Cover Feature Planet Of The Apes: Gorillaz

Damon Albarn might not be a man known for predictability, but there are some rituals he takes seriously. One, it seems, is the eating of cake. “It’s tea time isn’t it? I always have tea and cake,” he says, mouth full, intermittently stuffing bits of a cherry-flavoured number in over a 3pm Zoom call. “A little early perhaps, but I’m still on French time…”

Quarantining in his London house after returning from a stint in Paris to perform collaborative opera Le Vol Du Boli (translated as The Flight of the Boli - a Malian spiritual object), Damon’s penchant for a sugary treat, he tells us, hasn’t always worked in his favour. “I developed a very mild eating disorder [when I was younger] because my mum would always put supper on the table at about 6.40pm, and I had to eat my main meal and my sweet before 7’o’clock when Top Of The Pops started because I wasn’t allowed to eat food and watch television…” However these days, he doesn’t have to worry about rushing for the BBC schedule. Now, with Gorillaz’ latest offering ‘Song Machine’ - a project originally conceived as a string of standalone multimedia ‘episodes’ that’s now evolved into a full record - he’s basically created the greatest new music TV series going.

“We weren’t thinking about songs joining each other or having any connection; it was just, ‘Let’s do this today’. And then three days later, we’ve done [a track],” he shrugs, gold tooth just about visible between bites. “There wasn’t a sense of ‘we’re doing something’, which in some ways helped the very eclectic nature of the people on the record. It didn’t have a self-consciousness that a lot of albums have because you’re dedicating a period of time to say something and create something with a sense of it being a unified whole. This [record’s] strength is in it being the opposite.”