I know I am going to be alright Cool, isn't it?
I mean, we're not going to call it a retrospective, but it's fucking nice to look back over the last 25 years.
Yeah, it's a reminder.
Thank you.
Should we say reminder?
We don't do nostalgia, you see.
Obviously.
No, not normally.
We're anti-nostalgia.
I mean, even just one of these frames is just so much thought and work goes into it.
It's actually incredible how productive this whole experience has been.
What are you, nine albums now?
And the amount of art you've created Yeah, but it's been 25 years.
You know, if you work hard each day, you do a lot in 25 years.
Should we go and take a look at the Kong?
House of Kong.
It's a bit David Lynch, this room, isn't it?
Maybe we should do the interview backwards.
Who's the house to come?
Los Angeles style.
Pazuzu's here in the biggest packing crate ever.
When they opened it, it was full of rats.
We had to put the guitar to hide his serpent penis.
Because it's built just like the real statue of Pazuzu, and he has a giant snake for a penis.
And then we thought well, there's going to be kids here, so we're going to have to do something about that.
That was very thoughtful of you.
Yeah.
They have been busy, haven't they?
Welcome to the House of Kong.
Please stay together as a group and adhere to the gallery rules during your visit.
Let's move through to the first room of the tour, where the story of gorillas begins.
Nice smell in here.
It's a nice smell.
So, okay, let's start.
Miscreation.
Which is the first one?
Which is the oldest drawing?
I think it's that one.
Yeah.
She wasn't in the band in the end.
Paula.
Yeah, I didn't realize that there were people who auditioned and didn't actually make it in.
And that was the original Murdoch.
Yeah, he was far too clean.
And then I don't know who she is.
I don't know.
Yeah, it went through.
Look at Russell there.
You were living together when you were drawing these?
Yeah.
You're already working on the music and you guys have figured it out at this point like okay, this is going to be a thing.
I better catch up.
I better get to figuring out what they look like and what they are, what this is.
It was after the train crash, wasn't it?
Albert Grove.
Do you remember?
He wrote Ghost Train.
He went to the studio and made a song and stayed up.
I stayed at home and did some doodles.
And he came home from work and said, darling, dinner's ready.
He likes to...
I know, I know.
Mr. and Mrs. Here we are at his exhibition.
Man about the house.
It's way more about him than it is about you.
Come on.
I don't know if you're going to have an exhibition of sounds.
That's a concert.
Jeremy, every night's an exhibition.
That's a concert.
And we do millions of concerts all around the world.
They do one exhibition.
So, yeah, it's about me for change.
The timing is actually perfect, because this album does feel very much like a real union, a proper like it was in the beginning.
Oh, most definitely.
And it was kind of the sort of next record after Plastic Beach.
There's dissonance in between, but still feel that was kind of interesting time when there's lots of interesting things in there.
But as cohesion goes, and storytelling and that marriage, I think this is obviously like something I could say is the next one in that world, you know, and applying the principle of adventure.
And having a narrative that presented itself to us quite strongly.
It was kind of unavoidable.
Well, that's where friendship plays a really important role, which is why this started in the first place.
You're not going to go down on this adventure with someone you don't like.
And then I sort of feel like after Plastic Beach there was a little bit of a pull into the conventional world for gorillas.
It was like oh, we're a touring band now and we're going to remove a little bit of the mystery around it all.
Shall I tell you what happened?
It happened.
Because we got a last minute call to headline Glastonbury.
Yes.
And we had this band and we were still applying the principle that we've done in our live performance with Demon Days, where everyone is almost in silhouette, you know, and the band don't kind of step out.
You know, that's what we wanted to do, yeah.
And yet what happened was a weird disengagement.
Looks good on tv yeah, but a weird disengagement um, in that huge field which afterwards, so i've got this band, i've got a, i've got to go back to that because that's the only way to play at this size.
Do you know what I mean?
So the next weekend was Ross Kilder and I just went, fuck it, I'm going to do what I can do.
I'm not going to hold that back because it's just pointless in this context.
So yes, it did become more of a live band, but for some reason we've kind of got it back on track now.
We just put everything on stage now.
It's all there.
It's taken us a long time to do that.
It's just not an easy thing.
And I know that because I do it all the time.
I think that's the whole gorilla's experience.
It's one of those things.
I would imagine it's as surprising to you that we're standing here at the beginning of it all and we're going to walk through and get to where we stand today as it is to anybody, if not more surprising than it is to anybody else.
I agree with you.
These not only remind me of that special time Jamie and I spent living together.
Yeah.
Do you know what I mean?
It's like, it was really unique.
That's caught there, isn't it?
He's there.
It's been captured.
Very young.
But see, this is the mad thing.
They have actually aged, but they're still totally in a cartoon world, which is why it's not nostalgic.
Don't worry, I get the memo.
We are not reminiscing right now.
We're still working on our anti-nostalgists manifesto.
We haven't ironed out all the creases yet, but we will.
Yeah, we're really somewhere now, aren't we?
I mean, this is...
I realize now that that's probably the most like you, isn't it?
Yeah.
Jamie?
Yeah.
Sure.
Okay.
If we're going to apply characters to ourselves.
Here's one of the things I love about this room is as you go through the covers.
This is the first one.
So that was Jefferson Hack?
This is very important.
Yeah, this is... Nobody wanted to interview the characters.
And the only person who got it was Jefferson.
And he said, let's do the cover of Dazed and we'll do... I think there were like 10 pages inside.
And he was the only person who was prepared to do that.
And we did it.
It was a really cool piece.
And then everyone else started to talk to us.
This is the funniest one.
I actually didn't believe that was real.
Smash Hits, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it was real.
Wow.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That must have been one of the biggest high fives you've given each other at that point in life.
On a fucking cover of Smash Hits.
That's how old we were.
We were on the cover of Smash Hits.
It's amazing.
Look, Shaggy Atomic Kitten here saying gorillas on a Shaggy Atomic Kitten.
Starting a new millennium.
I mean, look at the times we were living in.
Steps, Limp Bizkit, your personal favorites.
Stereophonics, Westlife, Pink, Lil' Kim, Christina.
Just Christina, just one word.
No one ever talks about the awkwardness of the beginning.
The silhouetted interviews with the two of you like you're in witness protection.
You know, they're trying to get people to interview cartoon characters.
We were just, we were trying to remove the idea of celebrity out of the equation.
Every time we tried to, we did some.
Our first interview to America was Rolling Stone or something, wasn't it?
And we were all on different phones being the characters.
Remy was being Russell, I was being 2D, he was being Murdoch.
I don't think Noodle was around.
We were trying to do everything, you know what I mean, brilliantly.
And, you know, it's sort of that side of things we haven't kind of really mastered yet.
But I have to say, of this new animation.
It's all right, isn't it?
Oh, it looks amazing.
Exactly.
It's the mountain moon cave Zaggot.
Zaggot, yeah.
And it's absolutely fucking incredible.
It's hand-drawn animation. what we set out to do, you know what I mean?
It feels like it's been around for 50, 60 years, but it feels new.
And it made me laugh, because technology has finally caught up to what you were suggesting in the beginning and you're going back.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
And your reaction is to go and work in the old ways.
What else can we do?
We're determined to do the opposite of everybody else.
Even if we shoot ourselves in the feet, it's fine.
The holograms.
I actually thought it was good, but I know it was awful in the room, but it looked good on TV.
It looked amazing on TV.
That was very good, yeah.
It was brilliant on TV, but awful in the room.
I remember thinking at the time, you can have 12 shows at the same time.
That was the whole concept.
Then ABBA kind of... you know, had the money to really do it.
It was too expensive and the technology hadn't been developed well enough that in a live scenario you had to have the music very low because the invisible screen vibrates when you turn the bass up and the drums, and then your animations go .
When we were at the Grammys and they came on, it was really quiet.
And people were talking.
They didn't even know the show had started because it was so quiet.
And then Madonna afterwards moved over to the other side of the stage, which had the biggest speaker.
She sort of stood on top of a speaker, just the biggest speaker.
That just absolutely caught everyone's attention.
And everyone thought, oh, it's starting.
You got murked by Madonna.
Yeah.
I love this as well because it's like, who wore it best?
You know what I mean?
They were subverting in a really amazing way.
You were started to subvert in a really amazing way.
That's almost the most iconic cover of all of them.
We arrived at the same time, right?
I agree.
It was definitely felt like, oh, okay, they're doing what we're doing as well.
But they had the advantage of not having a face of Britpol. trying to hide.
That's true.
Yeah.
That's true.
I was at a disadvantage.
Yeah, a victim of your success.
You've been saying that for 13 years, mate.
I'll pay you in tomorrow.
One thing you always got right with the videos and I love seeing the storyboarding that you've done, the detail of the storyboarding.
This is probably the thing that actually jumps out the most.
The music is so obviously upfront and we get the videos that accompany that and we get to see the truth of it and the artwork and whatnot.
But this really is like a window into your process.
Are you comfortable showing your process to people?
I don't mind.
I mean, there's a lot of storyboards for a lot of videos that have never been seen.
What I do is I put as much work into the storyboard as possible so that when we begin, the animators know exactly what it's supposed to look like, instead of just doing stick men and little sketches and camera moves and stuff.
I'd try and do.
So yeah, they became more and more complicated.
And then I started editing the storyboards to the music.
So I'd deliver an animatic.
You know it ends up being like 350 drawings just to tell a four minute video.
So it's nice, it's nice to show them.
I mean, it was a happy existence.
So play a tune and run up to jamie's studio and bus space on the second floor and play it, and then he'd like listen to it and then start drawing.
You know, and that was that, was every day, it was it Okay.
So what normally happens with music videos is someone writes a treatment and then the director will figure out where and how they want to shoot it and get a production crew to pull it all together.
But to your point, you're effectively directing the video, as you're storyboarding the video and breaking it all down.
So how do you construct a narrative before you even begin to storyboard it?
Or does sometimes the narrative present itself throughout the drawings?
I listen to the song and I decide what the story is going to be.
I talk with him and we go, yeah, that's cool.
And then I draw it.
It's quite easy, really.
And then I change bits.
And sometimes he says, I don't like that, and I change it.
But there's not a big team.
I deliver the idea complete.
And then we get involved with animators and stuff.
And then they say, well, that's way too expensive.
You haven't got enough money.
And then things have to change and you edit bits.
But I try to deliver the idea complete without the requirement of anybody else's input, you know.
Yeah, I really appreciated seeing it start to flip between real life and animation.
Stylo being an obvious high point of that when Bruce Willis kind of showing up with the characters.
I mean, seeing some of the outtakes in the Red Room or Red Rum before.
Red Rum.
And you just like so giddy to be on set with Bruce.
Yeah.
Bruce was a sweetheart.
He was so nice and he didn't charge to be in the video.
He said, we did it in Barstow in between Vegas and L.A.
And he said, yeah, I'll do it.
I'll come on a Sunday.
Just can you fly me out by helicopter?
Because I've got a kid's birthday party to get back to.
But I don't want to be paid.
And we're like, sure.
And we bought some nice red wine for his trailer.
And we just arrived and he was a sweetheart and he did it and he got back in his helicopter and off he went.
We went to a kid's birthday party.
Yeah, we got to a kid's birthday party.
I've got to get back.
This video and this song changed the whole trajectory of the band.
Yeah.
I mean, when Billie reached out, she was like, respectfully, I want to do that one at Coachella.
And it's the one that really kind of connected.
I think it's sort of unified all of us.
The kids who loved the concept and the animation and the feeling that they got from it, but also the music.
That song really connected Feel Good.
Yeah, I know, and it's kind of, How do you do that?
Great question.
I have no idea.
That's a great answer.
How do you do that?
How does anyone do that?
It's like, clearly it's not allowed to have an answer.
No, it's not, but it's interesting, isn't it?
Because the first album is rough as fuck in a great way.
I mean there's songs, there's a transition record from where you were sitting in the Blur space of like I want to- Well, it's a bedfellow or a cousin of 13 really, which I feel was a really exciting time for Blur as well.
I really like that album.
But that was the idea of, oh, God, a producer can transform something.
And I was like, oh, no, I can do that as well.
Because, you know, do you know what I mean?
Watching William work was very inspiring.
Do you know all the things that you learn in life?
You just take them for granted once you've learned them, but at some point you were yet to acquire them.
You know what I mean.
And it's so important to keep learning, right? keep learning, never stop learning.
But I remember in quick succession, it was like Deltron, fucking interesting, right?
Interesting, conceptual thing.
And then over here, Dan and you doing the gorillas thing.
I'm like, oh, it's really subversive.
It's a subversive time.
It felt like a really natural to you as a creative, at least.
Yeah, I think people were a bit shocked at the time.
Well, I mean, seven million people bought that album worldwide.
It was very interesting doing it this last year at the Copper Box because yeah never, ever played it as a full album ever.
Oh, shit. because it was so quick that things changed and it became a whole different thing.
The songs on that really kind of got left behind, most of them.
But playing them was fantastic, wasn't it?
Demon Days.
We didn't even do that many gigs for Demon Days, just didn't play a lot in the early days.
You were very wedded to the characters then.
I mean, you were selling the story.
I mean, you were telling people who the characters were.
I mean, there was a line where they sent you the tape.
I mean, it was very.
You were leaning into the concept in a really real way, which must have been really fun.
It's an ongoing experiment, and it changes every time, and it adapts, and it's allowed to adapt.
Because we adapt, and we change, and we're growing as artists, and it's impossible to stay the same.
So this is freedom, basically, for us to do what we want, which is wonderful.
But of course the characters are really important to it and they end up kind of telling our stories sometimes.
The stuff that happens to us kind of filters into their stories.
There's one moment in this strange little journey that you can take where, when I did it the first time, I literally had the hairs from my back rise because it felt weird.
It felt weird.
It felt weird like they were just around the corner.
They actually did exist.
Do you know what I mean?
It's strange.
I think they do, because if you listen to the mountain And I want to talk about the mountain as we move through
I thought about the big subject matter on that record, the big beauty and the big loss and the big life in that record, and how the characters are really generous to you.
That album yeah, they are.
Yeah, you know yeah yeah, absolutely.
They sort of must give you a safe space to explore that well yeah well, yeah.
And then you add all of the kind of the rituals and and imagery of indian culture, just like a couple of million gods in hindu religion, all slightly different, all representing different aspects of the human and the animal and the nature.
If you just like learning stuff, it's a wonderful place to go to.
Let's get this.
Let's keep moving.
Choose Pazuzu.
Attention, there has been a technical error.
Leave the building and find the nearest assembly point.
So Jamie, when it came to sort of developing the characters and figuring out what their tastes were and who liked what Yeah,
I mean, it's...
It's very granular work, isn't it?
Because it's like you've got to literally create an entire backstory, present story.
Think about what their future story is, right down to the detail.
It's not like, oh, here's the image, here's the artwork, go do it.
It's like, no, they wear these clothes, they drink this, They like this kind of music.
Yeah, you start out, you design enough to begin with and you just keep adding to it and adding to it.
So they've developed over 25 years.
But yeah, I mean, Murdoch being a Satanist, that was quite an easy one.
Yeah.
Russell being from New York.
Russell being from New York, and well, that was on our original manifesto was that Russell was going to be the character that was able to summon spirits, dead rappers or dead artists, which we thought was such a good idea.
And then we didn't do anything with it.
And we had Dale the Ghost coming out of him, but we didn't pursue that idea until this album.
Yeah, kind of made sense, you know, because we'd have 25 years and we'd worked with these people and we had a relationship with them and they had passed away.
So then that idea made sense.
But when we came up with it, there wasn't anyone to do that with, unless they are an imaginary character.
So that was, you know, seeded a long time ago and now It comes to light.
It comes to light.
Look, it's very Breaking Bad, isn't it?
Oh, there's human bones on the barbecue.
I expect Leatherface to come out of there in a chainsaw any minute.
Murdoch's Winnebago.
This is definitely a new smell for me.
I've never smelled this before.
Do you want to stay here and we'll just come back around and grab you?
Oh, I'll join you in a minute.
Just getting a bit of sun, are you?
The Winnebago.
Oh, yeah.
Ooh.
Oh, that smells bad.
Smells fucking terrible.
I'm just in the shower.
Come in, take a seat.
I like the smell of it.
You know, one of the things I've loved seeing is like, as the footage has come out is that you've been in the studio a lot while the music's been made.
It hasn't just been like it was where you'd make a song and then run upstairs and play it for Jamie and he'd work on it.
Like, you've gone along for the ride and the mountain very much so, right?
I mean, you shared this experience together the entire way.
Well, you know, Song Machine was COVID.
So we were all separate and we started off together and then COVID hit.
So we were talking on Zoom calls really.
And the next record, Cracker Island, was a strange piece because it was literally made predominantly here in Los Angeles because we were waiting around in between meetings with Netflix.
Ah, the movie.
So I was just sort of, it was just, we didn't, we were waiting for something that didn't happen.
Yeah.
And I mean it's a record about, it's a frustrating record because it's a frustrating time, you know, for me.
It moves too slow, the film industry.
It's very slow.
Everything takes so much time.
And we were working on a script, and we were on the second draft of a pretty good script idea.
And then we kind of, Cracker Island kind of became the movie.
Yeah.
Because it had quite a complicated narrative, the storyline weaved through the album.
We were, in a way, letting too much of the new technology, which we didn't really understand, be used on our behalf.
That's why there was disconnect for us.
Yeah.
This whole period has been the opposite of that.
We've spent a lot of time together.
A lot of things have happened.
We've talked about what it is we want to achieve.
You know, actually having a real objective.
If we'd done a movie 25 years ago fine, but the idea of doing a movie now, it doesn't have no interest in it whatsoever.
No interest.
It's not an interesting idea.
It's not an original idea.
It's like we had this moment with Netflix where we were literally told you can do whatever you want and we'll give you as much money.
And we were like, okay.
Great.
And we had some brilliant ideas, but it was just moving so slow.
And the guy we were working with just left.
And they said, don't worry, we'll find someone else.
And it's like, okay, there's going to be another year of conversations before this starts again.
So we pulled out.
Yeah.
And then we put that on.
I just felt like I was hanging around. for what seems an eternity.
We made an album while we were waiting.
About hanging around for eternity.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What that record's about.
It's a good album.
Thank you, Netflix.
I mean, you get something good out of it.
I love this album.
Yeah, same.
It's a great album.
It's a great album.
All of them are great.
I love them.
Now Now is a great album.
I love Humans.
They were all made under different circumstances.
Of course.
Yeah.
And we were in different places, different mindsets.
I mean, Humans was just made right at the beginning of the Trump era.
But it has that sort of energy about it.
It's crazy how I feel like gorillas has been predicting the end of time from day one.
And yet life caught up to you in a strange way faster than the end of the world did.
Because it's, you know, the end of the world.
You know we all talk about the macro, but really the end of our world is when we lose people close to us and things change right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Apocalypse is an ongoing philosophical question.
It's not something you just... meditate on once, you're looking at it all the time.
That's what you're meditating on.
The whole point of the mountain is that it's a positive outlook, isn't it?
Yeah, we could have got political, but it's like, why don't we just do something that's more positive about something that's quite negative?
Yeah.
We don't need to add to all the... We all know what's going on.
I mean, I couldn't help but add the happy dictator.
Yeah.
But that was from an experience in Turkmenistan, of all places, where this president the second president actually, after it became an independent country had this vision that he would stop all negative news in the country so that people could sleep better and be less anxious, which sort of, in one sense, is a lovely sentiment.
And yet.
Ignorance is bliss.
Never finish that.
Just leave it at and yet.
Yeah, it stinks in here.
Let's get out.
See you soon, suckers.
It's the music that we choose.
Off you go, then.
Through the door.
It's Banania.
These are all your clothes, Damon.
You finally found somewhere to store your own clothes.
I'm storing them here at the moment.
That's quite a nice shirt actually.
Green light means you're in.
Oh, the recording studio yeah, man con, everyone's got their station.
Murdoch station.
The flying v yeah, the flying v classic.
But all the stuff does work in here.
It should work There you go.
Do you want to take a seat?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Now that is actually... The original mixing desk.
That is my desk from Bus Space.
Wow.
So the whole first and most of the second album was done on that.
Wow.
The brand new Monty Python paperback.
Oh my God, that's mine.
This must be torture for Jamie to actually sit down in here because he's so tidy.
No, I don't want to mess up.
They've set it all up.
I don't want to move stuff.
That's what I mean.
Look, you're messing it up.
This is a beautiful chaos.
In the studio, I definitely wouldn't have my albums on show.
Do you know what I mean?
They're all very low key.
This is not your old couch, is it?
No, that was lighter, remember?
It wasn't very comfortable at all.
Yeah.
So when did the mountain begin?
We were shooting the live action sequences for Silent Running video from the last album and we were in Serbia together and my wife was in India with her mother and they were flying back and her mother had a stroke, and so I had to go from Belgrade to London to India on the beginning of December 2022.
Then we were in Jaipur for six, seven weeks to the middle of January I think it was anyway trying to get her mother home in a coma, which was a pretty tough experience and quite traumatic.
But at the same time, I just had an amazing experience in India.
You know, people were very warm and it really helped the situation.
So when I came back I was very excited to talk to Damon about the prospect of us going together.
No great plan at that point, but just to go to India together to have an experience and to see whether we could make an album, a guerrillas record, in India.
And then, in between trips, we lost our fathers, Damon's dad first and my dad 10 days later, which was very strange because we're born 10 days apart.
That is very unique.
It all started to get quite spooky and weird.
Not spooky but like okay, this is something big that needs to be addressed, or I don't know we needed to think about how to move forward.
Because you lose your father, you move up.
Oh, yeah, you're next.
In the grand computer game of life, and you become the patriarch.
And it's very weird no matter your relationship, whether you had a good relationship or a bad relationship, it doesn't matter.
It does change you.
It changes you.
It does change you.
Because you've kind of had that buffer, kind of a safety zone all your entire life.
And so that's suddenly gone, and you're like, oh, fuck.
Yeah.
But it's interesting, isn't it?
Because you guys could have processed that individually and together, being friends, and helped each other out.
Jamie, you could have gone and worked on something.
Damien, you could have what you did with the everyday robots figured out how to say what you want to say through your own filter.
But to decide that gorillas is the right vehicle, I think, is a really interesting decision.
I mean.
For me, it wasn't even something I hesitated over, because I'd always wanted to come to India.
I just got very, very distracted and delayed from Mali And then the way that that led me to amazing countries.
So I just hadn't got around to it.
Well, I think you arrived at the right moment.
Yeah, absolutely.
I totally agree.
I felt like i'd done so much kind of playing music with people and hanging out with people to got over any kind of sort of notion of cultural impossibility, you know.
I mean, it just doesn't exist to me.
That's why therefore, all kind of um anti-immigration propaganda, that kind of propagates the idea that other cultures are other and therefore not to be trusted.
And it's just ridiculous, in my humble opinion, because it's so clearly that everything that's wonderful about the world is about our interaction with each other, respect of each other and understanding of each other.
It's not divisive.
What's all this division?
I think we have everything to gain from learning about everyone's culture and traveling the world.
It's very important.
How can you hate people you've never had an experience of?
Even if you don't have the option, to travel and explore.
It doesn't mean that you can't be open to it, and you travel and explore through that.
There's no argument, in my opinion, to racism.
That's it.
This album.
If we hadn't have worked with all these people from around the world, it wouldn't be the same.
That's a testament to what happens when you do that, when you mix with other people.
The end result is something really glorious, I think.
There's a very nurturing spirit to the mountain.
I feel like India was obviously a very nurturing experience for the two of you.
Yeah.
It's just a fascinating place.
It's nuts.
Privileged to be able to actually play with musicians who were connected to music from my childhood, you know, very early childhood.
Yeah, based on where you grew up and the neighborhood you grew up in.
Yeah, and the record collection of my father.
Did you realize at the time when you were going to India that there was a connection of the dots there?
Well, I didn't realize. how much of a connection music and his death would have, you know?
I mean, yeah, it's fascinating watching someone die.
What did you take from that experience?
It raised more questions than answers.
Like walls and walls of patterns, projectors and routes and paths.
It's a big old universe on the other side, I think.
That's what I was thinking.
Well, you know, there's a lot of questions in the Sad God.
There's a lot of sort of in that song, I feel like, as you're going through the list of things.
Yeah, I mean, that could have gone on forever, really.
It's like, in the end, all you can do in a song, really, is offer an idea, isn't it?
You know, I mean, you can't complete it.
I mean there are songs talking about and kind of connected to that and the transfer of atoms.
And you know I went into a coffee shop that had a studio at the back that had Frank Sinatra's bedroom piano in it.
So I played on that and for a moment I was Frank Sinatra in his bedroom.
And then we left.
Put the cover back on.
I left.
And then we went to KCRW.
Yeah, yeah.
And they had Nina Simone's piano.
So I played on that then.
This is ten minutes later.
This is ten minutes later.
Got some DNA from both. talked to this lovely human being who turned out to be Sly Stone's daughter.
This is what, within a half an hour?
Yeah, in a half an hour.
This all happened in half an hour.
The point of it is if you believe in the idea of everything leaves atoms and merges anyway.
That's a lot for me in my world of music.
That's a lot of music to be swimming around in.
India can give you that.
What was it like when you were listening to these precious outtakes of people.
The footage of you watching Dennis Hopper when he's alive recording is priceless because you are out of your mind with curiosity and excitement.
We were trying to make, you know, thriller.
Do you know what I mean?
And we needed a voice.
We needed a voice, you know?
We weren't sure whether it was actually happening.
We thought, this is a joke.
There's not going to be the Dennis Roberts not showing up.
And he did.
And he was just, what was great about him was there was no ego.
He didn't give a damn about who he was.
He's fascinated with artists and meeting artists and collaborating with artists.
That's his thing.
And so he was very excited to meet Damon.
He was a sweetheart.
The first time I had a chance to meet him It was at the Hackney Empire and it was some awards thing.
And he was sitting in his row just down and got up.
And I was in the kind of sort of gap between the doors and the chairs.
And then I lost my nerve at the last minute.
I went behind the column.
So we'd walk past.
I did pluck up the courage, but no, eventually, but I was actually shy.
Yeah, well, he is a legend.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, he literally changed Hollywood.
I wasn't surprised you were shy.
You know, he's part of the Kerouac generation.
You know what I mean?
He's part of that philosophy, which was really important in the development of America.
Yeah.
You know, it's the collaboration that makes this whole thing tick.
It's the idea of being able to bring people into the guerrilla's world.
And after the first album, right, the proof of concept, it's much easier.
People are like, yeah, I'm interested.
I mean, the jump from the first album, we had some amazing people, Ibrahim and many others.
But then you got Lou Reed, you know, showing up.
Yeah, that was a funny day, wasn't it?
We were in a studio off of Union Square.
It was me, Damon and Remy.
Remy Kabaka.
No, no, no.
Before we get to that point, you have to bear in mind that I had sent him three different songs that had all been completely literally thrown out.
You know what i mean in no, in no uncertain terms.
Um, and i just thought we can give it one more go.
Maybe i just sort of um wore him down or something, i don't know, But he agreed to meet us and talk about it.
And he arrived in the studio and Damon said, hey, Lou, nice to meet you.
This is, and before Damon could say my name, he told me to fuck off.
And he told Remy, you fuck off and you fuck off.
You can't say that to Remy.
We waited.
Remy's more interested than any of us.
So me and Remy went shopping.
Damon was alone with him in the studio with the technician guy.
He then said I've got to go uptown and I'm going to write in the taxi and then, when I've done what I've got to do, I'm going to come back and I'm just going to look at it and just read it verbatim, and then we'll see where we're at.
You know, and that's what he did.
He went off, wrote this fantastic kind of sort of meditation on plastic and came back and delivered it.
We saw him again and again and then he became much more friendly.
Like I did a drawing of him and I was told we couldn't use it.
And then he asked if he could use it for a magazine cover for some village voice or some local kind of New York magazine.
Came and did Madison Square Gardens with us, at which point he was becoming very friendly.
And then he said, I want to come and play in L.A.
Next thing, he's in L.A. with us, and he's going around every dressing room.
This is the Plastic Beach tour, so we had everybody on that tour.
He's going around every dressing room, introducing himself and being an absolute sweetheart.
Wow.
So the story starts with fuck off.
Fuck off. without even waiting to hear my name.
Wow.
And ends with a very, very friendly Lou Reed.
By Madison Square Garden, when he came on, they started going, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo.
And for some reason, I thought they were going boo.
Right.
And I thought, fuck, this is really weird.
Boo, boo.
But no one does a boo like that, do they?
They go, boo.
Yeah, no, they work as loo.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, I think it was loo.
Okay, so it sounded like they were booing him.
So this can happen.
Did you go looking for stuff from Lou, from the outtakes for this?
Yeah, I found stuff, but it's on there, but not him speaking.
We landed on how, didn't we?
There's a bit on The Plastic Guru where it's the voice of Hal from 2001, but he's saying the words that Lou Reed said.
That's how he did it.
I bet Lou Reed was an anti-nostalgist.
Yes.
Yeah, I just wondered about that because I love the idea that Russell has finally been able to fulfill his objective of bringing the dead to life and summons up their spirit.
But equally, these decisions, you can't take them lightly, right?
Because you used what you used when the people were alive.
They heard it.
They approved it.
And now you have these outtakes and you've got to figure out how you do it in a thoughtful and lovely way.
Well, we went through all the proper channels and we spoke to all the families of and the states of and approached it from a very respectful way and everyone was cool with it.
What was really sad is there was nothing of Terry Hall.
Yeah, I saw that.
Which is really, you know, because I knew Terry as well as anyone, you know?
But it wasn't anything, so We had to have that kind of very limited parameter for it to feel like it was still in the.
You know we were saving some of the atoms that had been left.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Do you know what I mean?
Let them bounce around over here.
That's the vibe.
We're going to see it in a second, the big mural of everybody who's been on it.
Oh, yeah.
It's moving, actually, in some ways.
Because you see a lot of people who are still, first of all, great loyalty ratio.
A lot of people on that fucking picture.
And not a lot of people have quit.
People still kicking about, Paul on this record, Johnny on this record, Dave rest his soul.
But there are people who've come and gone and so really loss has been a part of the guerrilla story long before you actually experienced it personally from a family point of view.
Absolutely by the very nature of what we do.
There's going to be loss, because when I work with Abraham,
Someone else we couldn't find out there.
Yeah, couldn't find anything.
That would have been amazing.
But he was already in his late 80s.
Yeah.
God, you look so reverent in that video.
I mean yeah, you're so young and you're sitting there and you're just like you are playing a steady hand.
Yes.
That must be one of the first times that you found yourself in a room with someone of that.
Oh, I know.
Testing your collaborative chops.
Yeah, that was a mad period, because I also went to Mali.
And my first musical experience in Mali was being invited around to Tumani Diabate's house, being shown into this very kind of sort of plush living room.
And then Tamale comes in in his robes and says, do you want to play?
I'd rather listen to you play, but I played my first note and realized that the core needs to tune because the melodica is a fixed reed.
Anyway, it was a baptism of fire, but what a long journey it's been.
So one question off the back of that, because confidence came in at the end of the day for you to be able to decide to go, then find yourself in that room, then honor the request by deciding to contribute something musically in a room where you probably, if you actually stop to even allow the inner voice to just natter at you for a second, probably some pretty decent imposter syndrome going on at that moment.
Absolutely.
So by the time that we got to India, well-versed in the... Yeah, go for it.
Exactly.
Just go for it.
And what I've found from musicians all around the world honestly, is that most of them are so generous of their spirit.
I'm more than happy to just hang out with musicians.
It's not an exclusive club, but you know what I mean.
I know a lot of musicians, that's for sure.
How did you get the voice on?
The film?
It was a voice actor.
It's so legit.
That's 70s grindhouse horror.
Machete.
Yeah.
But that comes from me seeing somebody re-edited a trailer for The Shining, but as a romantic comedy.
I haven't seen that.
He's a writer looking for inspiration.
Jack Torrance in Shinings.
It made me laugh so much that you can just re-edit something.
We wanted to do the horror trailer and then we did a fake Disney trailer.
Then the real film has nothing to do with horror or it's not a Disney film, it's just a joke.
I feel like that's where AI might come in handy is allowing us to have a giggle at things like that from a sort of subversive point of view.
Might come in handy?
Well, on that level.
Well, yeah.
I don't think you should trivialise that.
And I don't, and I'm glad we ended up here just briefly.
It's just, you know, that's just makes us lazy, it does.
It's plagiarism really coming?
This is the biggest form of plagiarism.
Plagiarism ever.
Yeah, but it's just laziness.
We're just getting lazier and lazier and lazier, and technology is allowing us to get even lazier, and then we're losing our skill.
Yeah, and then we don't do anything anymore.
I know people who, who use chat gpt to write all their emails.
Yeah, They don't even write anymore.
And they say, well, it's easier.
You're going to figure out how to write at some point, then you're going to become illiterate.
The people who are making this stuff are people who aren't artists, but they've been given a tool that makes them think they're artists.
So I know people who call themselves AI artists because they tap in a command and then the AI generates an image, and then they say I did that.
I'm an AI artist, which is bullshit.
Scientists thinking they're artists as well.
I met a bot called Kieran a few days ago.
Okay.
How was that experience?
I said, I'm always very polite.
We've been making friends with all the robots in LA.
Yeah.
Because they've got facial recognition and when the obvious happens in about 10 years' time.
You need to be friendly with them.
We're going to be friends with the robots.
Yeah, you need to be.
But, you know, being long-termists as well.
Oh, I like that.
Oh, my God.
It's time to move on.
As you're going through the exhibition.
Obviously, this is the mountain and this kind of honours where gorillas are today, which is in this environment.
So just talk us through this painting, Jamie.
This comes from an adventure we had together in China.
When we climbed to the top of Monkey Mountain, there was a monastery at the top.
And we were so high, we were above the clouds.
There's a lot more of that story.
This is two days where both of us nearly died.
So anyway, we got to the top.
No, no, no.
What happened?
What happened?
What happened?
Oh no, we really nearly died.
What happened?
I nearly died the night before because I took something I shouldn't have done.
Right.
Right.
So he was in the toilet and I was singing My Way.
And then I just thought, James disappeared.
And then went into the toilet.
Kicked down the toilet door and I was unconscious.
We were in a karaoke bar in China.
In Chengdu.
And somebody offered something that might help us stay awake.
Oh, shit.
And God knows what it was.
But I woke up the next morning in my boxer shorts in a hotel room with him at the end of the bed in his boxer shorts.
And I said, what happened?
And he said, fucking motherfucker, I thought you were going to die.
And I said, why are we in our boxer shorts?
He said, because you threw up over everything.
Oh, shit.
And then we climbed Monkey Mountain.
Feeling like that.
The worst hangover imaginable.
We get to the top of monkey mountain, i'm going to let you tell your bit and on the way down my kneecaps go.
I can't walk anymore.
So they they get people to carry me, and damon's like you.
You're lazy, he marches off.
I'm going to run down the mountain man, Because it had this ancient stairway all the way up the mountain, carved out of stone most extraordinary.
And it gets to a crossroads.
I'm sort of, you know, like that.
They're going down the mountain and there were like a couple of villages on this mountain.
Huge place.
And as I was going through there, they were like...
I didn't know what the fuck they were talking about.
But I think they were trying to tell me don't try and run down this, because you're going to really fuck yourself up.
Anyway, by the time I got to the bottom of the other side of this mountain, my back and my legs were starting to really tighten up.
And I was actually only being able to walk like this.
So you went missing for hours and hours.
This is about five hours later.
Anyway, no one speaks any English, so I thought, I'm just going to go and try and hitch a ride.
So I go out onto the road, and then finally someone stops.
I showed them the map of where I wanted to go and they sort of said yes, and I tried to get on the back of it.
Anyway, I got on the back of the moped and then this gentleman went up another mountain and then at the top stopped, answered the phone and then got into the most horrific domestic argument.
That went on for at least 20 minutes.
So I'm just sitting on the back of this...
It was getting dark and Monkey Mountain is full of wild, dangerous monkeys.
And they're saying if he doesn't come down before it gets dark, he's going to die up there.
They will attack him.
I got down, but maybe I was part of a kidnapping that sort of material, I went wrong, yeah.
But it was an event for 24 hours, and I suppose that reminds us of that.
Yeah, that was one of our many near-death experiences.
Oh, the Church of Gorillas.
And then I think we go into the dressing room.
Ah, costume department.
Oh, splendid.
This smells nice in here.
How many costumes do you think you have?
How many outfits?
Thousands.
I always draw them wearing something different.
As many outfits as I've drawn pictures, probably.
But the idea to make real versions of the cartoon characters was a good idea, because that's Noodle's little jacket.
No, it's different when it's tactile, when you feel it.
Yeah, yeah.
But I like this dressing room.
I'd like to have a dressing room like this.
Don't you have a dressing room like this?
Well, yeah, but not with these kind of lovely made beautiful clothes in there.
Yeah, it's cool.
This is great.
This is one of my favourite rooms in the entire exhibition because it really does.
It makes you, it really comes to life.
And all this fucking, all this effort has gone into like, you know, creating this world here.
And it's nice when these come on, you have the images in there of the characters and stuff.
So many pills.
I let the melted lollipop head north.
Where's north from here?
Lost and found.
Pete Jeep has cried.
Look at that hand.
That's supposed to be from the wicker man.
It should have candle wicks on it, you know.
Oh, there you go.
The famous Francis Bacon painting that was apparently stolen and never found.
So we're making out that the griller stole it.
Freud, bacon and eggs.
Thank you, brave traveler, for daring to enter Gorillaz, House of God.
It's fun, man.
It's really fun.
It's one of those experiences.
When you go through it, it's overwhelming the level of work that you both put into this.
Yeah, a lot of work.
It's never felt more like 25 years than in that experience.
Just based on, like you say, the fraction of Oh yeah, this is 15 of all of the stuff.
It's crazy.
I mean, even just getting a fraction of the stories the two of you had.
Yeah, oh my goodness.
I mean, exactly.
Just one little picture.
So much of it has that accompaniment.
I mean, you've gone and seen more of the world than probably any living musician in a way out there.
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely been one of the highlights of my life, traveling.
I love it.
I love traveling with him.
Okay, and then we end up together again.
Yeah, that's the corridor, one of the corridors in the studio first scene.
And they're actually my pants.
Where to next?
Well, that's actually a good question, because if it's not a retrospective, then this certainly isn't a way of saying thank you and good night.
The mountain... as we've talked about, covers some really big life stuff.
But we didn't plan it that way.
Of course not.
We're talking about the next album already.
Yeah.
It'll be something else.
Where haven't you been that you'd love to go and explore from a creative point of view?
There's still loads.
I mean, I've only just scratched the surface of everywhere.
It's never going to end.
I'm not going to be able to do everything that is there in my lifetime.
I'll just keep pushing for as long as I can.
Maybe stop.
And I will stop.
So there's no maybe about it.
And then Russell will have to conjure the spirits.
Get me back.
Get me back.
The two of you back.
I hope he does.
I hope he does because I'd be really fucked up if he didn't.
Russell, we have to conjure you, Damon.
What is this, Joni?
We're looking at some cells?
This was the Rhinestone Eyes.
We started doing a video for Rhinestone Eyes and we had a bit of a problem with the record company pulled the budget because they felt that the album hadn't been successful enough.
So they weren't going to pay.
We literally spent two days, we started animating.
So there were going to be four videos for Plastic Beats.
Stylo, Melancholy Hill, Rhinestone Eyes.
And I can't remember the third one, but it was a continuing story.
So it would have been like a short animated film over four videos.
And this was the third part.
And we started animating, and they pulled the budget on us.
It just exists like this, you know?
This is cool.
A Plastic Beach has been such a beautiful, long-standing relationship for all of us.
We wanted it to be made like Thunderbirds, you know?
Like a miniature.
And we shot it in a tank.
It's all the stuff underneath.
Yeah, you're missing... Oh, wow, look at that.
Holy shit.
It's all the detritus of mankind, all the mistakes, all the wars, all the hatred, all the madness of mankind congealed together to make this island of rubbish in the middle of the South Pacific.
Point Nemo, the furthest point from any landmass on planet Earth.
So we're at the end of our conversation this time around and we've reached a mountain.
I mean, this is the crew, right?
This is the cast of the new album.
This is all of our people on the record.
Well, this is great.
Yeah.
All these wonderful people.
Yeah.
That's a lot of great times spent with those people.
Yeah.
Look at Sean.
Yeah.
He's the only artist I've ever heard who was doing a soundcheck and came up with an international number one hit.
You know, Sean wasn't in the best of states at that time, so he was nodding off a lot.
Yeah.
And he'd just been playing for ages.
And then he sort of came back to this world.
And she was just telling everyone, yeah, I can hear it now.
Yeah, right, I'm ready to go.
And then... It's coming up.
It's coming up.
It's there.
Well, boys, thanks for letting me come through and have a little nosey at this amazing exhibition.
It looks good here.
Yeah, it's beautiful.
Actually, it's really come out nice.
I do want to finish by saying that this will obviously come down and be compartmentalized and will be put away.
But the album is, it's a triumph.
And the visuals are absolutely gorgeous.
The films are gorgeous.
All we can do to that is this.
