Damon Albarn, Jamie Hewlett and I stand on the balcony of the
Royal Opera House in Covent Garden where the huge stage work on
which they have collaborated is now performing, looking at flames
roaring out of the pavement grille five floors below us. A
restaurant kitchen is on fire.
"That's bad down there. It's about to explode any minute,"
Albarn observes, with the air of a man who knows his underground
fires. Flames are shooting up a couple of metres and surrounding
shops have been evacuated. Shouldn't we move back a little?
"Maybe," says Albarn over the empty street, "but I kind of like the
danger."
Albarn has made a career out of flouting danger, albeit usually
of the musical kind. The former Blur front man, and Hewlett, the
whiz-bang graphic artist with whom he devised the "virtual" band
Gorillaz, are also two-thirds of the collaboration that has
produced Monkey: Journey to the West.
Monkey, a kind of contemporary, Chinese-acrobatic opera
based on a Ming Dynasty saga about a naughty monkey king who wants
to be immortal, is the brainchild of admired Chinese director Chen
Shi-Zheng, who has directed several contemporary Chinese stage
spectacles in the United States.
Albarn wrote a score based on the Chinese scale and Chinese
musical forms; Hewlett designed the characters and sets. The lyrics
are in Mandarin, with simple surtitles. Nothing about it should
work, but Monkey has been getting rave reviews since it
premiered at an arts festival in Manchester last year.
Not many musicians, I suggest to Albarn, would be prepared to
take on a tradition as ancient and rarefied as Chinese opera
without flinching.
"Yeah, but ..." he begins - having seen the cavalry arrive in
the form of the London Fire Brigade, he has settled back to his
coffee - "I'm not really worried about stuff like that. I don't
think I'd have set foot in the Royal Opera House if I were
concerned about things like that."
When it came to it, Albarn knew about as much - or as little -
about writing opera as he did about Chinese culture. "There was the
same level of ignorance about them both, really. I don't speak the
language and I'd never written anything remotely like this
before."
They had no idea if they could do it, says Hewlett, but they
weren't going to knock back the suggested research trip to the
rural areas of China. Chen took Albarn and Hewlett to China five
times in all. It took Albarn 18 months to produce his first piece,
a rhythmically souped-up take on girly Chinese pop called
Heavenly Peach Banquet.
"I find it very humorous," says Chen. "Hong Kong pop is so
pretty and naive. This is Damon pretending to be naive and you are
laughing at him. Messy is a bad word, but he took a melody, messed
it around and put noises into it, twisted and processed the sound
so that none of it is as it seems."
Hewlett, meanwhile, was working on drawings of the characters
that would meet Chen's approval. At first, Chen says, he was
referencing his research too heavily. "They were too Chinese. It
took him a long time to get away from that, to draw Monkey
from his own imagination. I wanted to give people a surprise, to
get away from what had been done. And Jamie has a great sense of
humour when you hang around with him and I wanted that to come
through. It is a comic strip, after all."
Hewlett says now that he thinks he had an easier task than
Albarn. "As an artist, I can't go wrong really. It is a culture
completely made up of imagery: the language is written in
characters, it's all pictorial."
This month sees the release of a studio album of the
Monkey music, with graphics by Hewlett that are much
darker and more perverse than the glowing designs he did for the
sets and stage characters.
"I wanted to put the album out so that there is a record,
literally, of how I think of it in my head," says Albarn. But the
music should stand alone, he goes on, because none of it was
composed as an accompaniment to action.
"I wasn't going to start making music that drives the narrative,
because that's just naff; it becomes like film music or cartoon
music. 'Now they're running.' You can't really work like that. I
just wrote an awful lot of music and slowly kind of put it
together."
He says he composed his own music using the pentatonic scale;
elsewhere, he has described writing with the aid of a system of
five- and seven-pointed stars that he would rotate, supposedly at
random, to produce unexpected combinations of notes. Even so, as
the critics observed, the music was absolute Albarn.
"One of Albarn's more remarkable tricks," wrote Alexis Petridis
in The Guardian, "also demonstrated on 2002's Mali
Music album, is his ability to somehow impress himself on
world music in an unassuming fashion."
What makes Albarn's approach to the Chinese idiom entirely
distinct, says Chen, is his approach to rhythm and the sounds he
discovers. His orchestra ranged from strings to the tuba, but also
included Chinese instruments such as the pipa - a kind of lute -
and the Ondes Martenot, a 1920s electronic instrument that produces
a wavering sigh, a bit like the sound of a saw. Albarn and his
collaborators also invented their own instrument, a kind of klaxon
made of Plexiglass, to produce the sounds of China's roads
alongside the drone of classical strings.
"For me, especially with the record, it's very much a modern
piece," says Albarn. "It's not trying to evoke the time of legend
at all. It's very much in sort of downtown Beijing, Shanghai or
Tokyo. It's very much the modern Asia: slightly kooky, very
colourful, quite sexy, but still a quite sinister place."
Inevitably, the morality of investing in Chinese culture has
been questioned, especially since some more universally friendly
versions of the Monkey characters were commissioned by the
BBC as a promotional link for its Olympics coverage. Hewlett's
Monkey, Pigsy and Tripitaca encounter various pieces of sporting
equipment; the tone is frivolous. There is a kind of discomfort,
Albarn told British music journalist Paul Morley, in the fact that
he is used to being in the protestors' camp.
"I now find myself in the strange position that, while I agree
with the stone-throwers, I understand the glass that is having
stones thrown at it. I'm not agreeing at all with what China is
doing, but I think it is important that a dialogue keeps going or
they'll disappear behind a wall forever."
Hewlett, too, says it is worth keeping the lines open. "If it
does all blow up in our faces, I would still stand up for the fact
we did this. The level of understanding in the West of this vast
country and its people is very low and, if you get a chance, why
not do what you can to shine a light on its ways?"
Come September, however, they will both move on to the next
project which, they have said vaguely, may be called Carousel, may
have something to do with Spain, but, at the moment, is just a lot
of ideas and pieces of music. The challenge is to keep doing things
that are completely different from what's gone before. And if they
seem impossible, so much the better. That sense of danger: it keeps
things lively.
(Pics: monkeyjourneytothewest.com)