Music

Damon: ‘You can drink all day, shop all day, watch telly all day and then you add that line, “the country’s at war”, at the end of a sentence and it’s a different world. Even the news is consumerist. Life wouldn’t be normal at the moment unless every night there was someone getting blown up in Iraq. That is the whole crazy thrust of the not-so-hidden agenda of politics over the last five years. It relies on that picture being there, in bars or stations, in shops, you catch a little bit of this chaos on the TV, while you’re looking at that new pair of trainers. They work together in a weird way [mimes looking at telly out of corner of his eye]. “Oh, oh, I’ll get the trainers” [mimes running out of shop].’

There’s been a lot of dirty water under the 12 bridges since the war began, and even that march has become just one of those strange things, like riots, royal deaths and disorientated whales, that amounted to nothing more than an away day for London. We share these historical moments, even start talking to each other on public transport, but then we forget all about them. It’s like bumping into an old friend on the tube and swearing you’ll never lose touch again, and then another birthday goes by and you realise you already have. Feature continues

London’s always had its mobs…’ says Simonon. ‘But then it just disappears like that,’ Albarn snaps his fingers, ‘and everyone just sinks back into the brickwork.’

‘Apparently,’ says Simonon, warming to the theme, ‘in something like 1870, there was gonna be this big takeover of the government and whatever. Everyone was supposed to meet on a certain day and have this big riot. But unfortunately it was raining that day and no one turned up.’

‘The weather has been the blight of English revolution since time immemorial,’ says Albarn.

‘But there’s also a strange element where there’s the working class who respect the Queen,’ Simonon continues. ‘When we had the Silver Jubilee, it was the working class who were really into celebrating with tea parties and flags. It’s like, when I was a kid, I remember going to West Indian people’s homes with my schoolfriends, and there’d always be a picture of the Queen on the wall, a lot like with a Catholic family where there’d be a picture of the Pope. That was odd because we didn’t have a picture of the Queen in our house. We probably had one of Lenin. It’s the good, the bad and the Queen, I suppose. The Queen’s just… there.’

BBC Electric Proms (www.bbc.co.uk/electricproms).