British supergroup The Good, the Bad & the Queen: from left, Simon Tong, Damon Albarn, Tony Allen and Paul Simonon. (Soren Starbird/EMI Music Canada)
The elemental Englishness of the band the Good, the Bad & the Queen strikes you even before the first note is sounded. For starters, there’s the handle — an impolite overview of modern London, care of the group’s honcho, Blur frontman Damon Albarn. There’s the album cover, a detail of the London Tower and Mint by 19th-century British artist Thomas Shotter Boys. Then there’s the personnel: in addition to legendary Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, the band includes ex-Verve guitarist Simon Tong and a veritable British institution — Paul Simonon, ex-bassist for the Clash. In photos, Simonon wears a trilby hat and a bandage draped across the bridge of his nose, looking like a thug out of a Guy Ritchie movie — a right bounder, as the Brits might say.
The project got its start when Allen voiced an interest in working with Albarn after the two collaborated on Allen’s 2003 album Home Cooking. They eventually pulled in Tong, Simonon and producer Danger Mouse, the instrumental half of Gnarls Barkley and one of Albarn’s co-conspirators on the last Gorillaz album, Demon Days. Tong says it was Danger Mouse, a well-known Anglophile, who urged Albarn to “do a more English album.”
“We were very much aware that we were making an album that was going to have depth and that was going to be a weighty album, maybe a bit dark and melancholic,” says Tong on the phone from his London home. By turns hazy and haunting, the album is an enchanting blend of sideshow pop, dub and modern psychedelia.
(EMI Music Canada)
Taking stock of Tony Blair’s Britain, Albarn has created his most distinctly English album since Blur’s Parklife (1994). Since those salad days of Britpop, however, Albarn has surrendered his cheeky arrogance for something more forlorn. The album centres on a country besieged by rising tides (“In the flood we all get washed away”), a war machine (“I don’t want to live a war / that’s got no end in our time”) and the threat of nuclear annihilation (“The medicine man is here 24-7 / you can get it fast in Armageddon”). In the song Three Changes, Albarn refers to the U.K. as “a stroppy little island of mixed-up people.”
“[The lyrics] are bleak in a very English way,” says Tong. “A lot of English songwriters, particularly in modern music, like Morrissey and John Lennon, write quite depressing lyrics. But it’s also quite celebratory at the same time.” Like the main character of Geoff Nicholson’s 1997 novel Bleeding London, Albarn tallies the city's ills as a way of pointing up its boundless potential. The video to the first single, Kingdom of Doom, is an English tableau played for subtle humour. In a poky kitchen in a high-rise apartment, Albarn et al. prepare a blue-collar meal: sausages, bacon rashers, eggs and tomatoes. There’s no concert footage, no animation, not even a single mincing gesture — just four grown men enjoying typical pub food.
While the album has received tremendous praise, some reviewers have groused that it squanders the talents of Allen, a gifted drummer known for his explosive stickwork. The criticism reveals the expectations surrounding the word “supergroup”: most listeners brace themselves for a display of technical virtuosity, often the enemy of good music.
“I think everybody’s playing less [dynamically on the album] than they can do,” says Tong. “It was a definite discipline we had. Especially Tony — he’s used to 20-minute jams with Fela Kuti, and then to take it down to a three-minute pop song… I think he really enjoyed the whole process. He’s constantly looking to do new things. He hates repeating himself. For a young musician like me, it’s such an inspiration. This guy is 70 and he still wants to try new things.”
The Good, the Bad & the Queen is on EMI and is in stores now.
Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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