ā Damon, youāve said before that Africa is often portrayed as something overly āspecial,ā and that this kind of exceptionalism actually ends up isolating it. Events like Live 8, for example, donāt really help Africa; they may even give Western audiences a sense of moral superiorityāthe idea that money can solve everythingāmaking Africa seem even poorer on a spiritual level. Itās an interesting argument, almost like a kind of backlash effect.
Damon:Ā Thatās exactly it. You might remember my solo albumĀ Mali Music. That recording experience had a huge impact on me.
(Part Two: Jamieās Teasing and the Dessert Incident)
JamieĀ (cutting in, slightly out of breath): Damon, when we first went to Brazil more than ten years ago, you were basically a loudmouthed kid who treated everyone like idiots. You annoyed the hell out of people. Seeing you make such profound statements now, itās hard to believe youāre the same person.
ā Uhā¦ what happened to that āabsolutely no compromiseā hardline stance just now?
Damon:Ā Wellā¦ I guess I really did compromise with dessert (laughs). In the end, people are slaves to their desires. Thinking about starving children in Africa while Iām sitting here eating high-end dessertsāitās pretty disgraceful, reallyā¦ trulyā¦ (everyone bursts out laughing).
Jamie:Ā Thatās why youāve got to make work that lives up to that level. Youāve got a lot of responsibility.
Damon:Ā That said, itās also true that the British media is far too obsessed with its own culture. Their response to African or South American music is painfully slow. When will they realize that all theyāre doing is desperately propping up these fake images of ārock heroesā or āpop superstarsā? If youāve seen the sheer, mountainous grandeur of Malian music, youāll understand this: without recognizing that reality, you canāt possibly save Africa from poverty. Anything else is just short-sighted.
(Part Four: Plans Concerning Asia)
Damon:Ā Of course, Asia has a lot of fascinating cultures too. Actually, before coming to Japan, we stopped by China, and that experience was incredibly stimulating.
Jamie:Ā I really love Japanese animationāI watch Studio Ghibli films all the time, even back in London. As for China, the plan is to collaborate with a local theater company on a stage production tentatively calledĀ Journey to the West: Gorillaz Version. Itās still in the planning stages, but I genuinely feel that focusing only on Western culture is a dangerous thing.
Damon:Ā Exactly. Thatās why people like us, who have a certain level of visibility, need to be the first to incorporate these perspectives into our work. There are plans for Blur next year, of course, but beyond Gorillaz, I want to keep creating as a kind of āglobal citizen.ā
āI spend all of my time with musicians, I donāt really hang out with other artists so up until this point I wasnāt aware of who I was in the art world, what people thought of my work. I hang out with musicians, usually in the studio, and they are obviously there because theyāre excited to work with Damon and eventually they turn to me and go āwhat do you do?ā āIām the other half!ā so when I started to use social media I began to follow artists that I like on Instagram and I started to get messages from them telling me āOh I love your work!ā I started to get an idea of what other artists thought of my work and it was really flattering. We were coming up to 20 years of Gorillaz and I think me and Damon spoke about how much longer can we do Gorillaz for, is it possible to keep going? We decided it was, because we are still excited about it. But I needed kind of a little holiday from the norm. Experiment a bit.ā
ā Jamie Hewlett talking on The Gorillaz Art Book Podcast.
Melody Maker: WHAT DID YOU THINK ABOUT DAMON BEING IN THEĀ PAPERS FOR BECOMING A DAD? WAS THAT STRANGE FOR YOU?Ā
Justine:Ā "No it wasnāt, really. I think itās pretty great that Damon is big enough to just be a normal person and not just decide that he should die of a heroin overdose or anything because thatās whatās expected of you. Thatās people reinventing the rules, and I think that you should be able to live your life and make your music and not be some sort of pathetic, two-dimensional cartoon character. Iāve always thought that Damon was a little bit more careerist than he needs to be.ā
Ā
Melody Maker:Ā HAVE YOU HEARD "MUSIC IS MY RADARā?Ā
Justine:Ā "Do you know what? I havenāt. Which is shocking, but I have been away. But Iām really interested to hear it, and Iām interested to hear the Gorillaz thing as well.ā
At home, I can't say anything any more. Everything I say needs to be validated by the Realignment Office, approved by the new gender moral. The Realignment Office is my daughter. It's a cultural revolution, young people are reinventing the dictionary. From now on, my vocabulary, let's say, the most colorful one is censored. I can't give you any example. I have been reconditioned. My brain has forgotten my old personality. If I give you an example, I would expose myself to further attacks from the Realignment Office. You, the french people are a little behind in this area, but I promise you won't escape it either. It is true that the french are guardians of their own language. We, the english, are inclined to americanization. Lucky for me, a song like āGirls and Boysā, with all his gender fluidity, pleads in my favor with the office, it's almost like a badge of honor. But on the same record, the song Parklife could get me into serious trouble with the office. I'm talking about "dirty pigeons" [slang for "easy womenā]. And I also sing about a fear of an overweight man [āYou should cut down on your pork life mate, get some exerciseā]. Frankly, I prefer not to risk myself too much in this kind of inventory. (laughs) - DAMON ALBARN (l'OBS, nov 2021)
Hey I was wondering if you knew the article that Justine spoke about suzi in?!
It was in The Guardian in 2000. Here you go:
Sweet revenge
In the mid 90s, Justine Frischmann and Damon Albarn were the First Couple of Britpop. Then he used a Blur album to rake over their break-up, while she languished in obscurity amid rumours of heroin addiction. Now she's back with a new album, and it's her turn to exorcise her demons.
Caroline Sullivan
Friday March 24, 2000
As Alison Moyet once said, it's hard to write a decent song when you're happy. Rock bands thrive on romantic turmoil in their private lives, without which they would be reduced to padding out lyrics with football scores and the weather.
Thus it was for Blur's Damon Albarn in mid-1998 when he sat down to write what would become the 13 album. His eight-year relationship with Justine Frischmann of the chart-topping Elastica, whom he once described as **"the only person who's ever been completely necessary to me" **had just ended, at her instigation. Pained and humiliated, he decided to exact revenge by exposing their most intimate details to public scrutiny.
The outcome? Embarrassment for Frischmann, a number one album for Blur and a bit of a result for Albarn.
Break-up albums are by definition both embittered and yearning - in the case of Marvin Gaye's vindictive Here, My Dear, they're just plain nasty - but 13 got more up-close and personal than could be considered gentlemanly. Albarn portrayed his former partner as neurotic, even slipping apparent drug references into the single Tender: "Tender is the ghost, the ghost I love the most/Hiding from the sun, waiting for the night to come". Frischmann was the ghost, supposedly, who was on the verge of being consumed by what one music paper euphemistically called "the darkness at the heart of Elastica".
Frischmann's response can be found on a song called The Way I Like It, which appears on Elastica's first album in five years, The Menace (out next month): "Well, I'm living all right and I'm doing okay/Had a lover who was made of sand, and the wind blew him away".
This is unlikely to be her last word on the subject. As she ambivalently begins her first round of interviews since 1996, she's finding that everyone has the same three questions. Why did Elastica nearly sabotage a promising career by taking so long to follow up their million-selling debut? Had Frischmann taken leave of her senses when she walked out on Mr Britpop? And what about the drug rumours?
"One journalist said to me, 'Dahling, I heard you were on heroin - Mahvelous!' " she says with some amusement. "Drugs are around, but I'm not that interested and never have been, although there have been elements of party animal in my band. The rumours are a lot to do with rock'n'roll mythology, where people want to believe you're having a more exciting time than you are."
The only drugs on her person today, as she perches on the edge of an armchair in her publicist's north London living room, are Marlboro Lights. Her other indulgences are two cups of herbal tea and a Cadbury's Flake cupcake, which she nibbles with well-bred pleasure. Her dark eyes are clear, and her long, tanned body is a testament to the virtues of a daily swim in a pool near her Notting Hill home. Only Elastica know whether they really succumbed to heroin and hedonism after their self-titled debut made them more famous than they'd ever expected to be, but if they did, Frischmann, 30, seems little the worse for it.
Given the current predominance of damnable boy bands, the Britpop mid-90s are beginning to seem like a halcyon period for English music. It was a time when the underground went overground, and a self-described "little punk band" like Elastica could sell 80,000 albums in a week.
More than a few loser guitar groups saw Britpop as a licence to print money, but Elastica, led with cool elan by the androgynous Frischmann, were one of its gems. The Blur connection was a marketing godsend (Frischmann and Albarn met on the London indie circuit, she as guitarist in an early line-up of Suede and girlfriend of frontman Brett Anderson, he as a cherubic baggy hopeful), yet the spiky-haired Elastica LP embodied that euphoric time like nothing else.
Frischmann, guitarist Donna Matthews, drummer Justin Welch and bassist Annie Holland were unprepared for the album soaring to number one in its first week. When they signed their record deal, Frischmann, whose great-grandfather was a conductor of the Tsar's orchestra at the Summer Palace in Byelorussia, was five years into an architecture degree at London University. A liberal north London Jewish upbringing - her engineer father built the Oxford Street landmark Centrepoint - had instilled expectations of success, but the reality of being photographed in the supermarket and having her rubbish stolen was a shock. Fiercely independent, she also resented her unsought role as half of Britpop's First Couple.
There was more. Two of Frischmann's musical heroes, The Stranglers and Wire, decided that two Elastica songs were suspiciously similar to two of their own tracks, and won royalties. Meanwhile, there were malicious rumours that Albarn had done much of the work on the record. He hadn't, but he did find Justine's success in America, where she was substantially out-selling Blur, hard to endure.
"It was very hard for him to deal with and he's very confrontational," she says, with the flattering openness of someone who prefers interviews to be more like conversations. She admits she often says too much, but in an era of image control and spin, her honesty makes her a one-off. Not that she's likely to land herself in it too badly - she possesses the intellectual ammunition to look after herself, which must have been instrumental in attracting two of rock's more articulate stars, Albarn and Anderson.
She's been accused of being a professional rock girlfriend, though it was probably they who were lucky to get her. She spent the cab ride over reading the Sylvia Plath letters in Monday's Guardian, and muses on the irony of the poet's subjugating herself to Ted Hughes when she was the more gifted. (Her new boyfriend, by the way, is an unknown photographer, "though that'll probably change, because men seem to get famous when I go out with them".)
"I reacted the way a lot of women do, by being passive," she continues. "He put a lot of pressure on me to give up Elastica. He said, 'You don't want to be in a band, you want to settle down and have kids.' " In so many words? "In so many words. He kept putting on pressure till I started to believe him." She adds bemusedly: "I've met his new girlfriend, and one of the first things she said was that he wanted her to give up travelling with her work to stay home with the baby [Missy, born last autumn]. I'm surprised he's got away with being thought of as a nice person for so long."
After 18 months, during which they did seven American and three Japanese tours, Elastica came off the road to record company demands for an immediate second album. Annie Holland's response was to quit the group, while Donna Matthews became renowned for hard partying on the nocturnal west London scene. They lethargically recorded some demos, but their heart wasn't in it. By 1997, when a second album should have been ready to go, Frischmann and Matthews were barely speaking, and there was nothing useable down on tape.
Holland's replacement, Sheila Chipperfield (of the circus Chipperfields), was deemed not good enough and left by mutual consent. By 1998, their continued lack of productivity was being likened to the Stone Roses' lengthy and ultimately self-destructive holiday between their first and second LPs.
"I didn't think Elastica were going to continue at that point, and we did kinda split up," she says, absently stroking her publicist's cat. Frischmann is a cat person; she's owned a tabby called Benjamin since she was 10. "Unconditional love," she coos. The pet's place in her life is so assured that prospective boyfriends are subjected to his feline scrutiny before she'll go out with them.
On top of everything else, in early 1998 her relationship with Albarn was in trouble. Frischmann retains enough of the indie ethic to detest the phenomenon of celebrity couples, and was dismayed when they became one. "I really hated the tabloid interest, and I went out of my way not to be photographed with him. Only about three pictures of us together exist, I think. In many ways, I think the media interest broke us up, because it made me feel the relationship was quite ugly, and I had to get away from it. There were other factors, too, obviously, because we were together for eight years, and I finally felt it was better the devil you didn't know, really."
Albarn's ego seems to have been severely undermined by having a girlfriend who was nearly as successful as he was, and something of a sex symbol to boot. Despite adopting a resolutely boyish T-shirt-and-jeans uniform, she's thoroughly feminine, a mix that got her voted fifth most fanciable woman in a lesbian magazine.
"I'm completely heterosexual, so I didn't know how to take that. It scares the shit out of me, the idea of being with a girl. I'm glad I've narrowed it down to half the people in the world."
She seems to view Albarn with indulgent exasperation these days, simultaneously praising his intelligence ("The Gallaghers just couldn't compete") and ticking off his flaws. "Damon adores being in the press, and sees all press as good press. He orchestrated that rivalry thing with Oasis. He really wanted kids, and I didn't feel our relationship was stable enough. He was a naughty boy, and he wasn't the right person to have kids with. I had this cathartic moment..."
At which point they split up. Albarn wrote 13 and then met Suzi Winstanley, an artist. "She was pregnant within three months," Justine observes wickedly.
Of the acclaimed 13, she's tactful, describing several songs as "really lovely". She studies her cigarette for a while before adding, "but I'm cynical about selling a record on the back of our relationship". But you're doing the same now. "It's true, but at the time I had no right of reply."
Elastica finally pulled themselves together last year, just as the music industry was about to write them off (their American label had already "very kindly let us go", as she puts it). Holland rejoined, Matthews went to Wales to sort out her life and the band banged out an EP and played the Reading Festival. Things came together quickly after that. They spent the last Ā£10,000 of the recording budget on re-recording a dozen tracks, finishing the album, after years of procrastinating, in six weeks. They've called it The Menace "because that's what it was like to make".
It's dark and resolutely uncommercial - all wrong for 2000's pop-oriented climate. It's unlikely to match the success of the first one, which is fine with them. Call it (though Justine doesn't) their White Album. Its 70s punk aesthetic brings to mind angry girls such as the Slits and the Au Pairs, although the defining mood isn't anger so much as catharsis. None of the songs is specifically about Albarn, she claims. "The dark feeling is due to the sense of isolation, tasting success and getting frightened by it. I was questioning whether I wanted to be in a band any more, and there was no one I could ask for advice. Getting success and everything you ever dreamed about is hard to handle, and makes you question everything."
She's better prepared for success, if it comes again, this time. Already the privacy-preserving barriers are in place. The next interview of the day is with Time Out magazine, which wants a list of her favourite restaurants. "I'm not telling them where I eat," she says reflexively. "I'm gonna lie."
āLet me tell you a funny story about that night. As the game finishes, I stomp out the ground in a huff, and whoās the first person I meet outside the ground? Damon Albarn! He goes to one Chelsea game every ten years ā the last game heās been to was probably the last Champions League final they won! And heās like, āalright mate?!ā Of all the people! I was like, āoh well doneā, and he said, āoh youāll win it one dayā. I was like, āI swear to Godā¦ā Then, as heās kind of consoling me, Iām like, āhang on a minute, arenāt your team lifting the trophy in about ten minutes? What are you doing outside the ground?ā And heās like, āoh Iāve got to get off earlyā and I was like āwell that just about sums you up.ā And then he said āwell Iāve seen them lift it before.ā Oh right, OK. Iāve phoned up my manager and said we should re-release āRoll With It.āā
ā Noel Gallagher on meeting Damon after theĀ Champions League final between Chelsea and Manchester City (x)
There isnāt an official Blur WhatsApp group but Damonās not wildly interested in that kind of technology soā¦ He doesnāt really sit there looking at his phone, I donāt know why. He writes songs. Itās bizarre, thatās literally what he does. When weāre all on tour, check into the hotel, three of us have a shower and get something to eat, Damon has written three songsā¦ He goes home of an evening when everybody else collapses in front of the tv, he goes down to his little studio and writes songs, so he does that all the time, thatās why heās so bloody good at it and why heās able to have kind of three albums out every year. (ā¦) so itās quite hard to convince him of the benefits of doing something like joining a WhatsApp group. We did have a Zoom chat during the last lockdown, that was a firstā¦ but I think heās all right with Zoom now, I think heās kind of convinced about the utility of it but yeah, no, thereās a WhatsApp group with the three of us, we kind of feed things forward to Damon by more conventional means you know, carrier pigeonā¦ ā Dave Rowntree, The Dave Rowntree Show episode 10, April 2021 [X]
āMick, (21) like Paul, comes from Brixton. His father is a taxi driver and his mother is in America. āThey kind of left home one at a time,ā he says. āI was much more interested in them than they were in me. They decided I werenāt happening, I suppose. I stayed with my gran for a long time. And I read a lot. "Psychologically it really did me in. I wish I knew then what I know now. Now I know it isnāt that big a deal. But then, at school, Iād sit there with this word ādivorce, divorceā in my head all the time. āā
