When Damon Albarn woke up on June 24, 2016, the world had changed. Albarn is a child of Europe: born in London the Swinging Sixties, the parents of visual artists, the father for a while manager of the band Soft Machine. A liberal bohemian family where openness, tolerance and love of the arts were the values. However, exactly this model of life had now been indirectly voted out by a very narrow majority of the British on that June morning. Since then, the Brexit referendum has become the main artistic drive for Damon Albarn. "As a person and an Englishman, I feel disconnected," he says. "I want to connect again."

Most recently, two albums by Albarn's partially virtual comic book band Gorillaz were about social division, right-wing, Euroscepticism, racism. There he negotiated the big issues of the time from a global perspective, personally it is only here: "Merrie Land", the second album of his opportunity project The Good, The Bad & The Queen, is a wistful, often angry and desperate, but again and again also optimistic and tender letter of a Forsaken to his great love.

Metaphorical farewell letter

"Do not leave me now," says "Last Man To Leave," and where do I go now, and where does it seem to be free? " in "Lady Boston", "I'll pack my case and get in a cab and wave you goodbye" in the title song. So it's a farewell, but at first a more metaphorical: "I do not intend to leave the country," said Albarn last Saturday in a telephone interview. "Anyway, it's not just about England, the idea of ​​a multi-ethnic, progressive society that I grew up with is in danger everywhere, it's a European record, I want to initiate a dialogue."

photo gallery


4 pictures

The Good, The Bad & The Queen: Melancholy and Brexit

Hardly anyone is as well suited to this concern as the personal and stylistically multicultural band The Good, The Bad & The Queen: Besides Albarn play in the former bassist of The Clash, Paul Simonon, the former Fela Kuti drummer and Afrobeat co-inventor Tony Allen and Simon Tong (formerly The Verve), an Allstar ensemble with whom Albarn had already recorded an album in 2006, which was also about England. At that time, a magical fusion of Dub, Afrobeats, Britpop and Folk succeeded.

Naturally, this surprise effect is no longer present on "Merrie Land", but the album is not boring, quite the contrary. It contains a volatile and ethereal music that draws on the British folk tradition: dense textures, seamless transitions, the seemingly aimlessly dancing dub beats of Allen and Simonon almost paranoid meditations on missed opportunities and missed opportunities.

Damon Albarn had taken the train through rural England, where he visited regions for which the "Cool Britannia" of the Blair and Britpop years had never existed. "These areas have been neglected for decades," he says. "This has taken advantage of dark forces and spread in the minds of people, it is very easy to play with the fears and hopes of these people." Albarn had conversations, and the thoughts in his mind became more and more dense until he finally put them into eleven songs that his band recorded with Bowie producer Tony Visconti.

The critical-loving dialogue with his homeland has been a continuum in Damon Albarn's career since he captured the British zeitgeist of the nineties in 1994 with Blur and the album "Parklife." The euphoria of that time had distrusted Albarn, he never was a flag-dancer. Now the feeling of departure seems to have finally given way to a deep melancholy.

DISPLAY

The Good, The Bad & The Queen:
Merrie Land

Rykodisc (Warner); 12,99 Euro

Order at Amazon.

"I'd love to play 'Parklife' and 'Merrie Land' right next to each other at upcoming concerts," he says. "There's a strong connection between these albums, and then, like today, I sing about a great intimacy and sincere love neither patriotism nor nationalism, but an offer to share this love with other people and let me show their places, their homeland. "

There is still hope

It is a sentence that one can find naive. "Is a 50-year-old, millionaire pop star the right one to pinpoint the nation's situation?" Wrote the Guardian a few days ago about "Merrie Land". So the old question: which political force can music develop at all? "In England, pop is a cross-class part of public health care," says Albarn. "I firmly believe that music can create an emotional connection that politics can not handle."

The actual borders no longer run between states, but more and more between down and up, city and country, young and old, educated and educationally remote. When a cosmopolitan pop-millionaire from London drives into godforsaken north English pro-Brexit communities like Blackpool and Preston to talk to people, that's not the worst start to bridging those gaps. In any case, Damon Albarn has not lost his hope of preventing Britain's exit from the EU: "We can not possibly stick to a voting decision that has come about in such dubious ways and has since led to ever greater chaos."

Two days before the interview, Theresa May had presented her Brexit draft. From the end of November, The Good, The Bad & The Queen are touring England to take their concerns to the far corners of the country.