{"id":361382,"date":"2026-02-28T20:50:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-28T20:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/361382\/"},"modified":"2026-02-28T20:50:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T20:50:12","slug":"damon-albarns-creative-output-proves-the-musical-magic-of-keeping-office-hours-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/361382\/","title":{"rendered":"Damon Albarn\u2019s creative output proves the musical magic of keeping office hours \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been listening to The Mountain, the magnificent, horizon-expanding new album<\/a> by Gorillaz<\/a> on my way into work this week. It\u2019s about grief and the presence of death in our lives, with a dose of human folly thrown in, yet is far more exuberant than that might sound. I think it might be too good for my commute.<\/p>\n

Damon Albarn<\/a> and his collaborators exude melancholy suffused with joy, or perhaps the other way around \u2013 those two states seem to coexist, Albarnesque-style, almost as if we can have more than one emotion at once. With the sitar of Anoushka Shankar<\/a> all over it, The Mountain is transporting, too, which is handy, as when you\u2019re bound for an office, it helps to remember that there\u2019s a wide world outside of it, and in that world people are making music as sublime as this.<\/p>\n

Showing up to work is, of course, what Albarn famously does. The Blur frontman and musical force behind Gorillaz has been unusually prolific in his output for someone who made his money three decades ago. His various side-projects and solo records span genres and art forms. \u201cIf we don\u2019t keep him focused on the job in hand, he will literally be doing another opera before the third single is out,\u201d jokes Blur bassist Alex James on To The End<\/a>, a documentary about the band\u2019s 2023 reunion.<\/p>\n

\u201cHardly anyone really needs a conversation about what you want \u2013 they know what to do,\u201d Albarn says of the musicians he works with on Gorillaz, and yet it can\u2019t all be as automatic as this implies. Just looking at the roll call of featured artists on The Mountain makes me think, oh God, a lot of emails must have gone into the creation of this album. Even before you consider the graft and talent that fashioned it into a stirring, unified whole, it\u2019s obvious \u2013 this is not the product of a man who likes to rest on his laurels.<\/p>\n

Albarn\u2019s work ethic has long been notable. Paul Morley dubbed him \u201cmultitasker of the decade\u201d in Observer Music Monthly in 2009. On the Blur documentary, producer and musician James Ford says he is \u201calmost like pathologically addicted to making new stuff up all the time\u201d, while Blur drummer Dave Rowntree offers this take: \u201cYou or I might be watching TV or playing video games. Damon doesn\u2019t do any of that, he just writes songs.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Damon Albarn: \u2018I\u2019ve lost one of the loves of my life\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Albarn, in an interview in The Guardian in 2012, gave Blur guitarist Graham Coxon the compliment of being a \u201cdaily musician\u201d, like him. When it was put to him that the excesses of the 90s scene hadn\u2019t sent him into a torpor, as might have been expected, he agreed, explaining that he had \u201calways got up in the morning, excited about making music\u201d and felt \u201clucky in that sense\u201d.<\/p>\n

You can tell, and it\u2019s a facet of creativity that is oddly under-explored in pop. Novelists are always being asked about the schedule they keep and the environment in which they write. With musicians, this is often skipped. Maybe it\u2019s because we want to think it\u2019s all magic \u2013 the work of unseen elves \u2013 and not a matter of putting the hours in. More likely, however, it\u2019s because there is always something sexier or murkier to talk about than mere routine.<\/p>\n

In 2023 Albarn told the presenters of the podcast Sodajerker on Songwriting \u2013 who do enjoy these details \u2013 that working Monday to Friday from 8.30am to 6pm \u201cwould be my ideal thing\u201d, lamented a standard 10am industry start time and claimed he wouldn\u2019t know what to do on weekdays if he wasn\u2019t in the studio. If Gorillaz collaborators have \u201cjust got off a plane\u201d or are in a different time zone, he will work evenings, but otherwise he won\u2019t stay late, because he knows he\u2019s going to come in tomorrow. As for needing to create the right conditions, it was \u201cbest to get rid of that\u201d and \u201cjust be able to do it all the time\u201d.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Gorillaz: The Mountain – beautifully tender record with a sad smile plastered to its faceOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Occasionally there will be artists who go on hiatus but can pick up where they left off. For many others, the well runs dry soon after they abandon it. Their eventual return lacks potency \u2013 they\u2019re not daily musicians any more and you can hear it.<\/p>\n

Albarn\u2019s fortune will, naturally, never be understood by those AI overlords who cast creative endeavour as a giant pain that can only alleviated by their soulless, voracious tools. But nothing AI spews out will ever have the resonance of The Empty Dream Machine or The Moon Cave or The Hardest Thing (featuring the voice of the late Tony Allen). No one will ever dance to AI like they dance at a Gorillaz gig.<\/p>\n

My favourite description of how Albarn operates comes from Coxon, who told The Sunday Times in 2015 that his childhood friend was \u201ca hose on full\u201d. That\u2019s a lovely image, and a subtly rich one \u2013 you shouldn\u2019t stand in front of a hose on full unprepared for some force to hit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve been listening to The Mountain, the magnificent, horizon-expanding new album by Gorillaz on my way into work…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":361383,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[264],"tags":[36634,18,117,42283,19,17,4436,337],"class_list":["post-361382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-damon-albarn","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-gorillaz","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-laura-slattery","tag-music"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116150234274991497","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361382\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/361383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}