Damon Albarn Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  1 ALL THAT YOU CAN DO IS WATCH THEM PLAY

  2 TRY, TRY, TRY

  3 COME TOGETHER

  4 SING

  5 WEAR ME DOWN

  6 GETTING SNARLED UP IN THE SUBURBS

  7 PRETTY ENGLAND AND ME

  8 JUBILEE

  9 LONDON LOVES

  10 EVERYTHING’S GOING JACKANORY

  11 BEST DAYS

  12 “DAMON’S GONE TO ICELAND”

  13 SUZI

  14 EVENTS TAKE A CINEMATIC TURN

  15 CARTOON BEGINNINGS & NEW ENDINGS

  16 GRINDING TO A HALT?

  17 DEMON DAYS

  18 THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE PUB

  19 A REASON TO EXIST

  20 THE ICE CREAM MAN COMETH

  DAMON ALBARN DISCOGRAPHY

  REFERENCES

  Plates

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many people have been instrumental in completing this book and our gratitude is warmly extended to Eddie Deedigan, Nigel Hildreth, Lucy Stimson, Pat Gilbert, John Dower, Andrew King, Philip Glassborough, Biffo, Rets, Ric Blaxill, Top of the Pops, Chris Twomey, Wiz (RIP), Chris Charlesworth, Hilary Donlon, Paul Mortlock, Nikki Russell, Brendan Coyle, Karen Johnson at EMI, Ellie at Food Records, Andy Linihan and the National Sound Archive, Dave Crook, Paddy at Badmoon, Roselle Le Sauteur. Where possible, the authors have tried to trace the owners of the memorabilia, photographs and ephemera, but some were unobtainable. To this end, they would particularly like to talk to Eddie Deedigan, Lucy Stimson, Nigel Hildreth. Early parts of this book have previously been published under the title, Blur: The Whole Story by Martin Roach.

  Martin Roach: Dedicated to Kaye for her inspirational and unswerving support and to my children, my very own great escape.

  David Nolan: Dedicated to the PSL, Jake, Scott and Bonnie … my boys and girls.

  Chapter 1

  ALL THAT YOU CAN DO IS WATCH THEM PLAY

  “No single person here can change the philosophy of this college.” The sentence rang out over the large class of first year drama students. Towards the back of the room, an 18-year-old Damon Albarn glanced across at his friend Eddie Deedigan and raised a sceptical eyebrow. After all, this was East 15, a notorious champion of the method acting school of drama, supposedly a cauldron of latent talent and artistic potential. However, in recent weeks, student dissent and absenteeism had risen in protest at the increasingly strict courses and under-funding. Damon and Eddie had been amongst those refusing to go to tap dancing for example, convinced it was not how they wanted to progress. Matters had come to a head and the director was strolling back and forth at the front of the class warning of the grave consequences for any student who didn’t tow the line. She repeated her opening statement. As she did Damon leant across to Eddie and whispered: “No single person here can change the philosophy of this college, eh? What if that single person is right?”

  * * *

  Damon’s somewhat Bohemian upbringing had influenced him in a multitude of ways, but it was this strong-minded self-belief that was his childhood’s greatest legacy. His father’s family was part of a long line of Lincolnshire Quakers and Damon’s grandfather had served time during Word War II for his conscientious objection. Paradoxically, his mother’s parents were farmers who accommodated prisoners of war to work on their land during the conflict. Despite their different backgrounds, Keith and Heather married and soon gave birth to Jessica, followed by Damon three years later on March 23, 1968, in Whitechapel Hospital. Outside in the big wide world of pop, the swinging sixties were in full effect and The Beatles had just scooped four Grammy Awards for their latest album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

  It was a great time to be in London, and the Albarns were deeply involved in the cultural melange of flower power. Damon’s mother was an accomplished stage designer who worked for the revolutionary Theatre Royal Stratford East company of Joan Littlewood. She worked on many productions, including one, Mrs Wilson’s Diary, whilst pregnant with Damon. She later went on to have several collections of her art exhibited and even made the glass bead necklace which Damon frequently wears around his neck.

  Damon’s father was also creatively talented. Having trained as an artist, he was the first person to show Yoko Ono’s art exhibition in London in 1966. Yoko was a highly acclaimed and controversial conceptual artist of ten years standing in her own right before she met her future Beatle husband. By exhibiting her work, Keith was placing himself at the centre of progressive art culture. Keith Albarn was more than happy to work in an environment where Yoko would ask people to “communicate with the other members by mental telepathy.” He later presented a BBC2 arts show with some aplomb, which became the pilot production for The South Bank Show. He also ran a shop in Kingly Street, just down the road from BBC Broadcasting House, in the heart of psychedelic London. The store was crammed with weird and wonderful furniture, decorations and other design creations of the flowering hippy culture. Like his wife, Keith Albarn also enjoyed a keen interest in stage design which was put to good use in his role as manager of 1960s jazz rock warlords Soft Machine. Founded in the year England lifted the World Cup, Soft Machine’s early art rock soon evolved through various personnel changes into a fine jazz rock fusion which, for many people, is still the standard against which all future forays in this field must be measured. Robert Wyatt, the mercurial singer who left in 1970, provided perhaps the band’s highlight with ‘Moon In June’ which mixed his distinct humour with a half-spoken, half-sung vocal, delivered in his very English accent.

  The band was a progressive theatrical outfit and Keith was therefore heavily involved as their residential concept stage designer. The most famous of Soft Machine’s various dadaist ‘happenings’ was one called ‘The Discotheque Interplay’ in Saint Aygulf, in 1967’s Summer of Love. Perhaps not surprisingly, the event achieved much notoriety after the local mayor banned it for making his coastline look like a “pigsty”. Back in the family home in Leytonstone, east London, the Albarn’s immersion in the psychedelic 1960s was fully visible when Damon arrived a year later. Outwardly a small Victorian terraced house, Chez Albarn was hardly Terry and June. The lounge was painted silver and all the rooms were full of the bizarre conceptual furnishings that his father sold in the shop. In amongst the fascinating clutter were presents from the various artists and performers who would visit, including some odd blue chairs presented by Cat Stevens after he renounced all his worldly goods and converted to Islam. From an early age, Damon and his sister were treated as young adults rather than small children and they were both always welcome at the many parties held at the house. On these occasions, their home would be filled with strange characters, musicians, artists and performers. As befitting the period, drugs were inevitably present, but the Albarns kept them strictly clear of the children and avoided hard drug use themselves. Years later at a Blur gig, journalists were surprised to see Damon smoking a joint whilst talking to his father – for Damon, this was never an issue, as he told Q magazine: “Pop culture was never something new to me. It never served as a reference point for rebellion. I was always allowed to stay up late around at parties with people smoking dope and getting pissed and taking drugs.” Damon also said, “I had a very open childhood, in many ways, which didn’t hold me back or fill me with masses of angst.”

  As Damon’s first ten years were spent in this liberal atmosphere, his impressionable mind quickly developed and greedily absorbed the colourful environment. Attending the George Thompson Primary School in Leytonstone, Damon was a perfectly normal, ordinary young child. He played football, occasionally listened to music, collected fossils and stuffed animals, enjoyed bird watching
and avoided girls. He went to his first musical, The Point, at the Camden Roundhouse aged seven, which was a similar production to the hugely successful Hair. Damon’s other key memory of his primary years was watching the silent monks from a nearby monastery walking through the woods near his home in the mornings. Such a progressive upbringing inevitably influences a child, and Damon is quite sure it fuelled his later lyrical obsession with the mundane, as he told The Face: “Normal life is fascinating. That’s where I want to be. I started my life in a fucking hippy forest with monks and chrysanthemums.”

  Damon’s first real upheaval came in his tenth year. He was taken on holiday to Turkey with some friends of the family for two months and when he returned his parents had moved house to Colchester. His father had landed an excellent job running the local art college, and his strong wage allowed the Albarns to move into a comfortable four-bedroom 14th century house. Professionally, it was a prestigious position and Keith Albarn reinforced his reputation by writing two books on Islamic design, including The Language Of Patterns. For Albarn Junior, however, the change was not so immediately beneficial. Having been more than comfortable in the multiracial, liberal atmosphere of London, where his family’s colourful ways were easily accepted, Damon now found himself in an staunchly provincial environment with stifling values and old-fashioned morals. Damon began attending Stanway Comprehensive School, and during his first year found that his extrovert character was not universally liked. A new boy at any school is at an immediate disadvantage, but the combination of Damon’s home life and his already expansive interests made him something of a ‘weirdo’ (or even worse, the ultimate sin, a ‘gay boy’). Fellow pupils do not recall him ever being bullied, however. By now, Damon had begun learning the violin, and was reading the works of Karl Marx; he also loved drama, listened to music and sported an ear-ring, none of which are likely to earn you much respect with tough football-playing, hard-drinking, women-chasing 12-year-old hell raisers. Conversely, Damon’s pretty features and extrovert nature attracted certain pupils to him, especially those with a similar interest in the arts.

  Shortly after Damon arrived at Stanway, the school employed a new Head of Music, Mr Nigel Hildreth, who brought with him an open attitude to music that Damon has since publicly recognised as vital to his development. Hildreth enjoyed a love/hate relationship with the young Albarn throughout Damon’s time at Stanway, recognising and encouraging his talent but being frustrated by Damon’s frequent lapses: “What is most noticeable from this period,” he told one of the authors of this book, “is that Damon’s music was very much secondary to his fervent interest in drama and an acting career. I recall his mother telling me that ‘Damon’s talents are not in music’ and he felt the same. Damon [thought] his skills were in acting rather than music and he was always heavily involved in our school productions. He made his stage debut in a show called Fist, which was a rock opera adaptation I had written of the Faust legend. As a third year, Damon was only in the chorus, but he was still very much into it. After that, we did a whole range of pieces in which Damon was always involved, with increasingly important roles. His enthusiasm was such that even if he was not on stage he would find his way backstage to be part of the crew. He played his first lead as Bobby in The Boyfriend, a 1920s musical by Andy Wilson, where he had to dance the Charleston. He also went on to play Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, and Jupiter, King of the Gods in Orpheus of the Underworld, which was his final performance. Interestingly, this particular part showed that although his acting talent was not in question, his singing was not technically up to operetta.” However, this production also showed the extent of Damon’s confidence – at one point the weapon he was supposed to be attacking someone with fell apart, but he saved the show from disaster by just calmly ad-libbing the whole of the next scene.

  For Damon, the actual performance was everything. This practical approach soon affected his ‘O’ level music studies, where he found difficulty applying himself to the theory-based course. Even on the preferred playing side, his school instrument – the violin – was soon superseded by his growing interest in the piano. Hildreth saw his talent grow but no more than most competent pupils: “He was quite an accomplished improviser on the piano, although about normal for a good student. It was never a case of ‘a star is born’. To be honest, he had some problems when playing from written music with timing, with his rhythm. Nevertheless, he played second violin regularly with The Colne Valley Youth Orchestra and with our own Stanway Orchestra, but was frequently chastised for not concentrating. This was particularly frustrating, because when it came to his own music he had no such problems. He took some jazz piano classes of his own volition with a local blind teacher called Rich Webb, and was always encouraged in his artistic endeavours by both his parents, who had an excellent attitude. Having said that, it is very difficult to see any outstanding glimmers at that stage, certainly not in his music – his compositions were good, but nothing outstanding. Where I saw the best of his work was definitely in his acting performance – his stage presence and ability were very definite. He had a tangible magnetism on stage and many of the teachers thought he could make it as an actor.”

  Gradually, Damon’s original compositions did develop: “He was always into composition as well. He developed this ability to extemporise and take from all areas of music, a trait which I feel has always been Blur’s major strength. Through a mixture of my encouragement and his own volition, he gained a basic understanding of musicals, classical, jazz, rock, orchestral and many other forms. You could see in his own compositions that he was using all of these reference points.”

  Away from classes, Damon loved his keyboard and rarely played his violin. The classical proclivity of his course work introduced him to many great writers, of whom Vaughan Williams was a particular favourite. To complement this, his parents’ assorted record collection opened his young ears to music that was unusually diverse for his age. Soft Machine were an obvious feature, but Kurt Weill, various jazz masters and even Rod Stewart were regular visitors to the Albarn turntable. At the opposite extreme, Damon spent six months in front of his bedroom mirror at one point pretending to be the dandy highwayman Adam Ant. However, it was the rise of Two Tone that had perhaps the biggest effect on Damon of any popular music and it was thus that he met Graham Coxon for the first time.

  Graham had first seen his future Blur cohort next to the music room Porta-kabin, but really took notice when Damon was singing the West Side Story number ‘Please Officer Krupke’ in assembly (“I thought he was a particularly extrovert chap.”). Shortly after he was subjected to his first taste of Damon’s ebullient confidence. The scene of the crime was the post-punk vacuum at the end of the seventies which gave Two Tone its birthplace. The biggest selling independent single of 1979 was ‘Gangsters’ by The Specials, released on their own 2-Tone record label, and this heralded a genuine chart invasion of similar Two Tone bands whose music was a curious mixture of modern styles drawing heavily on Jamaican ska. Technically proficient covers of Prince Buster, The Pioneers, The Skatalites and The Maytals were complemented by Two Tone’s own intelligent compositions, perhaps most notably when The Specials ‘Too Much Too Young’ topped the UK charts. Madness, The Beat and Selector were just a few of the classic bands of this period. It was not only the music that mattered either, as Terry Hall of The Specials told the press at the time “The clothes are almost as important. We’re not a mod band or a skinhead band, The rude boy thing is a real mixture.”

  Having the right trousers, the correct shoes and just the right size pork pie hat was crucial to being a cool rude boy. Graham Coxon’s brogues were cheap imitations, but luckily most pupils let this pass. But not Damon. Despite hardly knowing Graham, Damon walked over to him during a school trip one day and publicly ridiculed his cheap footwear. Damon, naturally, had the genuine article.

  Despite this odd start, the two found they had similar tastes in many things, particularly music, and very soon a close friendsh
ip developed. Both boys covered their school books in various Two Tone logos, with Madness and The Specials taking pride of place. Graham’s saxophone, drum and basic guitar playing matched Damon’s own musical aptitude and soon they were swapping records and going to youth clubs together in full Nutty Boy regalia. Although many of their female peers were into soul, the two friends were unimpressed. Damon still applauds these bands and cites 2-Tone as a major influence on the material he would later write: “Madness are immensely important folk heroes in British pop music.”

  At this stage, Graham’s greatest gift was his art – his drawing and paintings (which began with him copying Beatles record sleeves) were stunning. He is a genuinely talented artist, a fact which is only overshadowed by his position as one of the finest guitarists of his generation. Back then, although he and Damon were very alike, they had come from very different backgrounds. Whilst Damon’s house extolled all the liberal values of the late sixties, Graham’s father Bob was in the RAF. It was during one of many postings abroad that Graham was born, in a military hospital in Rintein, in Germany, four years after his sister Hayley. Coxon Senior was a bandsman, and a commendable clarinetist and saxophonist, so the household was a musical one, with Beatles records playing constantly. Graham was given his first instrument – a fife – when he was just six. His infant years were spent on an army estate in Berlin, until aged five, he moved to live with his grandfather next to a flyover in Derby. Life was fairly normal through his primary education until, like Damon, his tenth year brought upheaval. His father left the army and became a conductor for the Essex Constabulary Police Band, moving the family home to Colchester in the process. Bob Coxon also became a visiting music teacher at Stanway, and so that is where Graham was sent to continue his itinerant education.