Damon Albarn on how nature influenced new album The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows

DAMON Albarn vividly remembers being dispatched to a farm aged 5.

It was a life-changing expertise for the little boy from a Victorian terraced home on Fillebrook Highway in city Leytonstone, East London.

Damon Albarn is releasing The Nearer The Fountain, Extra Pure The Stream Flows, the follow-up to 2014’s autobiographical debut solo album On a regular basis RobotsCredit score: © Steve Gullick

It’s clear David Attenborough isn’t the one “D.A.” with a ardour for the pure worldCredit score: Steve Gullick

“My mum was seriously ill in hospital for six weeks, then she was convalescing for two months,” he says. “So I went to live with my grandparents up in rural Lincolnshire.”

The peace, the solitude and the wildlife all had a huge effect on Damon and assist clarify why the good outdoor informs his solo works now, the newest particularly.

“Going to that farm was very influential for me,” he affirms. “I spent a lot of time sitting in my grandad’s Land Rover, following him around all day, hanging out with his dog. I was on my own a lot, too.”

He would have noticed farmland birds — possibly kestrels, rooks, woodpigeons, lapwings, skylarks, buntings, finches and wagtails — and shortly birdwatching grew to become a pastime.

“I joined the Young Ornithologists Club,” he tells me. “I had the kestrel badge and I was very serious about it.”

It’s clear David Attenborough isn’t the one “D.A.” with a ardour for the pure world.

Damon continues: “As soon as, throughout a extremely snowy winter, we had a chook feeder within the backyard.

“I worked out if I wore a white muslin cloth with two little holes for my eyes and if I was really still, I could stand next to the feeder and watch the birds close up.” 

Profound and poetic

All these years later, he’s releasing The Nearer The Fountain, Extra Pure The Stream Flows, the follow-up to 2014’s autobiographical debut solo album On a regular basis Robots. 

Two songs are named after birds, The Cormorant and Daft Wader, suggesting Damon’s childhood infatuation has by no means left him.

The challenge started as an orchestral piece impressed by the rugged fantastic thing about Iceland, where the singer keeps a house. There he recorded serene instrumentals with a classical ensemble however, because the pandemic kicked in, his work underwent an enforced and dramatic shift.

The album needed to be completed in Devon, the place it morphed into 11 songs drenched in old-school synths, processed beats and located sounds, full with thought-provoking lyrics. It’s probably probably the most profound and poetic factor he has ever executed.

If Gorillaz is Damon’s car for riotous sound collages and intense collaborations, that is how he reveals his coronary heart and soul.

It’s one other notable swerve in an enormous and different CV that includes Blur, The Good, The Dangerous & The Queen, Africa Specific and scores for stage productions comparable to Monkey: Journey To The West and Dr Dee.

“They even like it in America, which I’m very surprised about,” says Damon of his new effort. “Apparently they like soothing music at the moment.” We’re speaking by way of Zoom, Damon at his Devon farmhouse the place he likes to feed the crows, and me at our HQ overlooking London Bridge.

Although torrential rain is sweeping in from the West, he picks up his display screen to point out me the view from his window — a picture-perfect impression of England’s inexperienced and nice land.

“It’s literally the end of the line down here,” he says. “There isn’t one other home in a two-mile radius. You might be seeing the valley I reside in and the ocean simply past.

“Further up, the landscape opens up into a bay with a lighthouse. I swim there every day when I’m here, summer or winter. Right now, September into October, the sea is at it warmest.”

This leads us on to a different spectacular view, the one Damon can marvel at from his home on the sting of Reykjavik.

He holds up an image of a desolate bay framed by snowy mountains and instantly launches into extra discuss of birds.

“The water recedes at low tide, leaving mud flats,” he explains. “Thousands of wading birds gather here.”

‘Magical world’

These embody distinctive black-and-white eider geese, their point out prompting an enchanting anecdote from Damon.

“In the ancient deeds for the land I own, there’s an agreement that all the people in this area share the eiderdown,” he says. 

“Eventually you can accumulate enough to make a duvet but the most amazing birds we have there are ravens. You really appreciate how big and how smart they are.”

Simply as he loves Iceland’s fjords, glaciers, geysers, volcanoes and waterfalls, Damon admires the Icelandic individuals who, he says, are steeped in myths and legends.

“They’re still very much in touch with their magical world,” he says. “It’s as a result of they’ve needed to cope with such loopy bodily issues. At one level within the sixteenth Century, the inhabitants went right down to 200 due to plague, hunger and volcanic exercise.

“The imaginations of Icelandic individuals are supremely attuned to massive, open areas the place they set their fantastical tales. 

“They are also very calm, balanced people, very democratic, and they don’t have an overt class system like ours.”

Damon is completely satisfied to report that his new album incorporates the haunting sound of an Icelandic stone marimba, a percussion instrument often product of wooden and akin to a xylophone.

“It was put together by this amazing artist who has a workshop up in the mountains,” says Damon. “He gets the stones, including some really big ones, from streams but forming a coherent, harmonic keyboard can take years.”

How becoming it’s that the album title consists of the phrases “more pure the stream flows” then. 

Damon accepts the final temper is “melancholic” however the sweetly sung last two tracks, euphoric Polaris and ethereal Particles, undertake a “joyous” tone.

Particles, he says, emerged from “an intense metaphysical conversation with a rabbi from Winnipeg” on a flight to Iceland.

“This lovely old lady told me she was trying to escape from certain particles but she couldn’t. If they were meant for you, they’d find you, she said.”

He mused on this notion within the context of Covid but additionally turned his ideas to the aurora borealis or Northern Lights, a well-recognized sight at their North Atlantic vacation spot.

“The aurora is a beautiful spectacle, a direct result of particles sent on solar winds from the sun,” he says.

“They die when they hit the Earth’s protective skin but, in their death, they cause a chemical reaction that gives us a magical light show.”

Damon smiles on the considered “particles constantly moving chaotically. When chaos happ-ens, it’s joyous!”

‘Poetic feel’

He likens it to the randomness of our journeys via life, inevitable demise and thrilling rebirth and this brings us on to the album’s title, a couplet from the elegiac poem Love And Reminiscence by John Clare.

One of many Victorian poet’s best-loved works, it’s a meditation on grief and renewal with imagery drawing on the passing seasons and the marvel of nature.

Damon is a large fan and says: “Clare was a working-class poet, an attention-grabbing man and actually forward of his time. He even checked right into a wellbeing clinic, nineteenth Century-style.

“Once I was a lot youthful, my mum gave me an anthology as a result of he was from Essex and we had spent quite a lot of time there. I’ve had the e book for ages and I’m a dipper into poetry.

“I underlined the ‘nearer the fountain’ line years ago because I thought it would be a wonderful springboard for something.”

When Damon sat at his keyboard in Iceland, gazing out of his window on the pure, wild scene and subsequently invited the small orchestral ensemble into the room to play, he knew he had the right title.

However it was solely when the challenge continued in his makeshift barn studio in Devon and lyrics began to circulate that the remainder of Love And Reminiscence “came into focus”.

He says: “I wanted the whole record to have a strong poetic feel. Its mood demands it.”

For these periods, he introduced in long-time affiliate Simon Tong, the ex-Verve guitarist who performs in The Good, The Dangerous & The Queen, and composer, arranger and Gorillaz live-band member Mike Smith.

Once more, Damon factors to his display screen, this time to point out me the stone constructing which has change into a haven for his music endeavours throughout the pandemic.

“I’m having it renovated in the next year,” he says. “It’s very rough-and-ready, extraordinarily chilly, damp and really dusty.

“All of us received chest complaints and a few days the devices didn’t work. I had a man who was always having to drive down and repair my assortment of outdated synthesisers. They’re a labour of affection, like outdated automobiles.

“The one I use most on this record is an Elka, a classic Seventies synth that would have been used by people like Emerson, Lake & Palmer. It’s huge — huge. Weighs a ton!” 

If The Nearer The Fountain is a product of lockdown, the opening up of society means Damon is lastly attending to carry out its songs reside.

He says: “I’ve already done some weird and wonderful things playing this record.”

On Monday he’s placing on a solo present at Shakespeare’s Globe on the capital’s South Financial institution, which he’s “hugely excited” about. 

He will probably be revisiting materials from Dr Dee, his rating for an opera in regards to the lifetime of Elizabeth I’s scientific adviser — not precisely the Chris Whitty of his day, primarily as a result of he dabbled in alchemy and the occult.

Damon says the Dee music and his new album are “bedfellows” due to their exploration of metaphysical ideas. “But I can’t just spend my whole life doing that stuff or I might disintegrate and become just particles,” he laughs.

Subsequent 12 months brings extra solo gigs “in lovely old concert halls around Europe” in addition to large pageant dates with Gorillaz.

He’s additionally writing an orchestral suite for the Holland Pageant in Amsterdam and hopes to return to Paris to reprise his African opera in 4 languages, Le Vol Du Boli, a collaboration with Malian director Abderrahmane Sissako.

I counsel that, with every little thing happening, Damon actually is a bit like a particle, pinging across the universe.

“OK, I am a particle,” he agrees. “Generally the oppor-tunities arising for me are fairly tangential.

“But if they offer me the promise of making music, I will follow them. I just want to make music.”

The challenge started as an orchestral piece impressed by the rugged fantastic thing about Iceland, however the pandemic meant the album needed to be completed in Devon

Damon’s new album The Nearer The Fountain, Extra Pure The Stream FlowsCredit score: Steve Gullick