Music

From left: Tong, Simonon, Allen, Albarn

‘The first part of the show, I was playing piano with the Buena Vista Social Club, which was amazing,’ says Albarn ‘And I was on such a high afterwards, just for getting away with playing with them. Someone passed me this bottle of overproof rum, and it all went a bit wrong there. When I came back on to play with Tony I just could not find the beat at all. It was terrible. And about halfway through I just wandered over and started hugging Tony like this [treats Time Out to a full-body bear-hug] while he was drumming. Funnily enough, though, we made some kind of bond there. He just laughed, he could see that I’d just got carried away with how exciting it all was, and he invited me over to Nigeria.’ Feature continues

And so off he went, with Gorillaz producer Danger ‘Brian Burton’ Mouse for company. Aside from getting ‘far too stoned’, Albarn admits he didn’t achieve much during the Nigerian sessions. Although he was happy with the tracks put together by the band, Albarn didn’t feel there was any ‘grit’ to his own contribution. For his part, Allen seems highly impressed with Albarn’s skills as a composer.

‘Damon is an inspiration,’ says Earth’s coolest percussionist. ‘I’ve seen good composers before, but Damon is completely different. His way of composing, it is like genius to me. I like to do things the way he wants it. I don’t want to impose myself on anything; I like to do things the way he wants them to be.’ Which is quite a compliment coming from a man who wouldn’t take direction from Fela Kuti.

But it was Burton who first suggested that Damon needed to reconnect with his home town. Since 1997, when Blur veered towards a more American-indie direction at the insistence of guitarist Graham Coxon, Albarn hadn’t felt comfortable writing about his own city, or life, and even after returning to Westbourne Grove he was still unsure of how to approach the task.

‘Then I just thought… Paul Simonon,’ he says. Luckily for him, Albarn works in an alternate reality, where he can just ring up Paul Simonon and Paul Simonon will come round for coffee. Simonon grins. ‘I thought: It’s not every day you get a phone call off a genius asking you round… why not?’ As it happens, he didn’t have far to go: the two of them live a couple of streets away from each other in west London.

Although they have a lot in common musically – both were in bands that famously rooted their songwriting in London and both are heavily influenced by black music – it was their shared local knowledge that formed the basis for The Good, The Bad And The Queen. That day the two of them began a conversation that has effectively become an album, and which continues to this day. Really, you should see them talking about it – they’re like an old couple, finishing each other’s sentences and bringing up shared experiences.

‘We spent a lot of nights drinking and discussing our experiences,’ says Simonon, ‘talking about how strange it is that in this part of town, what were once slums are now back to being one-family Victorian houses, but next door is a council estate that was Victorian houses that were knocked down. That weird ecosystem where the rich are there, the poor are there and on the weekend they meet up.’

‘Where I live on Westbourne Grove,’ chips in Albarn, ‘which now is one of the ponciest parts of the area, it’s gone back to the way it was before. In the mid-nineteenth century, it was called Westbournia, because it was this kind of utopian, unrealistic, ridiculous kind of place. People constantly went bankrupt because the shop rents were too high, which is exactly the same as what’s happening now.’