Damon Albarn. Photo: Linda Brownlee.
‘Music and the Spirit is everywhere. I find it in the most surprising places.’
Still radiating the Tiggerish energy that made him Blur’s King of Britpop, Damon Albarn is proud of his Quaker roots. Rebecca Hardy found him in reflective mood.
Damon Albarn is spelling out his Griot name to me. I’m having trouble with the letters, so he scribbles on my notes, then points to a gold band on his wrist, engraved ‘Makandjan Kamisokko’.
‘I was bestowed that [name] some years ago in a hut in Mali,’ he tells me. ‘It helps me get around the music fraternity.’ He went to see the ‘balafon’, he says, which is an African wooden xylophone – ‘the most sacred artefact in the religion. It is amazing that a musical instrument is the centre of a whole belief system. I was very lucky: for the price of a cow, I was invited into the hut and it was revealed to me. If you really want to get into it, it belonged to the sorcerer blacksmith king, Sumaworo Kante.’
I’m feeling a bit confused so make a joke about it ‘being a bit much for Quakers’ and he’s onto it: ‘I think it’s exactly right for Quakers. Surely that’s connected to why I’m so interested in this? It must be [from] somewhere – these kind of intangible spiritual beliefs.’
It’s a good point and one he seems happy to elaborate on, as we sit in his West London studio. Various eclectic objects furnish the room, picked up from his many far-flung travels, particularly from his beloved Africa (‘a necessary course for anyone’). These include a model of the solar system, a wild-eyed African mask, a couple of owls (not real), and, of course, lots and lots of musical instruments.
For some people, the perky fifty-one-year-old will always be the sparky Essex Blur frontman who chirped ‘Parklife’ in the nineties and sparred with the Gallagher brothers. But his career has gone on to encompass many diverse projects of which his Quaker ancestors would (mostly) be proud.
Because, unknown to many people, he does have Quaker roots. His late grandfather was a conscientious objector and member of the partly-Quaker pacifist community in Holton cum Beckering in Lincolnshire during the second world war, which the playwright Ian Sharp recently devised a play about (Conchies!). His Quaker lineage, he tells me, probably ‘goes back at least to the eighteenth century. We were Yorkshire Quakers,’ he says, still radiating the kind of Tiggerish energy that made him King of Britpop more than twenty years ago. ‘Both sides of my family are from Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire.’
Today, the bounciness is partly subdued by the fact that he is jetlagged, but it’s still there, like a potion bottled in tight. His eyes are a striking blue and he exudes a natural warmth that makes me feel instantly comfortable, although he can be cheekily combative at times, telling me off for not recording something (‘Well, you missed out then, didn’t you!’).
Damon Albarn is ‘proud’ of his Quaker heritage, he says. ‘I wouldn’t say my grandfather’s Quaker roots were particularly on show, but I think with all Quaker families, there is a sort of strange bond – I’ve never really put my finger on it – it’s an outlook, isn’t it? When I meet someone with Quaker roots, there is usually some kind of bond and a shared belief in politics, as well.’
These roots have nourished a broad and deeply felt spirituality. ‘I wouldn’t want to overemphasise it,’ he says, ‘because I’m not anything, but I’m everything. But I think [the Quaker heritage] gives you an understanding of what the Spirit is, and for someone who is constantly searching to identify and connect with the Spirit around the whole world through music, to have an understanding when you start that journey, [of] what it is you are looking for… Even though, as we all know, you can only feel the Spirit when it reveals itself.’
So far, so Quakerly, and, at times, he sounds so much like a Friend, I feel I could be sitting in a Quaker Meeting. ‘I’m an empty vessel that’s full,’ he says, at one point. ‘Music and the Spirit is everywhere. I find it in the most surprising places… You just have to allow yourself to open to it, and that’s the trick.’
When I muse on the Quaker preponderance of amazing elderly people, he says: ‘Well, it’s the Spirit in them, isn’t it?’
It’s clear too that he has inherited his grandfather’s pacifism. A lifelong CND supporter, he was a prominent vocal opponent to the war in Iraq, co-funding campaigns and billed to speak at London’s massive peace rally in February 2003. (He later revealed that he had ‘this image of my grandad in his slippers reading the paper, knowing that his grandson had been involved in something which he’d put so much of his life into’ and ‘got over-emotional’). He also helped reunite the Orchestra of Syrian Musicians after they had been disbanded by war, via the musical collective Africa Express, which he co-founded with journalist Ian Birrell to promote African music. The project’s aims of ‘unity and collaboration’ are a constant theme to his work (the comic Viz once depicted him asking a toilet brush to collaborate with him), which includes two operas (one about the Elizabethan mathematician cum alchemist John Dee, and another based on the Chinese legend of the Monkey King’s enlightenment), a musical, the supergroup The Good, the Bad and the Queen (soon to start touring for its second album in nearly twelve years, Merrie Land), and the ‘virtual band’ Gorillaz, for which he has worked with a dizzying roll-call of big names, including Lou Reed and Bobby Womack.
What was it like, I ask, growing up and hearing what your grandfather did? It must have set a powerful example.
‘He was one of the youngest qualified architects,’ he says slowly, ‘and then he had all that stripped away because he refused to join up.’ His voice becomes low. ‘Pretty disgusting really… Quakers were very much disregarded and, in many cases, put in prison. My grandfather didn’t get put in prison; he was just made to sell sausages on the street.’
He likens the attitudes towards ‘conchies’ at the time to ‘the entrenched position of Leave voters now’ and it is true he has had a lot to say publicly on Brexit (he was one of the signatories to a letter in The Guardian in December calling for a citizen’s assembly). ‘It’s that tendency in humans to draw lines and not be able to work beyond those lines,’ he says. ‘That’s a classic example of what happened to a lot of Quakers.’ (‘The most corrosive thing’ about Brexit, he adds, is not just about economics, but ‘what it has done to us spiritually. It’s made people very belligerent and, actually, where there wasn’t a divide, one appeared after the referendum.’)
These experiences of being ostracised (‘People threw eggs at him in the street and called him a coward,’ he revealed in a previous interview) left his grandfather angry, but ‘he was a passionate and intelligent man… They say I’m like my grandfather,’ he twinkles. ‘My mum says: “You are so like Edward.”’ ‘In what way?’ I ask. He reflects: ‘I can be a bit brusque… I’m not afraid to stand up for stuff.’
The young Damon Albarn grew up spending time in the village of Holton cum Beckering, which he describes as being ‘full of these amazing families; then, literally a mile and a half down the road, there were my mother’s side who were successful landowners… My other grandfather had prisoners-of-war working on his land [during the war] which was very normal. So, in one village, you had Jewish refugees being taken in from all over Europe, and, on the other side of the fence, you had German prisoners of war… but my grandfather treated them pretty well.’
In Lincolnshire in the early 1970s, there were still the old aerodromes left abandoned from the war ‘so you could go and live out all your childhood war fantasies’. Not that you suspect he has many war fantasises. The 2003 Blur song ‘Out of Time’ is as close to a peace song as you can get, with the sleeve for the single drawn by fellow peacenik Banksy, who later donated a picture to the part-Quaker initiative Art the Arms Fair, raising £205,000. Does he envisage a protest song ever being able to gain traction now?
‘I think those wonderful days when John Lennon was sitting in a bed singing “Give Peace A Chance’’, there isn’t that space in the airways now, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t moments and…’ he pauses, ‘I mean – oh, it’s hard – maybe I don’t know what a modern peace song sounds like because I’m not receptive to it… I would like to think that music in all its forms is a peaceful pursuit… [it is] very much part of our national health and should be treated as such.’
Part of the reason I asked the musician for an interview was that I’m fascinated by the way the Peace Testimony resonates through the generations and creates ripples that carry far beyond Quakerism. To him, this isn’t surprising. ‘I believe in this,’ he says. He refutes ‘the idea that after someone dies, that’s the end of it… we share atoms, don’t we?… These are the intangible things that science has not yet understood and that’s why you see such a collection of esoteric books up there.’ He gestures to the bookshelves that crowd the studio wall, ‘because it’s the same question going from Gurdjieff to John Dee to Agrippa.’
‘I’m everything and nothing,’ he expands. The theological openness of Quakerism ‘appeals’ to him, and in other interviews he has expressed affinity with Sufism and Buddhism. ‘I mean, you know, the great thing that Africa as a continent has given me is a much wider spectrum of what pluralism means, which Christianity is really bad on.’ He tells me that in Nigeria, there are churches that seat a million people. ‘When you’ve got a million people all focusing their energy on one thing, that’s a big quake. It’s a huge quake.’
Which brings us back to his Griot name story. ‘You seem drawn to traditions where music is a kind of ministry,’ I say. I’m thinking of instruments such as the kora, the sublime West African twenty-one-string lute-harp, of which Toumani Diabaté, who has taken part in various Africa Express initiatives, is thought to be the world’s greatest virtuoso. Does he feel called to wake the West up to music’s potential to ‘tap into the mystic’?
‘Massively… it drives me to do everything. It’s acknowledging the power of the Spirit, and allowing the Spirit to enter you. I wouldn’t say every day is sort of level-five spiritual, but… as Ian Dury said, I’ve seen “glimpses”.’
Can music change the world? He looks at me as if I’ve asked the blindingly obvious. ‘Music has changed the world and music is constantly changing the world. People are listening to music more than ever… [they] have their internal universes with headphones… It’s not, “Can it?” It is – part of today and definitely tomorrow,’ and, with that, he’s off, on some other adventure, on some other project, wherever the Spirit may lead.
Africa Express will play a headline show at the Wanstead Flats in East London on 29 March to celebrate the Waltham Forest London Borough of Culture 2019.
Rebecca is the journalist at the Friend.
Comments
Good Job Rebecca
By joc_08@msn.com on 28th March 2019 - 1:02
Good article. Thank you.
By johnp on 10th January 2020 - 14:00
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