Monkey album

Albarn says don't treat their tangent, the Opera album, with prejudice

07 August 2008 -  Monkey: Journey To The West is out on 18 August and the former Blur frontman has admitted to the BBC that making it has been a labour of love.

The opera opened at the Royal Opera House last month and the album, which he worked on with Jamie Hewlett, is out in a few weeks (18 August).

Speaking to the BBC, Damon said their recent project is something people will just have to get their heads around.

He explained: “It has taken up like three years of my life. Making the record came out of having done lots of demos when I started to put the Opera together, and on stage you can’t get that electronic sound - so I’ve really tried to make what I think is a cool sounding record, with a lot of mad music. And yes, it is all in Mandarin.”

Damon says his creative relationship with his Gorillaz other-half Jamie Hewlett is as good as ever, and people need to listen to the Monkey record without prejudice.

“As soon as he gets his images with the music something really happens and what I would say about this record is, ‘yes it’s in Mandarin and it doesn’t have that immediacy maybe that Gorillaz has, but it is made by the two of us and we’ve just sort of gone off on a bit of a tangent’,” said Albarn.

"Yes it’s in Mandarin and it doesn’t have that immediacy maybe of Gorillaz, but it is made by the two of us."
Damon Albarn

Conducting research

Hewlett and Albarn went travelling around China extensively before attempting to make this record.

“We didn’t agree to even start the project until we’d been there twice,” Albarn said. “We got a chance to travel round mad parts of southern China where really at that point four years ago not many Westerners had gone.

“China’s opening up at such a massive rate but you have to understand how big the place is. There’s like a hundred different ethnic groups in China.”

Whilst travelling there, Albarn said they had some bizarre experiences - under the watchful eye of the government.

He told the BBC: “Everyone in these mountain villages were there in costume ready with ghost wine which is this lethal drink everyone in China drinks - and they’d be playing music and we’d get thrown into that, and there’d be a schedule for two hours and we’d get drunk and not know where we are, and we’d get almost pushed back into the little van, and then we’d go down one mountain and up another and then we’d be out of it again.”

Touring with the Opera

The Opera, directed by Chen Shi-Zheng, was premiered at the Manchester International Festival last summer - and features a series of animations by Hewlett.

Albarn was pleased with the fact that Monkey: Journey To The West was performed at London's Royal Opera House in July, because he thought it was a good way of getting young people interested in opera.

“I think we got a lot of younger people into Covent Garden and that has to be a good thing because, you know, it’s not trying to compete with Piccini or Mozart at all,” he said.

The pair have also contributed to BBC Sport’s coverage for this year’s Beijing Olympics.

Monkey and his friends will be the faces of our coverage, with music composed by Albarn and the animation done by Hewlett.

Georgie Rogers