Damon Albarn reveals the secret behind Gorillaz song ‘Clint Eastwood’
Over the past three decades, Damon Albarn has proven his instrumental and lyrical talents as the frontman of Blur, Gorillaz and in his various other collaborations and solo endeavours. With his legacy sealed, Albarn apparently has no reason to withhold the secret behind Gorillaz’s popular single ‘Clint Eastwood’.
‘Clint Eastwood’ was released in March 2001 as the breakthrough single for Gorillaz just three weeks before the virtual alt-rock band shared their eponymous debut album. The album introduced Gorillaz’s novel approach, mixing various genres in pleasing harmony. The album’s three subsequent singles were ’19-2000′, ‘Rock the House’ and ‘Tomorrow Comes Today’.
It’s no secret that Albarn is a fan of the Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood and his classic 1966 spaghetti western movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. When forming a supergroup with Paul Simonon of the Clash, Simon Tong of the Verve, and Fela Kuti’s drummer Tony Allen in 2006, he landed on the parodying name ‘The Good, the Bad & the Queen’.
As it turns out, ‘Clint Eastwood’ was named in reference to the same movie. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in 2005, Albarn revealed that the song got its name because the programmed beat that supports Del the Funky Homosapien’s rapping throughout bears similarity to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme music. “We were recording in Jamaica and listening to a lot of dancehall music, and we imagined a cool moniker to have would be Clint Eastwood,” Albarn later added during a Reddit Ask Me Anything session. “Also, I’m a great fan of the actor and of [The Good, the Bad and the Ugly director] Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone”.
The track peaked at number four on the UK Singles Chart and remains one of the band’s defining hits. However, as Albarn recently let slip, the song’s main instrumental run was lifted directly from a preset on his Suzuki Omnichord.
In a recent interview with Apple Music, Albarn showed a dumbfounded and hysterical Zane Lowe how the ‘Clint Eastwood’ beat is simply the “Rock 1” preset from the Suzuki Omnichord. He continues to demonstrate that the song’s stammering drum fill also came directly from the Omnichord.
Watch Damon Albarn’s interview with Apple Music presenter Zane Lowe below.
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