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!”

For Simonon the frantic psych-out of the title track is perfectly in keeping with the often baleful mood elsewhere on the record: “It’s saying that the world is falling apart—but rather than ‘let’s go and hang ourselves,’ it’s saying ‘let’s go out and make the most of it.’ And in some ways be positive!”

Is it a political album? “Well it’s not an apolitical record” demurs Albarn. The mood of the record often seems fatalistic rather than angry or militant: “Drink all day, ’cos the country’s at war” runs one line from the appropriately titled “Kingdom of Doom.” “It’s about growing older and wiser,” suggests Simonon, “realizing that one doesn’t need to jump and shout. It’s not doing [politics] in a lyric sense; it’s approaching it in a different way. I think it’s clear on our stance, where we stand as human beings.” “It’s about collective responsibility,” says Albarn explicating the line, ‘The crackheads on the green, they’re a political party.’ That is the message if there’s a political one. Understand people; don’t just kick them in the face. Understand why your social interaction doesn’t work.”

The Good, The Bad And The Queen adds up to, among other things, another brazenly inventive chapter in Damon Albarn’s restless career since he first hit the charts as a pie-eyed baggy bowlhead back in the early 1990s. As we speak, Jarvis Cocker is emblazoned across every pop magazine, preparing the country for his eponymous debut. A couple months ago Thom Yorke released his own low-key solo outing. As good or even great as these records are, they rarely stray from what we’ve come to expect from both men. By comparison with his contemporaries, Albarn has tacked—often against the prevailing winds—a quite unique, idiosyncratic course: from boyband psych-pop to Little England classicism; from lo-fi obliquery to hockey-crowd anthems; from African collaborations to the 21st-century Archies. It feels almost counterintuitive to say it of a bloke who’s spent 15 years in a Fred Perry shirt, but Damon Albarn may just be the most shape-shifting and adventurous British pop musican since David Bowie.

Put it to the man himself, however, and he’s roused into a vehement denial that the new group might be, say, a natural reaction to the more pop emphasis of the last few years of Gorillaz. “It’s not all a reaction at all!” he says, apoplectic at the very idea. “We were making this record at the same time as Simon and me were going to the Harlem Apollo to perform with Gorillaz! They are all a continuation. That’s just something that the British press and British journalists make up—they feel that there have to be lists, there have to be sequences, everything has to have a negative relation to what’s gone before.”

But didn’t he recently tell Uncut that “as for putting out pop music, that’s over?” “Well, in a way, but hopefully something else will come out of that,” he sighs. “We’re in the infancy of a whole new proliferation, and that’s exciting in itself. But hopefully one that ends up with people not being ghettoized … and being able to absorb lots of different influences.”

Albarn’s “proliferation” looks set to blossom even further in 2007, with the much anticipated Gorillaz feature film supposedly crawling out of development limbo (though whether this was helped or hindered by the assistance of filmmaker Terry Gilliam remains to be seen), and an ambitious musical stage production of the Chinese Monkey King myth—developed in collaboration with director Chen Shi-Zheng and Gorillaz cohort Jamie Hewlett, and featuring Shaolin monks and the Peking Opera—at the Manchester International Festival at the end of February.

But for now there’s that damned piano to be sourced and some warm-up shows to play way down in the countryside of southwest England. “First we’re going to take South Devon,” declares Albarn mock-determinedly to his new bandmates, plotting the first steps of this latest eccentric, oblique and oft-inspired musical campaign. “Then we take the world.”