The Good, The Bad, & The Queen

It’s a golden afternoon on the last day of the longest, hottest summer England has ever known, and Damon Albarn, Paul Simonon, Tony Allen and Simon Tong are sitting outside a café in west London—in October—fretting about preparations for their first big show together. “You can’t just choose any old piano,” insists Albarn to his management. “It’s got to have the right action.”

The group—who are emphatically not called The Good, The Bad And The Queen (“Who on earth would call their band that?!” laughs Simonon through a gap-toothed grin, perhaps understandably relieved that people won’t speculate which one is “the Queen”)—is booked to perform in London at the newly reopened Roundhouse, an old railway building in Chalk Farm, that once hosted several of the most mind-blowing performances in rock history, including legendary shows by Pink Floyd and The Ramones. Their rehearsal studio, just across the road from the café, is a converted church just a short stroll from the Rough Trade record shop—spiritual home of London’s original punk scene, haunt of The Slits, Scritti Politti and, of course, Simonon’s old group, The Clash.

A wily psycho-geographer—one of those maverick urban historians like Peter Ackroyd or Iain Sinclair—would undoubtedly appreciate the chronic resonance of the two locations, perhaps even plot them on a lye line or vital network of the city’s psychic hotspots. It’s something that’s not lost on the group. In many ways, the haunted streets of London are the real subject of the record they’ve made. “It’s a kind of time capsule on the top of a hill, this record,” says Albarn. “Sometimes it goes under the ground, sometimes up in the air, and sometimes underwater. Because under the water is the past, isn’t it? The songs go back into the past, and maybe into the future as well.”

The band that Albarn has assembled for this topsy-turvy musical time travelogue may be his strongest and strangest yet—which is saying something coming from the man who dreamt up the hip-hop Hanna-Barbera that is Gorillaz. Alongside Simonon there’s Simon Tong—once a member of The Verve, now Albarn’s right-hand guitarist both in Blur and Gorillaz. On drums there’s Tony Allen—Afrobeat pioneer, musical director of Fela Kuti’s bands through the ages and, according to Brian Eno, “perhaps the greatest drummer who has ever lived.” And corralling the whole show, directing, if you like, is Danger Mouse—aka Brian Burton—who not only decided which songs went on the album, but also their order.

“We needed somebody like that,” acknowledges Simonon. “The thing about Damon is that he’s very good at delegation. So [the final choice] was Brian’s job. And that was good, because it caused a situation where there was no bickering.” So did they miss a bit of creative tension in the studio? Not at all, Simonon laughs: “In the end, bickering is just really expensive.”

This new band started as a twinkle in the eye of one of Albarn’s old projects. “It started with the last song that the full lineup of Blur recorded,” he says, pulling thoughtfully on a cigarette. “It was ‘Music Is My Radar’ and it had that lyric ‘Tony Allen got me dancing!’” He pauses to remember which particular song inspired the line. “I think it would be ‘Zombies’ maybe. Yeah, that is the tune, that is the tune!” He grins madly across the room at Allen, who cracks up. “The way it stops and it starts!”

Hearing of Albarn’s lyrical eulogy and inspired by his sense of melody and way with a melodica, Allen got in touch, inviting him to work on his 2002 record, HomeCooking. They got along so well that they hatched a plan to record together in Allen’s native Nigeria. But something about the sessions didn’t quite work out. “I didn’t feel it had the balance I was looking for,” admits Albarn, “you know, not making an African record—making a cross-cultural record.”

It’s a problem he’s come across before—recording Malian Music under the aegis of Oxfam back in 2002. The solution, the crucial balance this time, came in a brainwave: How great would it be to get Tony Allen and Paul Simonon playing together? Others might have been content to splice the two together electronically; Albarn got on the phone. It turned out he and Simonon lived two streets apart. These days, the duo comprise a fond mutual-appreciation club: “If two records define that point in your life when you become a teenager and start listening to things and really getting into music, [to me] it would be The Specials and [The Clash’s] Combat Rock,” says Albarn.

“Making the record,” agrees Simonon, “was a nice chance to meet Damon properly and have a really good conversation.”

Apparently at the behest of producer and ardent anglophile Burton, the new supergroup decided to try and make a “very English” record. In a circuitous way, with The Good, The Bad And The Queen, Albarn is returning to some of the themes and subject matter he chronicled, celebrated and bemoaned on Blur’s defining Britpop album, Parklife—a record he seems to have spent much of the last 12 years singing himself away from.

“You had to really…” he groans, still bristling at the thought, even now. “It was all the things that came with it—the juvenile aspect, the Labour Government, the proliferation of football culture in every single nuance of life. I had to move away from that because it was misinterpreted. That’s partly my fault for playing with that imagery. … But it was an album made by a bunch of kids just really in love with the possibilities of pop music. I’d just like to make it clear: The only thing I meant by saying [that the new record is a natural successor to Parklife] is that it’s a very London record in the way that that record was.”

It strikes an oddly contemporary chord, what with British pop right now. From the Kaiser Chiefs and Arctic Monkeys to the Long Blondes and Lily Allen, it’s abundantly awash with young musicians whose sensibilities were in many ways defined by Britpop Mark One. But Albarn is reluctant to feel any satisfaction because of his influence. “I don’t feel a sense of achievement, no. I feel, as Jack Black would say, a desire to get to the NOOO-KLEEE-US of music. I don’t really look at any of that.”

The nucleus in the case of TGTBATQ is a kind of modern, multicultural, English folk song, but not in any straightforward or revivalist sense. Tracks have titles like “Bunting Song” and “A Soldier’s Tale” that might have come from William Blake. They carry ancient echoes of public hangings, document moments of innocence (the whale that swam up the Thames this year) and experience (crackheads passed out in the city sun), and they labor dolefully under the gathering clouds of war. If you were to plot the musical coordinates of Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town,” The Specials’ “Ghost Town,” Pink Floyd’s “The Scarecrow” and Tricky’s “Aftermath,” you might find TGTBATQ right at the heart of them. As much as the record might be hailed as a successor to Parklife, with its repeated references to ocean levels, floods and tidal waves, you might just as easily see it as a worried sequel to London Calling—a dreamy final broadcast from a city on the brink. Just like Joe Strummer, they live by the river.

“‘Green Fields’ is about both the actual tidal wave and a … metaphysical one,” says Albarn about the most affecting song on the record. “It was written one very drunk night on Goldhawk Road and then forgotten. And after the intervening period—of 9/11, of the tidal wave, of the war—it ended up here. But the last line on the record is upbeat!” he insists cheerily. “The sun is coming out!”