Damon Albarn - Solo The Culture Show

I suppose because I have spent a lot of my life playing with huge great

groups of people, or being a cartoon... Or being in a band...

It's quite a difficult thing for me to do to make a solo record. It is

quite an amazing thing to think that he has had a career of 25 years and

this is his first album that is lyrically about his life. You

definitely get an insight into him on this. There is a lot of very

revealing and honest facets of him on display here. I think he's making

himself quite honourable with the record.

# we are Everyday Robots on our phones, in the process of getting

home... It became a record where I was very

much singing about my own experiences. How do we know that we

really exist, other than that beam of light which is our history. I

started going back to places which I felt might give me some sense of who

am I now and how do I feel about stuff. So I went back to

Leytonstone. Change here for London Underground services...

The first time I came back, when I came out of the tube, I literally

felt like a giant. Because all my memories are from up to the age of

nine. I grew up in 1970s multicultural London. From the

smells of food coming out of people's back kitchens, from the

people I went to school with, to the music, to the general flavour of the

place, I think that definitely played a big part in who I am. I

just heard you were brought up here. Yes, just down the road. You

still look the same! Still as hot as ever! This is Philippa Road where I

grew up. -- 's Brook Road. I lived here with my mum, my dad and my

sister. For a brief while, my uncle and his family lived upstairs. And a

bit later on, my auntie randomly moved in with a guy to live next

door. My mum worked with kids with learning disabilities, teaching

them. And my dad worked at the north-east London Polytechnic

teaching art. Keith Albarn is head of the Margate

project. What is it going to be like? It is a series of capsules.

The whole thing depends on the visitor and it is activated by the

visitor and comes to life by the visitor. Every time you come back to

this, it should be a very different adventure. Both my parents still

make art. My sister is the same. We are just one of those families where

that is what we did. I was pretty lucky in the sense that there didn't

seem to be many boundaries about what you could and could not do. I

suppose I grew up in that sort of environment. That more than anything

has informed to I am. This is where I grew up, number 21. Very happy

memories. I used to enjoy going down that coal chute, can you believe it?

I think I was just a very ordinary kid, I liked mucking about on my

bicycle. I just remember it being a really nice communal sort of

street. There was a synagogue over the other side. Leytonstone

represents to me a series of windows into other cultures that felt very

accessible. So when I got any opportunity to look through those

windows, I did. # on the Hollow ponds, set sail, in

the heatwave that hit us all, 1976...

Down there is the high road. We are sort of at the edge of Hollow ponds

now, which is really the catalyst for the whole record, really. It is

quite an eerie, eerie place. Imagine what it is like on a moonlit night.

When I came back here, everything started flooding back. 1976, anyone

who is my age or older would remember as being an incredible

summer. A place like this was like going on holiday. But I do remember

it being packed, packed, packed, packed full of people. People who

would not normally ever getting a pair of trunks were there. It was a

real coming out moment I think for London. London sort of saw itself

naked in a way that summer. Then it turned into a song really. 1976 was

such a strong date that I thought I could continue taking these

snapshots of important moments for me.

It is really important, when you are starting a new thing, whether it is

a book, an album, a painting or a creative process, you are sort of

stepping into, you need a moment where something gives you the

confidence to continue, that it is not just an empty page you are

staring at. That is what happened when I came here. It really had a

very strong effect on me. Look, they have all come to say hello to us.

Hello. This is the Pentecostal City Mission

Church. I used to cycle up here. I remember vividly stopping on a

Sunday, just sort of listening and this amazing sound used to come out

of this place. # Mr Tembo is on his way up the

hill, to tell you how he feels, where he is now isn't what he

planned, where he is now wasn't what he planned. Mr Tembo is on his way

up the hill with only this song to tell you how he feels, but to get

there, he will need a helping hand, where he is now, it wasn't what he

planned... The connection is a mad connection, but this little

elephant, Mr Tembo, that I met in Tanzania, the guys who look after

him, watch a lot of gospel on television and listen to it all the

time, so the elephant has grown up with gospel music. If it ever hears

the song, I would like it if it had a gospel flavour to it. Mr Tembo is

really honest. It is about an elephant that he saw. I think he

thought, do I want to show people this? Yes, definitely. It was very

authentic to me. I think it is quite a life affirming record and it has

got joyous qualities to it. We are on a bridge now that did not

exist when I lived here. I am looking at the skyline which

definitely did not exist when I lived here. My old road was cut in

half and this huge road was built which is kind of weird because this

leads up to Colchester, 55 miles up the road. When I moved to

Colchester, I felt like a real outsider. I did not fit in. And

everything changed. I think any kid that moves can't

help but be slightly affected by that. It was such a different

culture. Essentially, very Anglo-Saxon and quite conservative.

I would say almost the antithesis of Leytonstone. But it also had this

really kind of magical Englishness about it. They are my two

influences. Englishness and that multicultural nests.

As a kid, you had to have a bicycle otherwise you did not get anywhere,

so I did a lot of cycling. This is a mad little place. It has got what,

one, two, three, four... About 18 houses and three pubs. You know I

was talking about it being quite Anglo-Saxon around here, this is

actually the path up to my old house round the back. You get the gist. So

you imagine, coming from Leytonstone to hear, it was like... I used to do

my paper rounds in there. This is where we moved to, this place here.

It wasn't a bakery, obviously, but it is called the old bakery. And

that is my bedroom. That is where I lived, in that room. But this is

like the back alley of a pub, so you can imagine it was pretty lively at

night. I was basically, you are basically

on your own. My sister, there were a couple of other kids in the village

but it was quite a sort of, you know, not lonely but self

introverted. No, that is the wrong word as well. I am finding it quite

difficult to talk about this. There is so much of who I am here.

# When your body aches # When the dreams we keep

# And the bow goes up # Just live the dream

# It will be a silent day... # So, this is Aldham Church.

I had permission on Saturday mornings to come and play the organ.

This is the organ. My mum organised it. You know, there was no-one here

so I could kind of play what I wanted.

Quite a singular thing to be doing when you're a teenager, to be

sitting on your own in a church and be playing an organ. This is when I

sort of took classical music quite serious seriously. I had a piano

teacher that I went to every week. I enjoyed playing classical music, but

found it quite restricting. By the time I was 13, I was probably

playing in the cabin at school with Graham so we were thinking in those

terms. Not grand terms, but just, sort of, maybe getting a band

together at some point. I wouldn't have become musical I

don't think in the way that I did if I hadn't have moved here. Everything

changed. In my life, it was cataclysmic. Music and cycling in

Essex. # Golden brown

# Texture like sun... # We are going to Fiddler's Wood. This

being the countryside. It's one of many places I used to hang out. I

come back here a lot actually over the years trying to find a

particular tree that I used to, I don't know, sort of... How can you

explain it without sounding really odd? I suppose it is odd, but I had

a tree and I used to bury stuff underneath it. You know, just sort

of momentos and, I don't know, maybe sort of playing around with

schoolboy magic, just a very private kind of thing.

The reason why this has some special significance to me is related to

something that happened a few years late later when I was walking with

my mum in the wood. Locally, this wood's got a bit of a reputation as

being a bit sort of other worldly. That afternoon, I was walking with

my mum, coming to show her this tree that I'd made my own sort of little

special place. And we were standing by it and we suddenly realised there

was something slightly different about the space around it.

And I looked down and there was this huge great pentangle that had been

built around the tree. So you can imagine that that was kind of a bit

shocking really. It's really hard to articulate what it meant and I still

don't really understand what it meant but it did haunt me for many,

many years. That experience is sort of peppered over the album. That

singular thing. You know, it's not all just put into one song, it's the

feelings around it. My feelings about being back here, they seem

very sort of, they seem concentrated here.

# In the process of getting home # Looking like standing... #

We had to adapt the songs for that context. The streamlines were kind

of lifted from the original recordings. It's really about making

the songs breathe. The whole atmosphere of the record is this

beautiful space so you are really focussed on what the vocal is doing

and what Damon is singing about. # In the process of getting home...

# Damon clan rates and shares his

music. It's personal and he shares it. It's a shared experience and we

are all very keen to get across what he's trying to say within songs.

Good. Great. Like any enterprise, there's a lot of people involved.

It's not just me. It would be very lonely if it was just me. Pf

Two reasons so far. Birthday. Chelsea have just beaten Man U 3-1.

It's important to allow it to be a bit more multidimensional than just

your own thing, especially if it's very personal. It can get precious.

I'm always grabbing moments on my own and working on new stuff.

Song-writing is a solitary discipline anyway really. The basic

idea is something I do on my own in. That sense, it's not really vastly

different from what I've done all my life.

Sundance is obviously a place where new trends and premiers go. What

brings you here to showcase your record? That's an interesting

question. It's a good, healthy mix of independent and mainstream. I

suppose for someone like me, that's probably my natural environment.

Do you want a catch-up or anything? No, we are English. It's hard

talking about something I've not presented yet. I'm writing in its

infancy at the moment. Tomorrow night is my first public

performance. It's really, really hard to imagine what will happen.

If you over the years have liked my more sort of melancholic

introspective stuff, then you might like this record.

I'm delighted to introduce Damon Albarn. I've been a long-term fan of

his restless creative output from blur to Gorillaz from the Good to

Bad, and he's a solo independent artist. Please welcome to the stage,

Damon Albarn. MUSIC: Honourable lady low ponds

Leader of the MUSIC

Hollow Ponds... If you like him, you'll probably

love it. I suppose people could have the opposite reaction as well. This

is the difference between someone who's really artistic. You know,

it's like how far are you willing or able to reach in and how much of

that are you comfortable putting out there for people to see? For those

who give a, I'm not assuming anyone does, but hopefully there's a bit of

an insight into who I am. Otherwise, it's a neurotic, letch-handed middle

aged man talking nonsense out there into the void.

-- left handed middle aged man.