Damon Albarn joins Hanuman Welch on ALT CTRL Radio on Apple Music 1 to discuss the Gorillaz’ forthcoming album ‘Cracker Island’. He tells Apple Music how the concept of utopias inspired the album, shares how the group came to collaborate with the legendary Stevie Nicks, and more. Albarn revealed that Nicks replaced The Strokes singer Julian Casablancas in the studio.
Damon Albarn on The Concept of the Gorillaz’ Forthcoming Album ‘Cracker Island’…
Well, I bought this anthology on Utopias. So basically a collection of all the recent Utopias through time. It’s fascinating book. What’s interesting about Utopias is how dystopian some of them seem to us now. And this is very loose, conceptually. But I kind of sort of imagined each song being another sort of utopian island. That’s a collection of islands. Because then I suppose the only thing that connects all of these different utopias is the human imagination, and so you could see that… You could see imagination as being the ocean, and that these little islands are all kind of isolated. And Cracker Island, I suppose, is a place where a lot of these sorts of weird Anglo-Saxon residual kind of tropes that exist in America and in the UK, in Russia and everywhere. That was a sort of dystopian island, that idea. So I thought everyone who shared that idea could all go live happily ever after on Cracker Island. The future is today. The process of… The creation of the future is happening today. This is the idea. So utopia is it’s happening anyway.
Damon Albarn on How the Gorillaz’ Collaboration with Stevie Nicks Came To Be and Says it Was Originally Meant for Julian Casablancas…
Well, it was a demo that I’d done in London that I brought to Greg Kurstin. And we put it together very quickly, because there wasn’t a huge amount to do to it. And at first I was thinking of Casablancas for the voice, but that didn’t work out. Not for any… Just logistically and everything. And so, I don’t know. Somehow from Julian, it came to Stevie Nicks. I was amazed when Greg Kurstin said, “I can get Stevie Nicks.” In a way, one of the nice reasons for working with people from so many different eras is that it’s not a numbers game. It’s not like, “If I get this person, I will get this amount of numbers.” Which unfortunately, collaboration has turned into. Which is has made it somewhat generic, there I’d say. So this is the antithesis of that. This non-generic collaboration.
Damon Albarn on Twitter…
A previous utopia would’ve imagined a time when we could all share consciousness together, and how beautiful that would be. And now that we actually can, we realize how dystopian in many, many regards that is. This is my point.
