Confounded expectations

Ben East

• Last Updated: November 14. 2009 5:30PM UAE / November 14. 2009 1:30PM GMT

Damon Albarn is working on a follow-up to his opera Monkey: Journey to the West. Thomas Coex / AFP

When Blur went head to head with Oasis in 1995, pitting Country House against Roll With It, it did not seem possible that the band’s gurning frontman, running Benny Hill-style around a Damien Hirst video, would end up being one of the most creative, influential and important musicians today. But Damon Albarn has become just that.

While Noel and Liam Gallagher messily tarnished and then split up a band that had barely moved on from Roll With It, Albarn has sold more than 15 million records with the cartoon hip-hop band Gorillaz. He has created a Chinese opera, Monkey: Journey to the West, made a record of African music, and gathered members of The Clash, The Verve and the Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen to form The Good, the Bad and the Queen.

There have been theatrical collaborations and film soundtracks. And now, he’s working on the follow-up to Monkey with the comic-strip-writing legend, Watchmen’s Alan Moore. Country House is a distant memory. There are no further details about this new project other than an excited Moore telling a low-key British comedy magazine this week that he’d met up with Albarn and the Gorillaz artist and designer Jamie Hewlett recently to discuss writing the libretto. But the fact that Moore is involved at all suggests the Blur frontman is still as keen to broaden the scope of what he can achieve with opera.

That, after all, is what has been so impressive about Albarn’s work, post-Blur. It is impossible to deride any of these intriguing diversions down new musical avenues as mere vanity projects. Albarn has always thrown himself wholeheartedly into whatever he’s worked on.

When Gorillaz started in 1998 it would have been easy to dismiss it as simply an easy way of making music without all the hassle that comes with being in a band with real people and personalities. But, along with Hewlett, he created an entire world for the four animated characters to inhabit. He found a unique sound for them – a kind of hybrid of hip-hop and indie pop. And when I interviewed him about it in 2005, Albarn insisted on doing it in “his” character (2D) – just about pulling it off.

To prove that Gorillaz was to be taken seriously, Albarn even took it on tour – first behind a sheet featuring projections of the characters, and then, memorably, in Manchester when Gorillaz puppets introduced the show. Everyone who attended those five nights in 2005 said it was one of the best, most celebratory gigs they had ever seen. It was ironic, really, that Albarn had gone to the spiritual home of Oasis and showed them a thing or two about how to progress.

Albarn was in Manchester because the Gorillaz gig was a trailblazer for the first Manchester International Festival, where he would present Monkey. To coincide with its 2007 premiere, British television screened a documentary about the making of the opera. It made for fascinating viewing as Albarn came across as very much the tortured artist. He battled with the limitations of the format, with deadlines and with bringing a high concept to life. It was, after all, a Chinese circus opera based on the adventures of a 16th-century monkey and filtered through the 1970s Japanese TV series Monkey Magic.

Albarn succeeded, just. No one said it was perfect – it was high on spectacle and low on narrative – but it was innovative, creative, and great fun, mixing cool modernity and ancient myth. It says something that it went on to sell out in Paris and London theatres. Even the standalone CD made the Top 10, despite being in Mandarin and containing nothing remotely approaching a three-minute pop song.

Has such success given Albarn the confidence to do bigger and better things? Has it given him a sense of legitimacy? Even before Britpop, Albarn was self-assured and competitive to the point of arrogance, so probably not. But where others have tried to repeat initial success with ever diminishing results, Albarn has always moved on. The triumphant Blur reunion at Glastonbury earlier this year could have been the stimulus for a new record – there was certainly enough goodwill – but Albarn just said: “I think it was beautiful, and I don’t want to ruin it.”

So we can look forward to plenty more occasions where Albarn pushes the boundaries of pop in his own peculiar way. That could be as a singer-songwriter, as Gorillaz (a third album is in the pipeline), in African music (his production on the new Amadou & Mariam album is fantastic) or, of course, in opera. One thing’s for certain: for Damon Albarn, modern life is no longer rubbish.