Music Interview: Damon Albarn’s Everyday Robots 

The debut studio album by the phenomenally successful, admired and influential Damon Albarn has finally come to fruition, revealing Damon at his most personal to date. We spoke to the musician about yesteryear.

With Blur being on a sort of hiatus since 2003, that’s given the fascinating Damon Albarn time to invest his time in various projects. In the last decade, he has made 12 albums; including 4 with the graphic pop project Gorillaz, co-writing on two film soundtracks and crafting two operas… the list goes on and the various excursions this man has taken himself on can clearly be felt on his album ‘Everyday Robots’. It’s a wonderful record, casting a chilled out sleepy spell over the listener, drawing you in with use of reggae, folk, soul and gospel.

We touched upon the new album with Damon Albarn, when we spoke to the artist to reflect on yesteryear.

How did you conceive the idea of a solo album? It’s a first for you, even though you’ve been making music for 20 years. It wasn’t really a choice; it was a proposition from producer Richard Russell, to make a record with my name on it. I thought… “well, what do you do, when you’re making a solo record?”. When you make something like that you usually make an album about someone, and this album is about me.

Can you tell us something about the first solo live dates? What’s the difference between playing solo than like with Gorillaz or Blur? There’s more people on stage than Blur, but less than Gorillaz. But it’s going very well. I mean it’s great. I finally have the opportunity to represent, live, the full palette of my repertoire as an author. You know… when you’re in a band, if you just strip something down to something like you and a piano, a member of the band is likely to gain “dominance” and it’s something that can have a huge implication, emotionally. Now I can change the dynamic of the performance far more, because I’m with a band out there, but basically it’s just me. It’s liberating in a sense, I can play anything I want, even improvise.

The British music press is well known for being pretty tough with artists, but you always were one of its most loved and cherished ones. How did you live this special “status” of yours? I think they always mean well, but sometimes the temptation to sensationalize and distraught what they see in front of their eyes is too much for them. And you know, actually this is an impossible topic to discuss, but despite this we still spend a lot of time talking about it!

Your music is one of the symbols of the Nineties. What was it about ‘that’ sound in peculiar? I don’t know… well, that decade was the beginning of the end. I mean, many things happened, there was a sort of boom in media. When I started there were just two music magazines around. And then the Internet happened: when I started there was no Internet. My daughter looks blankly at me, when I tell her about a world with no Internet… she’s like: “How was that possible?” We didn’t rely on telephones or anything, in fact they were a novelty, or some kind of status symbol and only certain kin of people had them – something they had because they wanted to be noticed. So I think music kind of went through that cycle as well and became something which has lost all its politics. But there are some survivors around and I am one of them.

Then came the noughties. What did that period mean for you and for your music? Moving from the late Nineties to the 2000’s was extremely productive, there were a lot of opportu-nities. Anything was possible. The way music was recorded changed so profoundly; at the begin-ning of the Nineties we started recording on tape and if you wanted to change something you had to physically cut tapes. At the end of the nineties everything changed, you could source any kind of sound and it became very easy to be more eclectic. But all these opportunities have not been very well utilized, in fact in many ways we regressed, there’s much pop music written by anonymous au-thors, brought to us by sexualized young people – as it’s always been.

On the new album you talk about technology that makes us “Everyday robots”. But you’ve always played with technology. With Gorillaz, for example, you started using holograms on the stage, something that now is becoming huge in the live music business: what do you think about it? We were trying to do something too early. Technology was not very developed at the time. But we did it first. Now is the right time for this stuff to exist and I can actually do it properly!

What about your plans with Gorillaz? I’d like to make at least one more record with them. A happy, positive and funny one!

You travelled a lot: which places you think influenced your music? England for sure influenced my music more than anything. At the moment I’m very interested in Victorian chamber music, which is influenced by Italian opera. So at the moment this is where my head is. I’m working on a quite big thing for theatre: it’s not Victorian and it’s not Italian, but it has influences.

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Tags: Damon Albarn Everyday Robots New Album 2014 New music 2014

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