More comments from Damon and Jamie about the Gorillaz third album
More quotes about Gorillaz third album plans have emerged from further Monkey promo interviews that Damon and Jamie have given to the Canadian press.
In an interview with the Toronto Star newspaper, the interviewer noted that 'Albarn and Hewlett hope to begin work on the follow-up to Gorillaz' excellent Demon Days sometime in January' but mentioned that they wouldn't be drawn on the specifics of guests who might work on the album (with one exception, see below). The following extract from the interview was also printed.
"I want to work with an incredibly eclectic, surprising cast of people," says Albarn. "But the nice thing after having done Demon Days is that there aren't a lot of people who say, `No, I don't want to do that.' So we've got a shit choice. It's just up to us to use that wisely."
"I'd like to get Bruce Willis involved in this one," offers Hewlett.
"Involved in whatever way we can have him involved. Something action-based. I just think its would be really funny to get Bruce Willis involved in a Gorillaz album and I'll bet you there's a perfect way to do it."
Read the full interview on the newspaper's website here.
In an interview with the National Post newspaper, Damon answered "We're going to do another Gorillaz record" when asked what he would do next. Jamie mentioned that Monkey had taught the pair "more about what we do, musically and artistically". "That’s a great place to come at when we come to another Gorillaz album. It doesn’t have to be animation and music.", he added.
Read the full interview on the newspaper's website here.
Finally, shakermaker113 sends the news that Damon will be on the Canadian tv show 'The Hour' with George Stroumboulopoulos on Thursday on the CBC tv channel, talking about Monkey - but maybe we'll be treated to some Gorillaz mentions as well. Check Gorillaz-Unofficial after the show airs for the full lowdown. The show will be available to watch online on the CBC site after the television airing and we'll have a link to that as well.
MUSIC
TheStar.com | entertainment | Gorillaz pair collaborates on Mandarin-language opera
Gorillaz pair collaborates on Mandarin-language opera
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Sep 23, 2008 04:30 AM
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Ben Rayner
Pop Music Critic
Something simian this way comes once again from Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, but it's of a decidedly different breed than Gorillaz.
The forward-thinking pair - one half the sometime-lead-singer of Blur, the other the cartoonist and animator who gave us Tank Girl - drops a curious new multimedia project on these shores today, the soundtrack to a Mandarin-language opera entitled Monkey: Journey to the West.
The opera opened at the Manchester International Festival last June and opens Nov. 8 at the O2 in London, directed by Chen Shi-Zheng, scored entirely by Albarn and featuring characters, sets and costumes designed by Hewlett. It'll be some time before North American audiences get to witness the stage show, but the soundtrack - a curious concoction mixing modern electronics with a full orchestra and rigorously composed in adherence to the five-note Chinese musical scale - offers a taste of the modern spin the three collaborators have put on an adaptation of a 16th-century Chinese novel.
"I think we were told it was going to be six months' work, and it became a lot more work than we'd ever imagined," laughs Hewlett, who was in town last week with Albarn for a day of press. The two have devoted a large chunk of the past four years to Monkey, much of that time spent travelling to China to "get our heads around" the country.
Even without the culture shock, it would have been an arduous learning process - Albarn, for instance, is still reeling from the "hopelessly depressing and suicidal experience" of directing an 85-piece orchestra to perform his compositions - but the two chums never flinched at the challenge.
"We have such a great collaboration because we both believe we can do whatever we want with what we have," says Albarn, who first teamed with Hewlett to create the highly successful "cartoon band" Gorillaz in 2001.
Monkey plays at the O2 until Dec. 5 and will eventually "travel the world on its own, without us caretaking it" if successful enough, Hewlett says.
Once freed from their operatic duties, Albarn and Hewlett hope to begin work on the follow-up to Gorillaz' excellent Demon Days sometime in January. For now, they're close-mouthed about the musical guests who will be involved.
"I want to work with an incredibly eclectic, surprising cast of people," says Albarn. "But the nice thing after having done Demon Days is that there aren't a lot of people who say, `No, I don't want to do that.' So we've got a great choice. It's just up to us to use that wisely."
"I'd like to get Bruce Willis involved in this one," offers Hewlett.
"Involved in whatever way we can have him involved. Something action-based. I just think its would be really funny to get Bruce Willis involved in a Gorillaz album and I'll bet you there's a perfect way to do it."
Gorillaz Monkey around: Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett on their new album
Posted: September 22, 2008, 6:48 PM by Brad Frenette
Music, Continental Riff
By Brad Frenette
Damon Albarn’s career reads like a roadmap to some musical no-man's land:
• Start a pop band (Blur);
• Then, turn into an indie/hip-hop/dub “virtual” group, Gorillaz;
• From there, The Good, The Bad and The Queen, a supergroup featuring, among others, Tony Allen, the drummer that helped create Afrobeat;
• And then, record an album of Malian guitar music.
Rather than lead to obscurity, however, his trip has helped shed the image of Albarn-as-tabloid-star and build the image of Albarn-as-musician.
Following the trajectory, his latest opus - a Mandarin opera based on the 500-year old Chinese allegorical novel by Wu Cheng’en called Journey to the West - doesn’t seem so haphazard.
The opera debuted in Manchester last summer, and teamed Albarn with his Gorillaz confederate, artist Jamie Hewlett, who provided the visuals.
Under the name Monkey, the former (and future) Gorillaz are releasing an album based on the stage show. The compositions are esoteric, but immediately gripping; Albarn and his orchestra tiptoe between traditional Chinese music and a globalized caricature of it. Under it all, the Gorillaz lurk, with their mischievous beats and sinister rhythms.
Sitting in a park in Toronto on an early autumn morning, Albarn and Hewlett discussed the new album, blending cultures and which simian moniker they’ll be recording under next:
National Post: Not everybody is familiar with Journey to the West.
Damon Albarn: That’s reason enough to try to introduce it to our generation. A TV show ran in the early ‘80s called Monkey. It was very fresh to us.
Jamie Hewlett: That was the first introduction to Chinese culture we had as eleven year olds. We were contacted by Alex Poots, who is head of the Manchester Festival... [who] asked us if we’d fancy doing an opera of Monkey. [We said] we’ll go to China, and see what we think. We’ll meet Chen Shi-Zheng [director of the opera]. And we travelled around China with him.
NP: Was this the first time you guys had been to China?
Albarn: I’d only been very briefly on my way to Mongolia.
NP: Did you feel you had to immerse in the culture to really understand the story?
Albarn: You have to bear in mind they went through the Cultural Revolution where everything was banned. Quite interestingly, for the director, Shi-Zheng, Journey was very important to him. It was one of the books his family kept under the mattress. He witnessed his mother being shot, while at a rally. I think he was five. In front of him.
Hewlett: She had a white dress on, and they shot - accidently - they shot into the crowd, and they shot her through the heart. She bled to death in front of him. His memory is watching her white dress turn red.
Albarn: And his father was sent away to labour camp. He was a street kid who eventually escaped to the west.
Hewlett: That was for me - when he told us that story - that was the point when I felt like - Ok, he’s the real deal. My youngest boy was six at the time. And I try to imagine him on the streets of Beijing, eating out of dustbins.
Albarn: So him coming to us with the idea of resurfacing Monkey was loaded with a lot. You bear that in mind, you travel around, you get your orientation. And then you come to the inevitable question of: What does this mean to myself, coming from the West to the East? For us, it was a journey to the East. But then again, if you travel to the west long enough, you end up in the east. All these things are extremely circular. Then I made the decision that it had to be in Mandarin. Even though I don’t speak Mandarin, fans of it, it was very inportant to keep it in Mandarin.
Hewlett: It’s a story we all know anyway. Even if you’ve never read Journey to the West, it’s a story that’s been told in many different ways.
Albarn: But in making the record the most important things was with Mandarin, you’re going to dig up a lot of very old prejudices. And essentially if this record was done in English and made by a young band, the perspecitve would be enritrely different. When you hear it in another language, immediately barriers go up. If it’s not in a straight pop song format, other barriers go up. So to me, that was why I made the record.
Hewlett: Also, to see if we can progress.
Albarn: If you can’t listen to this, then what does that say about you?
NP: Do you think this record could be equally enjoyed by your kids and kids of the same age in rural China?
Hewlett: I like to think so. It’s all a matter of listening to it in its entirety and you’ll either like it or you won’t, no matter where you are or where you’re from.
Albarn: I know people are surprised when they hear it. But look, a lot of people can’t be fuckin’ asked to spend a bit of time with anything these days. So to be asked to listen to a album of that length, you just have to hope that they hear it. If you can do that without interruptions, it is, its a bit of a journey. It’s not sound bites.
NP: Even without the context of the visuals?
Hewlett: It works from the moment and you hear the first bit of a song and see the visuals of Monkey [in the album’s booklet]. Then, you want to jump in and hear more. It’s a great story. If they made a movie of it, it would be 100 times better than Lord of the Rings. It really would. It’s got sex, violence, monsters, comedy. It’s got everything.
NP: What about a film - would you guys want to be in on that?
Albarn: A lot of people have...I’m sure there’ll be several films made. We’re gettin close to that. In a way, we start from a different point. There are several parallels with what we do. I think we’re unique in how we work so in a way if we do it any other way.
Hewlett: With Shi-Zheng it was great. We connected with him.
Albarn: It would have been impossible for us to do something like this in essentially a strange culture, unless we had a fantastic guide...through the mindfield of getting it wrong. At the source of all these things are very human traits. And they don’t change wherever you go on the planet.
NP: What’s next for you?
Albarn: We’re going to do another Gorillaz record.
NP: Did Journey to the West change how you collaborate?
Hewlett: We just learned more about what we do, musically and artistically. That’s a great place to come at when we come to another Gorillaz album. It doesn’t have to be animation and music.
NP: Do you each do your own thing, then meet up again?
Hewlett: I sit upstairs, he sits downstairs [in their London studio]. We live across the road from each other, we hang out, our kids play and we’re kind of on the same wave length. We rarely have a conversation about a master plan. We do have those, but not every Sunday...
• Monkey: Journey to the West releases in North America Tuesday.
Click here to return to news index
Click here to submit a news story
In an interview with the Toronto Star newspaper, the interviewer noted that 'Albarn and Hewlett hope to begin work on the follow-up to Gorillaz' excellent Demon Days sometime in January' but mentioned that they wouldn't be drawn on the specifics of guests who might work on the album (with one exception, see below). The following extract from the interview was also printed.
"I want to work with an incredibly eclectic, surprising cast of people," says Albarn. "But the nice thing after having done Demon Days is that there aren't a lot of people who say, `No, I don't want to do that.' So we've got a shit choice. It's just up to us to use that wisely."
"I'd like to get Bruce Willis involved in this one," offers Hewlett.
"Involved in whatever way we can have him involved. Something action-based. I just think its would be really funny to get Bruce Willis involved in a Gorillaz album and I'll bet you there's a perfect way to do it."
Read the full interview on the newspaper's website here.
In an interview with the National Post newspaper, Damon answered "We're going to do another Gorillaz record" when asked what he would do next. Jamie mentioned that Monkey had taught the pair "more about what we do, musically and artistically". "That’s a great place to come at when we come to another Gorillaz album. It doesn’t have to be animation and music.", he added.
Read the full interview on the newspaper's website here.
Finally, shakermaker113 sends the news that Damon will be on the Canadian tv show 'The Hour' with George Stroumboulopoulos on Thursday on the CBC tv channel, talking about Monkey - but maybe we'll be treated to some Gorillaz mentions as well. Check Gorillaz-Unofficial after the show airs for the full lowdown. The show will be available to watch online on the CBC site after the television airing and we'll have a link to that as well.
MUSIC
TheStar.com | entertainment | Gorillaz pair collaborates on Mandarin-language opera
Gorillaz pair collaborates on Mandarin-language opera
Email story
Choose text size
Report typo or correction
Email the author
License this article
Sep 23, 2008 04:30 AM
Be the first to comment on this article...
Ben Rayner
Pop Music Critic
Something simian this way comes once again from Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, but it's of a decidedly different breed than Gorillaz.
The forward-thinking pair - one half the sometime-lead-singer of Blur, the other the cartoonist and animator who gave us Tank Girl - drops a curious new multimedia project on these shores today, the soundtrack to a Mandarin-language opera entitled Monkey: Journey to the West.
The opera opened at the Manchester International Festival last June and opens Nov. 8 at the O2 in London, directed by Chen Shi-Zheng, scored entirely by Albarn and featuring characters, sets and costumes designed by Hewlett. It'll be some time before North American audiences get to witness the stage show, but the soundtrack - a curious concoction mixing modern electronics with a full orchestra and rigorously composed in adherence to the five-note Chinese musical scale - offers a taste of the modern spin the three collaborators have put on an adaptation of a 16th-century Chinese novel.
"I think we were told it was going to be six months' work, and it became a lot more work than we'd ever imagined," laughs Hewlett, who was in town last week with Albarn for a day of press. The two have devoted a large chunk of the past four years to Monkey, much of that time spent travelling to China to "get our heads around" the country.
Even without the culture shock, it would have been an arduous learning process - Albarn, for instance, is still reeling from the "hopelessly depressing and suicidal experience" of directing an 85-piece orchestra to perform his compositions - but the two chums never flinched at the challenge.
"We have such a great collaboration because we both believe we can do whatever we want with what we have," says Albarn, who first teamed with Hewlett to create the highly successful "cartoon band" Gorillaz in 2001.
Monkey plays at the O2 until Dec. 5 and will eventually "travel the world on its own, without us caretaking it" if successful enough, Hewlett says.
Once freed from their operatic duties, Albarn and Hewlett hope to begin work on the follow-up to Gorillaz' excellent Demon Days sometime in January. For now, they're close-mouthed about the musical guests who will be involved.
"I want to work with an incredibly eclectic, surprising cast of people," says Albarn. "But the nice thing after having done Demon Days is that there aren't a lot of people who say, `No, I don't want to do that.' So we've got a great choice. It's just up to us to use that wisely."
"I'd like to get Bruce Willis involved in this one," offers Hewlett.
"Involved in whatever way we can have him involved. Something action-based. I just think its would be really funny to get Bruce Willis involved in a Gorillaz album and I'll bet you there's a perfect way to do it."
Gorillaz Monkey around: Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett on their new album
Posted: September 22, 2008, 6:48 PM by Brad Frenette
Music, Continental Riff
By Brad Frenette
Damon Albarn’s career reads like a roadmap to some musical no-man's land:
• Start a pop band (Blur);
• Then, turn into an indie/hip-hop/dub “virtual” group, Gorillaz;
• From there, The Good, The Bad and The Queen, a supergroup featuring, among others, Tony Allen, the drummer that helped create Afrobeat;
• And then, record an album of Malian guitar music.
Rather than lead to obscurity, however, his trip has helped shed the image of Albarn-as-tabloid-star and build the image of Albarn-as-musician.
Following the trajectory, his latest opus - a Mandarin opera based on the 500-year old Chinese allegorical novel by Wu Cheng’en called Journey to the West - doesn’t seem so haphazard.
The opera debuted in Manchester last summer, and teamed Albarn with his Gorillaz confederate, artist Jamie Hewlett, who provided the visuals.
Under the name Monkey, the former (and future) Gorillaz are releasing an album based on the stage show. The compositions are esoteric, but immediately gripping; Albarn and his orchestra tiptoe between traditional Chinese music and a globalized caricature of it. Under it all, the Gorillaz lurk, with their mischievous beats and sinister rhythms.
Sitting in a park in Toronto on an early autumn morning, Albarn and Hewlett discussed the new album, blending cultures and which simian moniker they’ll be recording under next:
National Post: Not everybody is familiar with Journey to the West.
Damon Albarn: That’s reason enough to try to introduce it to our generation. A TV show ran in the early ‘80s called Monkey. It was very fresh to us.
Jamie Hewlett: That was the first introduction to Chinese culture we had as eleven year olds. We were contacted by Alex Poots, who is head of the Manchester Festival... [who] asked us if we’d fancy doing an opera of Monkey. [We said] we’ll go to China, and see what we think. We’ll meet Chen Shi-Zheng [director of the opera]. And we travelled around China with him.
NP: Was this the first time you guys had been to China?
Albarn: I’d only been very briefly on my way to Mongolia.
NP: Did you feel you had to immerse in the culture to really understand the story?
Albarn: You have to bear in mind they went through the Cultural Revolution where everything was banned. Quite interestingly, for the director, Shi-Zheng, Journey was very important to him. It was one of the books his family kept under the mattress. He witnessed his mother being shot, while at a rally. I think he was five. In front of him.
Hewlett: She had a white dress on, and they shot - accidently - they shot into the crowd, and they shot her through the heart. She bled to death in front of him. His memory is watching her white dress turn red.
Albarn: And his father was sent away to labour camp. He was a street kid who eventually escaped to the west.
Hewlett: That was for me - when he told us that story - that was the point when I felt like - Ok, he’s the real deal. My youngest boy was six at the time. And I try to imagine him on the streets of Beijing, eating out of dustbins.
Albarn: So him coming to us with the idea of resurfacing Monkey was loaded with a lot. You bear that in mind, you travel around, you get your orientation. And then you come to the inevitable question of: What does this mean to myself, coming from the West to the East? For us, it was a journey to the East. But then again, if you travel to the west long enough, you end up in the east. All these things are extremely circular. Then I made the decision that it had to be in Mandarin. Even though I don’t speak Mandarin, fans of it, it was very inportant to keep it in Mandarin.
Hewlett: It’s a story we all know anyway. Even if you’ve never read Journey to the West, it’s a story that’s been told in many different ways.
Albarn: But in making the record the most important things was with Mandarin, you’re going to dig up a lot of very old prejudices. And essentially if this record was done in English and made by a young band, the perspecitve would be enritrely different. When you hear it in another language, immediately barriers go up. If it’s not in a straight pop song format, other barriers go up. So to me, that was why I made the record.
Hewlett: Also, to see if we can progress.
Albarn: If you can’t listen to this, then what does that say about you?
NP: Do you think this record could be equally enjoyed by your kids and kids of the same age in rural China?
Hewlett: I like to think so. It’s all a matter of listening to it in its entirety and you’ll either like it or you won’t, no matter where you are or where you’re from.
Albarn: I know people are surprised when they hear it. But look, a lot of people can’t be fuckin’ asked to spend a bit of time with anything these days. So to be asked to listen to a album of that length, you just have to hope that they hear it. If you can do that without interruptions, it is, its a bit of a journey. It’s not sound bites.
NP: Even without the context of the visuals?
Hewlett: It works from the moment and you hear the first bit of a song and see the visuals of Monkey [in the album’s booklet]. Then, you want to jump in and hear more. It’s a great story. If they made a movie of it, it would be 100 times better than Lord of the Rings. It really would. It’s got sex, violence, monsters, comedy. It’s got everything.
NP: What about a film - would you guys want to be in on that?
Albarn: A lot of people have...I’m sure there’ll be several films made. We’re gettin close to that. In a way, we start from a different point. There are several parallels with what we do. I think we’re unique in how we work so in a way if we do it any other way.
Hewlett: With Shi-Zheng it was great. We connected with him.
Albarn: It would have been impossible for us to do something like this in essentially a strange culture, unless we had a fantastic guide...through the mindfield of getting it wrong. At the source of all these things are very human traits. And they don’t change wherever you go on the planet.
NP: What’s next for you?
Albarn: We’re going to do another Gorillaz record.
NP: Did Journey to the West change how you collaborate?
Hewlett: We just learned more about what we do, musically and artistically. That’s a great place to come at when we come to another Gorillaz album. It doesn’t have to be animation and music.
NP: Do you each do your own thing, then meet up again?
Hewlett: I sit upstairs, he sits downstairs [in their London studio]. We live across the road from each other, we hang out, our kids play and we’re kind of on the same wave length. We rarely have a conversation about a master plan. We do have those, but not every Sunday...
• Monkey: Journey to the West releases in North America Tuesday.
Click here to return to news index
Click here to submit a news story