Music

It’s true that London has punched well above its weight since we first stole rock ’n’ roll, mostly thanks to our natural instinct to respray the stuff we’ve pinched. From injecting new influences into the beat template in the ’60s to the experimental post-punk funk of acts like Johnny Rotten’s PiL and Letts’ Big Audio Dynamite, London has set a standard for splicing sounds that is still unrivalled. But it’s not just the sound of the music which has made it uniquely London, it’s what it has been saying. Even acid house, commonly seen as drug-driven drop-out music for E-munchers, was the soundtrack to widespread civil disobedience. Music, even repetitive instrumental bleepy music, is our social solvent, dissolving our barriers to bond us together. Feature continues

Letts believes that, though it’s a sad state of affairs, it has become music’s responsibility to speak for those without voices. Music, he reckons, has the power to say things that public figures are only prepared to admit in private, and give us insights into lives we’d otherwise be terrified of asking about. So if you’d like to stop yourself being scared of Islamist terror cells and ricin poison and Sunny Delight bombs on your Ryanair flight, perhaps you should pop along to some of next week’s Ramadan Nights festival, where sufi music’s finest will soothe your paranoia.

‘The struggles that they had in the ’60s and ’70s that spawned those lyrics,’ says Letts, ‘people think they’ve been won, but they ain’t. They have just been shifted or relocated, to another race or religion or geographic sector. It’s like Gil Scott Heron said: “What happened to protest, man?” ’The biggest protest in London’s history was the 2003 march against the invasion of Iraq, which saw over a million people take to the streets to have their opinion ignored. Although ‘The Good, The Bad And The Queen’ is celebratory, the spectre of that period does hang over it, particularly on the cheerily named ‘Kingdom Of Doom’, which contains the memorable line ‘Drinking all day ’cos the country’s at war’. ‘I think that’s one of my favourite lines on the album,’ Albarn grins. ‘It says how I feel some days. Not that I’m drinking all day, but that the pubs are open all the time.’

‘It’s that sense of helplessness too,’ chimes in Simonon. ‘The country is at war, and like Damon says, people are drinking all day, trying to ignore it, because one can feel powerless. That’s how I read it, anyway, but maybe somebody who’s in a pub all day might go, “Wahey! Yeah! War time!” ’