Damon Albarn is three weeks away from 46 and still looks the way he always has, like a man who's just woken up from a very long nap. He's sitting in an old Victorian schoolhouse turned photo studio in an unlovely part of unlovely Manchester, a few hours before performing at a BBC-sponsored music festival. His left eyelid dips slightly when he talks. Right now he's talking about heroin. On his startling new record, Everyday Robots—Albarn's first solo album in an increasingly strange and fascinating twenty-five-year career spent fronting Blur, Gorillaz, and a half-dozen other not-quite-rock bands, an album written in the fine tradition of aging rock musicians turning down the volume and examining their lives in a low, weary murmur—there's this lyric: Tinfoil and a lighter, the ship across / Five days on, two days off.
The lyric, he says, is about what you think it's about. "I used to go to work and take heroin in the studio and then stop when I came home," Albarn explains, without a trace of embarrassment. "That's why I say it's five days a week and two days off, and that's how I existed for several years." The joyfully sinister first Gorillaz record, which Albarn created with the artist Jamie Hewlett, "was very much made in that kind of cloud," he says. "We probably wouldn't have been able to create a record like that unless Jamie and I were, um, somewhat in our own worlds."
Then, one day, after a few years of living in that kind of way, he took two aspirin and quit. "I still like a night out, but I certainly don't do heroin," he says now. "I haven't done that for a very long time."
Are those years painful to revisit today?
"No, I mean, it's a little uneasy—I've got a 14-year-old daughter, and so I'm very mindful of her," Albarn says. But his daughter, Missy, and her mother, Suzi, Albarn's partner, both "seem to be fine with it." The reality of it—there at the end—was bad. The telling of it now, that's nothing.
In the past few years he's been in Mali, China, North Korea—all over the globe, really. He made opera, Gorillaz albums, a one-off record called The Good, the Bad the Queen with the Clash's Paul Simonon and the Nigerian percussionist Tony Allen. Albarn's always done a lot, and lately he's been doing even more. Just this January, he wrapped yet another reunion tour with Blur—their last-ever show until their next last-ever show. "Doesn't mean I won't ever do it again, 'course not," Albarn says, sighing. "But it doesn't mean that I will, either."
All the while, in hotel rooms and on planes or buses, he was writing. "Music is a compulsion with me," Albarn says. "And God help me if I smoke any weed, I'm fucked—I'll just make more music." Those songs—some of them, anyway—ended up becoming Everyday Robots, which he recorded with veteran producer and XL-label head Richard Russell at Albarn's West London studio. In lieu of a better idea, and because he'd rarely done it before, Albarn wrote about himself—his childhood in East London's Leytonstone, his adolescence out in the English countryside, Blur tours, heartbreak, infidelity, cool parties, cocaine, submarines. Russell provided the record's percussion: all heartbeat pulses, hisses, and clicks. The guitars are languorous, the vocals even more so, except when they're not—one manically bright song, "Mr Tembo," is about a gospel-loving baby elephant Albarn encountered in Tanzania. It's a dark, compellingly insular album—bracing in its honesty, a bit haunted in its arrangements, vividly fragmented in the way that memory can be. It's the sound of a man who has many regrets but doesn't really regret any of them.
One sunny Monday morning, Albarn shows me around the studio. Inside there are crates full of gear back from Manchester, many of them with the Blur logo still stenciled on the side. Little Damon Albarn dolls line one wall. "When I was in Indonesia last year, they do all these puppets," he says—mostly likenesses of Obama, who once went to school just up the road. Albarn bought one, then came back and commissioned the guy to make a bunch more of Albarn himself. There is a raw-looking childhood Albarn, a Gorillaz-era cartoon Albarn, a handsome, rock star-y Albarn wearing an inexplicable blue turtleneck. A few of the Albarns have hats. Nearby is a vestment cupboard once used by the nuns from the former convent close by. "Where they used to keep their knickers," Albarn says wickedly.
He and Russell recorded Everyday Robots here last winter, in the "cold, wet, gray." The music came easy, Albarn says, the sporadically self-lacerating lyrics—I do love you, but it's just a fact / The history of a cheating heart is ours—less so. To write the worst of them, Albarn got out of town. "I've got a very isolated place down in Devon, in the southwest of England by the sea—hence my sea references quite a lot of the time." He'd sit there with a notebook trying to write, staring out at the water.
"And then, you know, when the third hour is going by and I still can't seem to finish a line," he says ruefully, "I look at the sea and go: 'Oh, just one more time.' "
In Manchester, Albarn walks out onstage with the new band he's put together to perform Everyday Robots. The band plays deliberately, carefully. It's a chilly night in February, and the record's not out yet; no one knows the music, which doesn't seem to matter much—the songs drift off full of feeling. A bunch of drunken British people sway, cheerfully befuddled, to the song about the elephant.
Afterward, at the hotel bar, Albarn's bandmates mill about. He orders a double vodka and tonic, then a second one. "The last show I played was Blur at Budokan," he says. "Ten thousand people who knew, like, every syllable. And now…this." He gestures around the bar, then at himself—mischief in his eyes, eyelid dipping again, another drink on the way—and smiles.
Zach Baron is a GQ staff writer.
