I’ve been listening to The Mountain, the magnificent, horizon-expanding new album by Gorillaz on my way into work this week. It’s about grief and the presence of death in our lives, with a dose of human folly thrown in, yet is far more exuberant than that might sound. I think it might be too good for my commute.
Damon Albarn and his collaborators exude melancholy suffused with joy, or perhaps the other way around – those two states seem to coexist, Albarnesque-style, almost as if we can have more than one emotion at once. With the sitar of Anoushka Shankar all over it, The Mountain is transporting, too, which is handy, as when you’re bound for an office, it helps to remember that there’s a wide world outside of it, and in that world people are making music as sublime as this.
Showing up to work is, of course, what Albarn famously does. The Blur frontman and musical force behind Gorillaz has been unusually prolific in his output for someone who made his money three decades ago. His various side-projects and solo records span genres and art forms. “If we don’t keep him focused on the job in hand, he will literally be doing another opera before the third single is out,” jokes Blur bassist Alex James on To The End, a documentary about the band’s 2023 reunion.
“Hardly anyone really needs a conversation about what you want – they know what to do,” Albarn says of the musicians he works with on Gorillaz, and yet it can’t all be as automatic as this implies. Just looking at the roll call of featured artists on The Mountain makes me think, oh God, a lot of emails must have gone into the creation of this album. Even before you consider the graft and talent that fashioned it into a stirring, unified whole, it’s obvious – this is not the product of a man who likes to rest on his laurels.
Albarn’s work ethic has long been notable. Paul Morley dubbed him “multitasker of the decade” in Observer Music Monthly in 2009. On the Blur documentary, producer and musician James Ford says he is “almost like pathologically addicted to making new stuff up all the time”, while Blur drummer Dave Rowntree offers this take: “You or I might be watching TV or playing video games. Damon doesn’t do any of that, he just writes songs.”
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Albarn, in an interview in The Guardian in 2012, gave Blur guitarist Graham Coxon the compliment of being a “daily musician”, like him. When it was put to him that the excesses of the 90s scene hadn’t sent him into a torpor, as might have been expected, he agreed, explaining that he had “always got up in the morning, excited about making music” and felt “lucky in that sense”.
You can tell, and it’s a facet of creativity that is oddly under-explored in pop. Novelists are always being asked about the schedule they keep and the environment in which they write. With musicians, this is often skipped. Maybe it’s because we want to think it’s all magic – the work of unseen elves – and not a matter of putting the hours in. More likely, however, it’s because there is always something sexier or murkier to talk about than mere routine.
In 2023 Albarn told the presenters of the podcast Sodajerker on Songwriting – who do enjoy these details – that working Monday to Friday from 8.30am to 6pm “would be my ideal thing”, lamented a standard 10am industry start time and claimed he wouldn’t know what to do on weekdays if he wasn’t in the studio. If Gorillaz collaborators have “just got off a plane” or are in a different time zone, he will work evenings, but otherwise he won’t stay late, because he knows he’s going to come in tomorrow. As for needing to create the right conditions, it was “best to get rid of that” and “just be able to do it all the time”.
Occasionally there will be artists who go on hiatus but can pick up where they left off. For many others, the well runs dry soon after they abandon it. Their eventual return lacks potency – they’re not daily musicians any more and you can hear it.
Albarn’s fortune will, naturally, never be understood by those AI overlords who cast creative endeavour as a giant pain that can only alleviated by their soulless, voracious tools. But nothing AI spews out will ever have the resonance of The Empty Dream Machine or The Moon Cave or The Hardest Thing (featuring the voice of the late Tony Allen). No one will ever dance to AI like they dance at a Gorillaz gig.
My favourite description of how Albarn operates comes from Coxon, who told The Sunday Times in 2015 that his childhood friend was “a hose on full”. That’s a lovely image, and a subtly rich one – you shouldn’t stand in front of a hose on full unprepared for some force to hit.