Watch Damon Albarn record early Gorillaz demos in 1999
Whilst Damon Albarn’s genius was already immediately apparent due to the gravity of his work with Britpop vanguard Blur, when he arrived with the virtual band Gorillaz alongside visual artist Jamie Hewlett in 2001, he would enter another creative realm entirely. Unlike in Blur, Albarn was free to fully experiment with all his influences and create an outfit with more crossover appeal than anyone could ever have imagined when the four former art school students broke through in the early 1990s.
Albarn met comic book creator Jamie Hewlett in 1990 when Blur’s guitarist Graham Coxon, a fan of the artist’s work, asked him to interview the band, which he and Albarn had recently formed. The interview went ahead and was published in Deadline, the home of Hewlett’s celebrated comic, Tank Girl. Hewlett would later tell Q Magazine in 2001 that although he and the quartet were acquaintances after the interview, they often did not get on, particularly after Hewlett started seeing Coxon’s ex-girlfriend, Jane Olliver. He would also say that he initially thought Albarn was “arsey, a wanker”.
Despite this friction, Albarn and Hewlett shared an apartment on London’s Westbourne Grove from 1997. Hewlett had recently split with Olliver, and Albarn had broken up with his girlfriend Justine Frischmann of Elastica, one of the era’s most highly publicised relationships. It was in this flat that the two conceived the idea for Gorillaz, who would become one of the most consequential modern acts.
One day, the pair found themselves watching MTV, with it prompting a trail of thought that would lead to the creation of the virtual band. Hewlett later said: “If you watch MTV for too long, it’s a bit like hell – there’s nothing of substance there. So we got this idea for a cartoon band, something that would be a comment on that”. They released their eponymous album in 2001, kicking off a run that produced 2005’s Demon Days and their celebrated eighth effort, Cracker Island, earlier this year.
Cited by the likes of Major Lazer, Billie Eilish, The 1975, ASAP Rocky, Odd Future, Grimes, A.G. Cook and many more as an influence, this intense concentration of prominent acts looking to them for ideas demonstrates just how impactful the convergence of Albarn and Hewlett has been.
In 2019, a clip of Albarn emerged from 1999, wherein he was writing early Gorillaz demos. A fascinating glimpse into how he conceives and layers the group’s tracks, pointing to his eight-track recorder, he explains: “This is what I do all my demos on, and I like it because it’s got an in-built microphone so that I can be anywhere and I can just have a guitar, and I can just do four and then bounce, and I can do like eight tracks on this”.
Touching on the connection between the end of Blur’s first chapter, and Gorillaz, Albarn revealed that all the demos for the Britpop band’s sixth album, 1999’s 13, were written on the machine: “All the demos from 13 were written on this, and most of them from the album before”.
Towards the end of the video, Albarn maintains: “A song should be strong enough anyway to sort of survive whatever you do to it; if it’s not, it’s the fault of the song and not the person who’s working on it, really”.
Watch the clip below.
