Reykjavík Grapevine - nov 2021, Qupperneq 9

9 The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 11— 2021
It's impossible. And if you are, you're doing
something terribly wrong. It used to hurt
me so much when I was younger. 'Why don't
they like me? I'm really good, I work really
hard, and they're so mean about me, certain
people.' Even when I've done something
really good, they're mean, and I know it's
because they just don't like me."
What did we gain from the Iraq
War?
Damon has always had a strong sense of
social justice, and has never shied away from
taking a stand. He downplays this, saying
it’s “just from being brought up by socially
aware, liberal parents. In part coming from
a Quaker background, pacifist, you're hard
wired into that straight away,” but even with
such a background, it’s not a given that some-
one who’s been suddenly catapulted to fame
will retain these values. One of the causes he
was most outspoken about was his opposi-
tion to the then-impending invasion of Iraq,
something he still feels strongly about to this
day.
"It does astound me, and obviously you're
far more sensitive to your own folks' bad
decisions, but with the whole Iraq thing,”
he says. “There were two million people
who marched. It felt on that day like no
way will Tony Blair be able to deal with this.
This is a very physical expression of public
opinion. Especially back then; this was pre-
Twitter and everything. And yet it was just
dismissed.”
In retrospect, he believes, simply marching
wasn’t going far enough.
“If I was Captain Hindsight, I'd have been able
to tell everyone that we can't just march on
this Saturday; we have to stay in London, all
of us camp in Hyde Park, and just stay there,”
he says. “It's quite extraordinary, really, the
power of the state to just undermine every-
thing. And for what? What did anyone gain
out of the Iraq War? Massive refugees, the
Taliban, ISIS. None of that's gone away. But
what did we gain? I suppose if you're right
wing and support Brexit, you got what you
wanted, because you scared everybody.”
Ultimately, it’s the cruelty at the heart of it all
that astounds him.
“I just look at them and think, why are you
like this?” he says. “What sort of world do
“It was at a moment in my life
where I'd become far more
famous than I'd ever antici-
pated or even imagined.”
“There were all these things
I'd accumulated while being
here, and they became the
bedrock of how I wrote the
album.”
The View From The Piano:
Damon Albarn’s Love Affair With Iceland
you live in where you think it's agreeable to
be aggressive and negative to other people?
However much I walk around these things,
I always come back to ‘no, we have to keep
trying to educate people.’ We're all exactly
the same. We're just little specks of dust,
and nothing any of us say is actually of any
importance. But collectively...", he trails off,
leaving the possibilities open-ended, up to
the imagination.
The journey from the sea to
the island
On the topic of the new album, I mention a
press release that quoted him as saying the
album was a result, in part, of a “dark jour-
ney” he had taken.
"Sometimes I say things and they get frozen
in time and come back to me,” he remarks.
“It's related in part to what we're all going
through, but I suppose when you get to 50, it's
the first time when you become really aware
of people dying and getting ill, because you're
on the radar of all of that. It's just a realisa-
tion that it is finite."
To say that Iceland inspired the album,
though, is an understatement. Some of the
songs were literally written from the inspi-
ration right outside his livingroom window.
“Someone came to me and said, 'What would
you like to do?' And I said, 'I'd love to make
a record staring out my window in Iceland,
with a group of orchestral musicians.',”
Damon explains. “I wasn't going to write
anything down; just get to some very simple
harmonic destinations. But basically, we
used to come here with everything all set up.
Someone would be in charge of the clouds,
someone would be in charge of the outline of
Esja, someone would be on waves, and birds,
and golf carts. We'd spend hours just playing,
playing, playing. And once you take it out of

It’s in this room where Albarn’s newest
album, ‘The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure
The Stream Flows’, was composed. In fact,
the view itself guides the harmonies and
melodies on this album in a novel way.
"I've spent years just sitting at the piano and
staring,” Damon says. “Once you start it's
like—,” he begins, but is suddenly distracted
by the view from the window. “Oh my god,
there's a rainbow, there's everything."
He stands, picks up his tablet, and walks to
the window to take some photos of the rain-
bow in question, singing softly as he does:
“Rainbooooow… rainbowwwww!” I remark
that it’s admirable he hasn’t grown jaded to
this country’s features after more than 20
years of making Iceland a part of his life.
"It's hard to get jaded to that,” he says, gestur-
ing to the window. “It's volatile. And the
mood—it's just crazy."
Over the course of our conversation, Damon
talks about how this view inspired his new
album, his views on social justice, and how
he fell in love with Iceland.
Flying over black sand
beaches
"I had a very specific introduction to Iceland,”
Damon says. “I used to have a recurring
dream as a child, of flying over black sand.
It wasn't connected to anything, but I would
always find myself, at night, in my dreams,
flying over black sand. I kept having that
dream for a long time. Then I became a
young adult and forgot about the dream for
a bit. Much later I was lying in a hotel room
somewhere, on tour, and watched a National
Geographic programme that happened to
be about Iceland. Suddenly, I realised that
Iceland was full of black sand beaches.”
The timing of making this connection was
fortuitous for Damon, as the experience of
fame was beginning to take its toll.
“It was at a moment in my life where I'd
become far more famous than I'd ever
anticipated or even imagined,” he says. “It
gets beyond a point where your imagination
can go, it becomes deeply psychological, its
effect on you. It dawns on you that this is not
straightforward, and it's not the thing that
you imagined as a kid, religiously watching
Top Of The Pops. It's way more than that, and
way darker than that. I felt I needed to get out
somewhere where no one would know me.”
This led to his first trip to Iceland, with a
typewriter and guitar in tow, and re-connect-
ing with the only person he knew in the
country: musician, visual artist and former
Sugarcubes vocalist Einar Örn Benediktsson,
whom he previously met in Boston. Damon
describes Einar as “my guide, really, into the
world of Reykjavík.” The two soon became
fast friends, and Damon began frequenting
the downtown pub Kaffibarinn, which he
would later, and temporarily, become part
owner of. During this time, Damon fell hard
for Iceland.
“I started waxing lyrical in every interview
about how I'd found this place and how
wonderful it was,” he says. “It spiraled out
of control, really, and for 15 years after, there
were huge amounts of people coming over
just to go to my bar as one of the things they
were going to do. That was a bit depressing,
really, as I no longer had anything to do with
that. I was only very briefly a co-owner of that
place.”
Citizen Albarn
Earlier this year, Damon Albarn was granted
Icelandic citizenship, some 24 years after
first coming here. It’s something that he’s
still quite excited about, as he eagerly shows
me his Icelandic passport when I ask if he has
one.
"What I'm really excited about is going back
into the UK with this," he says. "I only got this
one. I didn't bring my British one, just to see
how far I could get with it. Going back to
England, it's going to be funny, because they
always recognise me. They're either going to
think it's cool or think I'm an asshole. Which
is kind of how it is in my country.”
He pauses for a moment, reflecting on his
home country.
“I'm not everyone's cup of tea, but fuck 'em,”
Damon says. “What you have to reconcile
with yourself in life is that you're not going
to be able to please everyone all the time.