Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett
Pop Runs Wild
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But you say you like your pop stars? You love hearing tales of their devilish real-life exploits, watching their videos and reading articles about their background? Meet one of the craziest quartets of personality ever to vomit onto acetate.
The wizards behind this curious curtain, Blur frontman Damon Albarn and cartoonist Jamie Hewlett, along with web site dude Matt, were kind enough to offer their jet-lagged minds up to NATN co-director Troy Carpenter just before the Stateside release of their debut.
NATN: So the album's coming out next week, but in England, you're already releasing your third single.
Damon Albarn: Yeah. In Europe, it's already very much up and running and topping the charts all over the place, so we've sorted that out. It's just here now -- always a great stumbling block for English musicians.
NATN: Do you think it'll be any different this time around? I mean in theory, the musicians are English, but...
DA: Well, actually there's only one English musician. There's more Americans than there are English. It's actually more of an American record. There's a Jamaican, a Cuban, three Americans and myself.
NATN: Do you think that will affect people‘s perception?
DA: I don't know -- I mean the voice is predominantly English, apart from Ibrahim Ferrer and Miho (Hatori, from Cibo Matto), who's sort of Japanese-American, or American-Japanese -- I don't know which one she puts first.
NATN: How did you guys get together and come up with the ideas for the project?
DA: Well, Jamie and I used to live together for a brief period -- for nearly a year -- and we eventually came to the conclusion that a cartoonist and a musician should do something together. We realized that there were loads of possibilities and that it could really be used as a vehicle for anything. So he started drawing and I started mucking about in the studio, and talking to a record company, and at that point we started an internet site, Gorillaz.com, and basically everything has gone in tandem since then. Never any point have we tried to make it too subconsciously cohesive. Everyone does their own thing, and what unifies it is the fact that we have similar outlooks, where the goal is to put something in the mainstream that in a way revolutionizes the way music is perceived.
NATN: So you don't really work from the standpoint of “well, here's this piece of music, let's see how we can visualize this” or vice versa?
Jamie Hewlett: Nope. But we started up on the same day, basically. We have studios in the same building, so the whole process has been overlapping and everything. We control everything from our studio, we do everything there: the music, the animation, the web site, whatever. So everything has been sort of intertwined.
NATN: What kind of a part does the web site play in it all?
JH: Well, that's where the Gorillaz live. We started the web site, and we thought, if we're gonna do a web site, rather than just create pages of information, we should try to build a world out of their studio complex that you can actually go and visit. You can go in their rooms, you can go in their studio...
DA: ...you can essentially watch them living out fragments of an entire life. And it also gives you an opportunity to show how the creative process works: demos of songs are put on there in various places, and sketches as well. So the audience is very much involved in the whole thing -- they know what's going on, they know how we're putting it together and they can give us ideas. It's extremely interactive - far more so than it could ever be if you placed human beings in that context, because they would object to the intrusion. Whereas it is very intrusive, what we do, but we're making a virtue out of that, and trying to turn it into something. It's kind of a sorting out of the weeds from the vegetables, if you know what I mean. Every single part of our creative process is open to scrutiny, so it has to be good. You can't really gloss over anything.
NATN: How do you go about making a Gorillaz track in the studio?
DA: Very randomly, really. Having my own studio gives me the freedom to experiment all the time. And I've kind of discovered ProTools after working with William Orbit. It's a whole new world for a musician 'cause you can just manipulate sound and the way you play things, and just go wherever you want. Having it in the context of a cartoon, it's just so liberating.
JH: Yeah, it's a freedom for both of us to do whatever we want, basically. And that's pretty much what we're doing. And then we got Matt involved when we put up the web site, and now we've got a whole team of people working on it, because there's so much stuff needed. But still every day, it's just doing what we want, and enjoying it. Which is extremely important.
NATN: I hear that you've put on a couple of shows?
DA: One show. We've got two others coming up, one in Paris and one in Dublin.
NATN: But then there were four others canceled?
DA: No, just postponed.
NATN: So you perform behind a screen, I understand. What kind of things do you project on it?
JH: Different Gorillaz-related visuals for each song. We worked with a company and they put together all the visuals for the entire set in like a month, and now we're updating the show, sort of changing little bits. It was an experiment, and we didn’t know how it was going to work. In doing it, we saw it worked to an extent, and we could see the things that didn't work, so we changed it around. So each song has its own visual that goes with it, which is either done in flash or real animation, or just stills or footage from whatever. So, it's a big experiment. But it went down well, the first show. It was supposed to be a quiet little thing, but everybody showed up.
DA: We even had Rod Stewart on the guest list, though he didn't turn up.
JH: We were under the microscope, but it went well.
NATN: Are you planning to do any shows in the States?
JH: If we get asked, absolutely.
DA: Yeah. I don't think you should plan a gig before the record's out, you know. We'll wait a little while.
JH: By the time we come to the States, we'll have changed the show completely.
DA: It's not the most exciting thing. It's like going to the cinema, but with the heaviest soundtrack you could ever imagine.
JH: Yeah, the bass will make your fillings rattle in your mouth.
DA: It's rather like standing up in the cinema, and moshing as well. It takes a lot of different sort of experiences and puts them together. You do get to see the band a little, through silhouettes -- occasionally the screen will show the silhouettes of the band. But you don't know who they are. They look like the Gorillaz.
NATN: Obviously, the visual aspect is really important in a group like this. How do you get across the personalities of the characters?
JH: We're doing it every single day, and it's a lot of work. But it's not hard to get the characters across to people. They do their own interviews in the American and English press. And the videos are like little stories, really. The more videos we do, the more the characters unfold.
DA: We have to take it one step at a time. We can't just launch the entire thing on the public at once, and it's nice to see it grow and get involved. The first bit of press they got was Dazed & Confused, but now they're on the cover of Smash Hits, which is the biggest teen magazine in Britain. So there's no certainty to it, and that's really interesting. When you've sort of removed yourselves from it, you can be very objective about it and you can really see what's happening in a far more lucid way than if you're right in the middle of it and it's you having your picture taken. You can do it much better. In a sense, the whole idea of it in the mainstream is very exciting, because it's very unpredictable.
NATN: Do you think people will draw unfavorable comparisons to some of the other pop groups of today that are, you know, "manufactured"?
DA: Well it is completely manufactured, but it's manufactured purposely, by people who would otherwise be sort of left-field...
JH: ...so the intent is very different.
NATN: And it's being manufactured by artists, rather than a record label, say.
DA: Exactly. It's our choice. And they're hardly conformist characters: the bass player's a satanist, the singer's on the verge of being a zombie, the guitarist is a 10-year-old Japanese girl and the drummer's an enormous black guy from the States who's possessed by spirits.
NATN: So I was looking around the internet today, and saw some strange stuff - something about Murdoc's Winnebago being stolen? Is this a publicity stunt you guys came up with?
Matt: Well, the idea is if you've bought the album, you got the keys to his Winnebago, and it was just parked in the carpark at King Studios. Well, the first person to come and have a look at it [on the web site] drove off with it. So that happened two months ago, when the album came out in Britain, but now he's over here, and he's following a lead at the moment, and he'll hopefully get it back this week.
JH: And then Murdoc's Winnebago opens to the public. You can go have a sniff 'round in his bedroom.
Matt: Which is a very stinky place!
JH: It's a very unpleasant place....So this is all just building extra bits on to the website. It'll just grow and grow.
DA: And the audience, you know, has been there since the beginning, so they're just seeing the whole thing develop.
Matt: And each of the members actually have real email addresses and get email. Each character has very specific sort of fans who'll latch on to each of their personalities.
NATN: So this is all stuff you've come up with, or have fans contributed things like to the online community?
JH: Well we obviously concieve it in the first place. We put it out there, but once it's out there, it's got its own life and the fans can do what they want with it. There's kids in there who are very good at what they do on the internet, and they do hack pieces of it and create new bits and steal things to make their own sites. Russell hates it when they do that, but Murdoc encourages them.
NATN: So what if some random fan takes these animated characters and comes up with a whole adventure using them or something to that effect?
Matt: Yeah, somebody's actually done something like that - a chap called Dr. Wurzel, that's his online name, and he hacked into Murdoc's mail, and fans sent in images of where they've seen the Winnebago and he made a web site out of it.
NATN: And is that sort of thing cool with you guys?
Matt: You couldn't want anything better.
DA: Yeah, we don't have any agenda except that the whole thing grows. The bigger it gets, the more impact it'll have and the more impact it has, the more possibilities there will be for people sort of taking charge of certain aspects of popular culture again, and returning it to the kids.
Matt: Stimulating their creativity is fantastic. That they'll take that initiative and roll with it -- it's great, you couldn't ask for anything more.
NATN: Do you think that there might be any sort of delay on the U.S. audience's part in "getting" the concept, since, as you say, the European fans already have this background?
DA: Well, there's always a delay because it's a different area. But this is made for America. America's the most internet-savvy country in the world. Eventually, we'd like to think that the entire process could just bypass the conventional modes of communication and just be completely anarchy. Zero censorship. Where we're reliant only on our sort of moral standards.
JH: Murdoc's moral standards.
DA: But does mother nature have any moral standards? That's debatable, that's one of the great big debates.
NATN: Right. Have you been working on more Gorillaz music?
JH: We're working on ideas for the second album.
DA: We've just done a Redman remix. But it's all very random, it has no focus other than just whatever feels good and sounds good and looks good, and at that moment makes us get excited. There are no rules of engagement.
NATN: How'd you hook up with Ibrahim Ferrer?
DA: Phoned 'im up. As the old saying goes, everyone is two phone calls away.
JH: Is it seven?
DA: Seven phone calls?
Matt: It's seven people, isn't it? Seven degrees of separation?
DA: Well, I think it's two phone calls.
NATN: Well, why don't we try it?
Matt: Yeah, who should we try to get?
DA: Well, obviously the first phone call's gotta be very you know, focused.
Matt: That's the one that counts, isn't it.
NATN: You guys have any other projects that you're working on?
DA: In order to be successful, this just takes up all your time. I thought I might have gotten an easy ride with this, after Blur, but our schedule is just as intense. And actually, you need to come up with more and more ideas. And that suits me as a musician, because I thrive on constantly moving.
NATN: So can you conceive -- if this becomes really popular -- of, say, doing it for the next five years?
JH: As long as it's fun, and we're enjoying it. The moment it starts to get crap, we'll just have to stop it.
DA: I think the moment anyone in the collective loses their edge, that's the end.
Matt: Could be next week, then.
JH: It's a real sort of grueling schedule.
DA: Yeah, well you can't really kid animation, you know what I mean? And ultimately, everything is sort of channeled through the animation.
JH: If it was a real band, just by living their lives, they'd have to commit to what they're doing. But we're living our lives, and we're having to live their lives as well, and it's sort of tough. You know, we've got kids and girlfriends. But we said to the record company from the start, we wanted to do everything, right down to the font on the song titles. Anyway, I've got a holiday coming up. It is hard work, but we're loving it.
Matt: That's the saving grace of our work, isn't it? It's so much fun.
NATN: Have you done separate interviews with the characters?
Matt: Yeah, Russell did an interview with a magazine called Pop Connection, in the U.K. Murdoc's done Squire. Penthouse called and asked if they could speak to Murdoc.
JH: They want to do a photo special with Murdoc.
DA: They don't, do they? Really!? (laughs) Excellent.
JH: There's really cute photographs of him sittin' there with his girlfriend and the baby going (makes sneering face). Murdoc in the bath with a baby.
DA: (hearty laugh) See, what no one realizes is that it's sort of revealing the sham of celebrity. But the kids love that.
JH: Yeah, there's little 12, 13-year-old kids who love it, but don't care about us, who don't care about who's behind it. They absolutely love it. Because they love the characters, and they believe in the music, and our names mean nothing. Slightly older generations seem to pick at pieces, and worry too much about who's behind it.
DA: And I've been around long enough, for the youngest fans, for it to be their parents who know of me. That's terrifying, actually. It was 1989 when I first reared my ugly head. That was 12 years ago.
JH: My god, you're cracking the mirror.
DA: But you're just the same.
JH: Except I've been around 15 years now. When you think of it, it's the kids of our sort of first bands who are probably getting into Gorillaz. So that's cool. Imagine what it'd be like to be an excitable 12-year-old into Gorillaz. I can't imagine what it'd be like to be viewing it.
DA: Well hopefully it's a lot more straightforward than it is to be somebody who's behind it.
Matt: I reckon.
DA: But that's the beauty of making something. You present it to the world without any of the stress, and they just take it up.
JH: That's what's great about each of the Gorillaz, because they don't suffer any of the stress at all. They take it all in stride. And 2-D's a natural icon, he's not bothered by it.
NATN: So 2-D's not going to crack under the stress of fame, is he?
JH: Well, he probably will. It'll fuck him up.
NATN: But in a good way.
JH: Exactly. I've been pretty into this idea of Murdoc getting decapitated in a car crash, while on drugs. And then getting his head sewn back on, and being alright.
Matt: He'd look great with stitches.
JH: See, we can do anything with them. That's the sort of joy.
NATN: Right, do you think people will after a while kind of lose track of the cartoon characters, and just say "what are Damon and Jamie up to?" rather than "what are Murdoc and Noodle up to?"
JH: Sure, a lot of people will say that, but they don't count. You know, I like watching the Simpsons, but I don't think of Matt Groening every time I watch it.
DA: Well if, like last year, they gave a seminar with all the actors [from the Simpsons], I'd go to it, but I don't care what they're doing tomorrow, for instance.
JH: Well, it was always going to be difficult having Damon doing our music, because of who he is. But people are going to have to get 'round that by themselves.
DA: Well I know that it’s not just [my celebrity] that’s making it work.
JH: No one knows who the fuck we are in America. No one cares.
DA: No, no, most people know me. But they don't know me for even the title of the song, they just know me for the one that goes "Wa-hoo". I had a nice conversation with a bloke just the other day:
“Yeah, I'm in a band.” - “Have I heard of them?" "Probably not." - "What's it called?" "Called Blur." - "Never heard of it. Any songs I might have heard?" "Yeah, one song you've definitely heard - ‘Song 2’" - "Never heard of it." "The song that goes 'Wa-hoo'." - "Oh yeah, I've heard of it."
...That's as far as they know me. I hope to progress a little farther with this, but not as myself: through the idea. I sacrifice myself to the greater vision.
TROY CARPENTER | Troy Carpenter founded NATN from a Chicago apartment during the ambitious winter of 1998 with co-conspirators Ben French and Jonathan Cohen. After a five-year stint in New York, he and wife Lourdes have recently relocated to Indianapolis, where he spends days listening to music and nights in the kitchen at Elements restaurant. Musical heroes: Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Super Furry Animals. What else makes life worth living: Sushi, Phucty, runs in the park, and the Atlanta Braves.