TRACK REVIEW: Damon Albarn - Royal Morning Blue

TRACK REVIEW:

Damon Albarn

PHOTO CREDIT: Aaron Richter/Contour by Getty Images

Royal Morning Blue

9.2/10

The track, Royal Morning Blue, is available from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY0xBLdyWng

RELEASE DATE:

22nd September, 2021

ORIGIN:

London, U.K.

LABELS:

13 under exclusive license to Transgressive Records Ltd

PRODUCERS:

Damon Albarn/Samuel Egglenton

The album, The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows, is available from 12th November, 2021. Pre-order here:

https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/damon-albarn/the-nearer-the-fountain-more-pure-the-stream-flows

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I get to focus on one of my favourite artists…

PHOTO CREDIT: Linda Brownlee

for this weekend’s review. I have been a fan of Damon Albarn since listening to Blur in the 1990s. They are one of my favourite bands ever. I have also followed Albarn in his Gorillaz guise. He is one of the most versatile and talented musicians in the world. It seems like he never rests and he is always creating something! In November, he is releasing his solo album, The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows. It follows 2014’s Everyday Robots. I think that Albarn will continue to make music with Gorillaz and on his own. I am not sure whether he has any plans for anything else in the coming year. You never know just what he will produce next and who he will work with. I am going to get to his new track, Royal Morning Blue, in a bit. I want to work up to that by sourcing some interviews that give us a greater impression of where Damon Albarn came from and what we can expect from his upcoming album. Last month, The Herald spoke with him. We get to find out more about Albarn’s early life, in addition to those early days with Blur:

“That is the culture he grew up in. Albarn was born in London in 1968. His mum Hazel was a theatrical set designer, his dad had been the manager of Soft Machine and went on to be a headmaster in Colchester where the family settled.

“I was brought up an internationalist and my dad’s dad was a conscientious objector. Both my parents were very much part of the sixties in their mindsets.”

As a result, he says, “I didn’t feel any sort of nationalism. I didn’t really understand what it was. I remember when I first went to comprehensive school, Scotland had been in the World Cup in ’78. I bought a Scotland top and went into school, and I got the s*** kicked out of me. I soon learnt about nationalism after that one.”

“That’s a true story. I didn’t know you weren’t allowed to support other teams. Literally, because it had never been part of my upbringing.”

Curious then that when Blur started what marked them out in the early 1990s was their studied Englishness, a reaction to their miserable experiences touring America at the start of the decade.

There was even a moment before Cool Britannia reduced it to caricature when that idea of Englishness, drawing on English pop of the 1960s, felt progressive. That feels a very long time ago.

“Yeah, well, Brexit opened Pandora’s box and a lot of things our generation thought we were growing out of …That ignorant racism and bigotry … We thought we were progressing from that. But now it’s been given the platform to continue its dull, ignorant belligerence”.

When we were in my parent’s garage in Colchester and we first played Sing and She’s So High and I suddenly felt like I had moved on from being in local Battle of the Bands in Colchester and there was a chance that we might be able to fulfil our dreams, our real crazy Top of the Pops Whistle Test, TV show dreams. We could be a bit like The Who. That’s the best moment. Because ever since then I’ve just been working really.”

He laughs. “I’ve been busy”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Gullick

I always associate Damon Albarn with his younger days in Blur. He has accomplished a lot since then, though my mind travels back to the classic Blur days and this incredible frontman delivering songs that were unlike anything else. It seemed like, then, anything was possible and there were no obstacles. Even though Blur could be quite reflective, I always associate them with being youthful and spirited. As a solo artist, there is more contemplation, calm and reflection in the music. Albarn is fifty-three now…so perhaps middle-age has accounted for that. Even so, Albarn is restless and always on the go! Coming back to the interview from The Herald, the subject of growing older came up:

“At 53 Albarn is well into the middle of his life. Is he onboard with the idea of ageing?

“I think you just have to start coming to terms with the finality of life. In a way that’s quite liberating because once you get over that … I mean, who knows how we face death until we face it? There’s nothing else getting in your way, really, other than death. So, if you see it like that, it’s very liberating. There’s one thing you can’t avoid, so head towards it joyously.”

Joyously? “Well, yeah, of course. Why not? Rather live a life of joy than to fear the end.”

I have wondered sometimes if your Stakhanovite appetite for work is in any way a raging against the dying of the light, Damon?

“Raging against death? By being super busy?” The idea amuses him. “I think there’s definitely an element of avoidance by being super busy, obviously.

“I love making music. It’s just a joy. I’d rather live a life in joy than not.”

Does he take time off? If so, what does he do with it? “I love reading, but falling asleep on the sofa is more what I do. I like cooking.”

Is he any good at it? “I’m a very good cook.”

I’m surprised Celebrity MasterChef hasn’t come calling, I say. “I can’t be f****** bothered to go on TV. Why would you do that? No way would I go on telly. I’ve been asked to do so many things over the years. All those talent shows. MasterChef, I’ve been asked on that. The dancing one. Celebrity Come Dancing”.

I will concentrate on Albarn’s solo output soon. I feel it is quite useful to know about his other projects. That way, we get a fuller impression of his talent. Back in October, Gorillaz released their seventh studio album, Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez. It is clear that Albarn is one of the most innovative and influential artists around. With Gorillaz, he has helped create something historic and hugely popular. In this DAZED interview from last year, Albarn discussed his time in Gorillaz and Blur:

“Reflecting on how that teenage dream became a full-blown reality via the runaway success of Blur in the 90s, Albarn lights up. “The mad thing for me is I’ve been in Gorillaz a lot longer than I was in Blur,” he says with a hearty, gold-toothed grin. “When you’re in an indie band it’s like a marriage, you know? You’re married to everything about it. I was just at the front being a fucking knobhead frontman for quite a long period of time.”

Frontman theatrics aside, it’s the sheer finesse of Albarn’s songwriting that made Blur one of the most vital British bands of a generation. Though it may not have been outwardly obvious, his transition from one guise to the other can be traced back to what he calls the first Gorillaz song – “On Your Own”, from Blur’s 1997 self-titled album. “It makes me smile when I think how far I thought I was reaching by doing that,” he says. “Because at the beginning I didn’t play guitar because Graham (Coxon) was just so good. It was still very much in the distance but I felt like there was another door opening for me.”

IN THIS PHOTO: Damon Albarn alongside his Gorillaz bandmate, Jamie Hewlett/PHOTO CREDIT: Thomas Chéné

As that door came fully ajar via their eponymous debut album three years later, Gorillaz sat down with Dazed for their first-ever cover feature. In it, Jamie Hewlett AKA Murdoc Niccles from the then-anonymous cartoon band declared: “If the music works that’s all that counts, and we don’t like to think of people as stupid.” Does Albarn, alias 2-D, agree with that sentiment two decades on? “I do,” he says. “I was always accused of being a bit of a dilettante back in the day. I never really saw it like that. I was just interested in lots of different things, and I wanted to see how I could somehow articulate my own thing through other things. No one actually comes up with something that reinvents music.”

He may not have reinvented music in the intervening years but Albarn, backed by Hewlett’s singular aesthetic, has come close by honing the globetrotting hit machine that is Gorillaz. Thanks to multi award-winning albums including 2005’s Demon Days and 2010’s Plastic Beach – releases that delivered ubiquitous singles like “Dare” and “Feel Good Inc” – they have long been officially recognised as the most successful virtual act of all time. And that’s really just for starters. In much the same way Blur progressively expanded their sonic palette while some of their more noteworthy peers creatively stagnated, Gorillaz have defined, and redefined, the limits of what a band can be”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Jess Shurte

As a creative who never seems to sit still, lockdown was busy for Albarn. Everything has led to his solo material and a new album. The Times chatted with Albarn in October about the new Gorillaz album. Even though it was an unusual situation and restrictive one, Albarn managed to adapt:

“We shouldn’t take this as a sign that Albarn is withdrawing from the limelight, though. Come off it. This is a man who, since the death of James Brown, has a decent claim to being the hardest-working person in showbiz. As well as being a key member of Blur, the virtual band Gorillaz, the Africa Express collective and two supergroups, the Good, the Bad & the Queen, and Rocket Juice & the Moon, he has created stage extravaganzas with English National Opera, the National Theatre and Manchester International Festival, plus a new show in Paris called Le Vol du Boli. He says he gets his creativity from his father, an artist, and his mother, a theatrical set designer. During his childhood in Essex and east London his parents “were always busy creating and doing things. And hopefully it’s rubbed off on to the next generation.” Missy, 21, wants to work in fashion, and his nine-year-old niece played “mad trumpet” on the new Gorillaz album, Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez.

Albarn recorded the bulk of it in Devon during lockdown, with guest singers completing their parts remotely and sending them in. I’m not meant to call it an album; it’s more like a conveyor belt of music that serves Albarn’s prolific way of working. Each song is released when it’s ready and accompanied by an animated video from Jamie Hewlett, his partner in Gorillaz for 20 years, featuring the cartoon members of the band: Noodle, 2D, Murdoc and Russel.

PHOTO CREDIT: Studio Wane

The first batch is collected together as season one and features Robert Smith of the Cure on a swirling lockdown anthem called Strange Timez and other guests including Skepta, Beck, Peter Hook, the Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara and Elton John, who duets with Albarn on a psychedelic torch song called The Pink Phantom.“It came from a true story that I told Jamie about a year ago. And if you’d like,” Albarn says coquettishly, “I will tell you the story.” Please do. “Well, when I was seven, I was picked up from my primary school, George Tomlinson in Leytonstone, by Elton John’s pink Rolls-Royce Phantom V. I really was. It wasn’t driven by Elton. It was driven by his percussionist, Ray Cooper, who was a family friend of my mum and dad. So nothing strange about it. But the reason why he had this ridiculous car was because Elton had done a tour of the USSR and had only been paid in coal, I believe, and couldn’t convert it into money. He consequently had no money to pay his musicians, so he had to give them things and Ray, fortunately or unfortunately, got the pink Phantom. And obviously for a kid to be picked up from school in such a striking automobile was something I’ve never forgotten.”

Was this all news to John? “Yeah, and he claims it wasn’t pink. He might have said it was fuchsia. But for the sake of my sanity, it remains pink.” The numbers don’t quite add up either — John toured the USSR in 1979, when Albarn was 11. He has never let the facts get in the way of a good song, though.

His other lockdown project was co-creating Le Vol du Boli, a show featuring musicians from Mali, Congo and Burkina Faso, at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Despite coronavirus restrictions they welcomed 1,000 socially distanced people for each of the three performances. Albarn says that he woke up every day and thought: “Right, today’s the day someone rings in sick, and the whole thing gets cancelled. But it didn’t happen”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Linda Brownlee

This brings me to the album, The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows. One can feel a lot of beauty, landscape and stunning geography on the album. It is no surprise, as Albarn has a house on outskirts of Reykjavik. He also has a house in Devon. Rather than getting an album that is quite intense, colourful and edgy – like we might expect from Gorillaz -, The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows looks set to be a more lush, gentle and immersive listen. NME interviewed Albarn back in June to discuss some of the elements of The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows:

“Quite right. So, this is one of the first interviews you’ve done about your new solo album ‘The Nearer The Fountain, The More Pure The Stream Flows’?

“Yes, very good. Do you think it’s a bit of a long title?”

A little, but people are just going to shorten it ‘The Nearer The Fountain…’, aren’t they?

“Yes, but don’t you want to know what happens nearer the fountain?”

I do! I understand this album started out as a set of orchestral pieces inspired by the landscapes of Iceland. What is it about these places that first drove you to pen music about them?

“Well, the best thing to do there is to show you the view from the window. It’s slightly unorthodox for a Zoom interview, but sometimes words aren’t enough…” [Damon shows NME the extremely beautiful view he snapped in Iceland].

Very well. I’m going to screen-grab this, Damon, if that’s alright?

“Go for it.”

That’s really wonderful. So what did looking at that every day stir up inside you?

“It’s a nice place to meditate on the elements and particles. I’d been dreaming of making music while looking out of that window, when my friend from the Lyon Festival offered me the very tempting proposition: ‘You can do whatever you want’. I immediately had something that I never thought would be feasible, so I organised some musicians, string players, three bass trombones, some percussion and keyboards into an interesting arrangement.”

Was there anything special in the arrangements to capture Iceland’s uniquely supernatural feel?

“I found a stone marimba made by this guy who lives in the mountains outside of Reykjavik. He literally finds each note as a stone in mountain streams. Just to make a pentatonic scale can take years. It’s a beautiful thing. There’s no manufacturing; it’s just him knocking on all these stones found in streams to find the right note. Anyway, I digress too much for our snappy little interview. Where were we?”

You were telling us how the arrangements came together. How did heading back to your home in Devon and living in lockdown shape the record?

“Obviously March came last year and that was the end of everything. What I was left with was all of this great rehearsal recording from just a mic in the room. I just felt like the beginning of this year was so grim and I had to do something to lift me out of those, I wouldn’t call doldrums, but storms – those terrible north wind storms that you get down by the sea in Devon sometimes. They come down off the Atlantic from Greenland, they spin round, and they’re brutal. I got together with a couple of my old friends who I’ve been making music with for a long time – [former Verve guitarist] Simon Tong and Mike Smith – and just tried to nail everything into some kind of cohesive meditation about particles, now and the future.”

So when the time came to turn all this material into these 10 pop songs, what were you drawing from lyrically?

“While [I was] staring out of the window in Iceland, the wind was so strong that the windows would start to move. It was so freezing that sometimes you’d be staring at the rain and while you’re watching it, it suddenly turns to snow. I took some of these real-time, extreme elemental experiences and then tried to develop them into, as you say, more formal pop songs with that as my source. I wanted to see where that would take me. Sometimes it took me down to Uruguay and Montevideo. Other times I went to Iran, Iceland or Devon. With travel being curtailed, it was kind of nice to be able to make a record that strangely put me in those places for a moment or two”.

There is a really interesting interview from National Geographic that hones in on themes of nature and the elements. I think that his new album will be quite elemental and nature-inspired. Albarn spoke about turning the atmospheres of Iceland and Devon into music – in the shadow of the pandemic:

“One less positive aspect of this inspiration was articulated in the Gorillaz album Plastic Beach, released in 2010 at the peak of the 'virtual' band's fame: an environmentally-veined statement piece which Albarn described to BBC Radio 4's Today programme as “the beginning of a meditation on the state of our oceans.”
Now, the 53-year old musician's experience of spending lockdown overlooking this same coast – as well as another he calls home, outside Reykjavik in Iceland – has culminated in a new album of naturally-charged, intimate music. All inspired, he says, by the outlook from these two seemingly disparate vantage points. But according to Albarn, speaking to National Geographic UK via Zoom from his London studio, the two are – like everything else – connected.

Tell us about your connection with Iceland.

National Geographic is the reason I went there in the first place. There was an article about black sand beaches [in Iceland]. I’d had recurring dreams as a child about flying over black sand beaches… so when I made that connection, I thought ‘well, I definitely have to go there.’ So I took my typewriter and guitar and booked into a hotel, and very quickly realised that it was a very special place. I was so lucky – I went pre-tourism. Now there’s a bar to drink at in the middle of the blue lagoon. When I first went there was just a wooden hut to change in. And that’s all in 20 years.

PHOTO CREDIT: Axel Hoedt for Zeit Magazin

What inspired you about that place in particular?

The space. I’d never been somewhere that had so much empty space. Where you could easily escape humanity. You could be in a bar in Reykyavik then half an hour later you could be in the most deserted kind of place you can imagine. The whole genesis of [this album] really came from wanting to make a record staring out of my window in Iceland. And that evolved into a series of workshops with some fantastic musicians, in collaboration with my friend Andre de Ridder, the conductor and orchestral arranger. We gathered in my house during various seasons. During the darker months, we’d get there around half nine, everyone would have a coffee, then get in place and we’d literally just play as the day emerged.

Right back to Blur's Parklife, your songs have always been products of their time in terms of the stories they tell. What story were you telling with this album?

Initially it was just, ‘how far can you take an ensemble into nature without literally abandoning your instruments and just being in it?’ It was about getting people to be really sensitive to the way the water changed, the clouds came in, the light, the rain… almost horizontal rain, then very gentle rain, almost mist. Or moments where a storm would come in, and the temperature would drop really dramatically and the rain would turn to snow, and amazing things like the northern lights appearing. (Related: Images of winter magic from Europe's frozen north.)

Then the wildlife. The habits of the wading birds, the seals, the occasional whale that would be out in the bay. And the physical landscape: the mountain Esjan, and far in the distance the glacier and volcano of Snæfellsjökull. Just a wonderful tableau to meditate on. It was amazing really. Once people accepted that there were no written notes, and everything was driven by the actual dynamic of the environment, the music started to emerge. And I suppose the songs are sort of an articulation of that experience.

How do you go about turning what you see into sound?

That’s just, you know, the joy of making music and playing with your environment while you’re making it. These strange synapses that create weird thoughts and images.

How did the pandemic inform it?

In lockdown, it did enable me to sort of travel, to go back to places that were haunting me. Like the desert in Iran, or the tower of Montevideo [the Palacio Salvo, a building in the south American city designed by Italian architect Mario Palanti in the early 1930s]. So in that sense it was a unique record. Inevitably if you spend days and days looking out of the window, either behind it or outside, you just really tune in to that small space and that perspective looking out-out-out.

Are you hopeful for humans? As a species?

I’m hopeful that eventually we will realise how fragile everything is. [But] there’s so much noise. Social media is not helping, because… it stops... a whole new generation... just listening, and being quiet, and not having anything other than what’s around them. They just have what’s in front of them in their hand [mimics a phone], and everything that comes out of that – the energy that comes out of that – it’s a kind of massive great joke. The amount of energy that’s needed to fuel the mechanics of social media is exactly what we shouldn’t be doing.

Everyday Robots, from your last solo record, includes the lines: We are everyday robots on our phones... looking like standing stones.

Yeah. I sing about my fears. It’s cathartic for me to sing about what I fear and what I imagine could happen... if things become how I imagine them. It’s about tipping points. We are starting to accept that we are tipping over an edge. But our cultural expectations and dreams are still massively incoherent to the reality about what we need to do”.

I will come to the new single from Damon Albarn soon. I am coming back to the Herald interview to wrap up before getting to the review. The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows has these improvisational elements. It seems that Albarn was keen for orchestration that represented the weather and landscape of Iceland. Maybe, too, the darkness and uncertainty of the pandemic and lockdown affected the sound of The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows:

“Albarn’s new album is based on an idea he had to take orchestral musicians to the front room of his house in Iceland and “play the weather and the outline of the landscape.”

And so that’s what he did, mounting three workshops, one in the last of the summer light in September the others in the depth of winter in Iceland when it’s almost entirely nocturnal.

“It’s just an amazing process for making music and I recorded hours and hours of very interesting orchestral improvisation. And then I had to leave it at the beginning of last year. But it was just such a haunting experience, in such a stark contrast to how the world metamorphosised within a month or so.”

Ah yes, the pandemic. He spent most of lockdown in his home in Devon, where he started thinking about making an album out of those instrumental “atmospheres.” (They weren’t songs yet, he says).

In the press notes he talks of the album taking him on a dark journey, I say. How dark?

Albarn begins to talk about John Clare’s haunted, mournful poem Love and Memory. “Such an ode to the death of somebody. I’ve always loved his poetry. I love his story. I love what he represented to the beginning of the 19th century; the anti-aristocrat poet, someone who was self-aware and into that kind of English magic realism.

“So, I’ve always gravitated to his poems, and I had the line From Love and Memory, ‘The nearer the fountain, more pure the stream flows.’ I was using it for the title for what I was doing in Iceland.

“But then I felt there was much more in this poem that means something to me at the moment through personal loss and just that sense of loss of a generation … Do you know what I mean? All these kids not able to express themselves.”

Because of the moment we’re living through? “Yeah, exactly. So, when I sing, I don’t necessarily sing about the death of a young person. It’s more the death of that moment. People’s dreams”.

This takes me to Royal Morning Blue. The introduction to the song is really beautiful and interesting. There is the sound of a what appears to be synthesisers. Piano plinks and there is a gentle electric guitar strum. The combined effect is wonderful! I said earlier how Alban’s new album will be less energised and layered as a Gorillaz album. There is quite a bit going on at the start of Royal Morning Blue. The introduction builds these images and impressions. One transports themselves to a different place. Every listener will have their own thoughts and escape. Albarn is backed by a driving drum beat as he delivers the first verse: “Rain turning into snow/You put on your robes and disappear/Into new realities/Thought and memory/Stay by your side”. The lyrics are quite oblique - so it is unsure whom he is speaking about and what the inspiration is. His vocal is typically impactful and full of emotion. I have come back to the song a few times in order to work out the meaning and possible relevance of those lines. There is a definite energy and surge from the composition. The synth sound provides plenty of weather and atmosphere. I sort of consider the song to be about the environment and how things are changing. Some might look at it as being about the breaking of a new day, though I pick up on fears about the changing climate and what impact that is having on us. The chorus shed more light in that sense: “Royal, royal morning blue/You are saved/And nothing like this had ever happened before”. I guess one can have a different viewpoint. It is interesting how Albarn writes, so that everyone has their own impression and theory.

I think the composition is one of the most interesting aspects of the song. It seems like there is a string instrument in the mix with the synthesiser. Rousing, funky, glacial, sunny and hypnotic all at once, it is a brilliant sound. I wonder about my theory regarding the song and its meaning. I have not read about Albarn explaining Royal Morning Blue. I keep coming back to the idea of the environment and climate: “Running out of things/Sent to give us wings/To fly away”. Albarn’s voice is powerful and beautiful the whole way through the song. Maybe Royal Morning Blue is more about a general feeling or person. The final words are among the most well-delivered and memorable: “At the end of the world/Stay by my side/At the end of the world/Stay by my side/Royal morning blue”. I have spun Royal Morning Blue a few times. It is a song that grows and expands the more one listens. It is so full of imagery and possibilities. Maybe the lyrical truth and story is not as important as the general feeling and impact of the song. Its aura. A typically assured, accomplished and memorable track from Damon Albarn, I look forward to seeing what The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows contains and whether there will be other songs such as Royal Morning Blue. A fantastic offering from a much-anticipated album, there is no denying Damon Albarn is one of most hard-working and important artists. He has this passion and love of music that results in so many different and interesting projects! His solo work is among his best. I look forward to seeing what…