success."

So what were you going through? "I feel like the first seven or eight years of my musical life were kind of about experiencing, as far as I could within my conscience, the limits of notoriety - playing with excess and my sexuality. And the mistake was to make a record when we were still caught up in the buzz and the sensation of becoming ridiculously famous."

There seemed to be a big change in your style of music-making between '97 and '99 - something that's stayed with you ever after.

"I'm not going to be graphic about it, but there was a period of time when I took a lot more drugs, from about '97 onwards, and I broke that barrier - the barrier of self-consciousness - and started doing stuff in a more automatic way. And I never really looked back since."

It seems that Albarn's critics will have to wait another day to see their bête noir blot his copybook good and proper. Grand claims and inflammatory posturing notwithstanding, The Good, The Bad & The Queen debuted at Number 2 in the UK album chart and is doing decent business in America, particularly via downloads. And you won't hear anything but praise from the bonkers crowd at New Orleans' intimate Republic venue on St Joseph's night, treated to the band's finest show of their American trip, at once more scintillating, pointed and poignant than any of their others, with Simonon glorying in his bass-brandishing, on-stage gangster role and Albarn even giving it a bit of James Booker on the old Joanna.

Afterwards, the band mingle humbly with autograph hunters and Tony Allen enthuses about the precedent that The Good, The Bad & The Queen has set. "This thing is unique," he reminds MOJO. "But soon - you will see - there will be copies. Not of our sound, but of this idea of coming together and starting again from the beginning."

In two weeks' time, they'll take the stage for the penultimate ever rock show at the Clash-hymned Hammersmith Palais, with Don Letts, Jude Law and his enormous navvy of a bodyguard grooving in the wings. Questions regarding the band's future - Is there one beyond this album? Should it matter if there isn't? - are on hold, and when Simonon hacks out a splinter of the stage and holds it aloft as a souvenir, the taste in his mouth will be something very like victory.

"This seems to me just a very grown-up way of being in a band," says Simonon. "Why do we need a name? A name would be a millstone, or a headstone! This way we feel we can go in any direction we like." He pauses, reflects: "You know, The Clash was an instant family for us. To one degree or another, we were from broken homes - Bernie, even. Mick was the mum, Bernie was the dad, or the granddad! But in this band, we're older. There's no need for us to be in a gang, to link arms and march into the school playground, singing 'We won the war in 1964'. We're in the 6th Form now."

How Paul Simonon ended up on Bob Dylan's 'Down In The Groove'.

Paul: "That was an... interesting situation. In 1988 I was living in LA, and hanging out with Steve Jones. Steve and I and Nigel from Havana 3AM all had old Harleys and we'd gradually built up our own bike gang. Anyway, one day Steve says to me, 'I'm doing a session with Bob Dylan and they need a bass player - do you fancy it?' Presuming we'd be finished by a certain time, Steve and I arranged for our bike crew to meet us outside the studio after.

"Anyway, Dylan showed us a song: 'Brangg, brangg brangg, have you got that?' Then he'd be on to the next, just showing us the chords, then moving immediately on to the next. By the time he'd got to song five or six I'd pretty much forgotten song one. Then he said, 'Let's record them!' It was easy for Steve. All he had to do was (mimes resounding power chord) all over the changes, but it was much harder for me, having to pin down all this random stuff.

"Suddenly I saw Dylan's engineers cowering in the control room - behind them were 30 bikers in leather jackets waiting for us to finish!"