There are various nautical and ecological references, a few recurring characters and some philosophical meditations on recycling, but all get rather lost in the flow of perfect pop singles that tumble out from the album. Plastic Beach is a concept album set on a mythical Pacific island, one built from the detritus dumped into the Pacific Trash Vortex. It’s a statistic that ?puts the Blur vs Oasis shenanigans into some context.Īlbum No 3 sees Albarn and cartoonist Jamie Hewlett take that conceptual edge further. Gorillaz – a project that had its roots in Damon’s guest slot with hip hop supergroup Deltron 3030 – have shifted more than 12 million albums, twice going double platinum in America. While his more dimwitted rivals continue to pursue a monochrome vision of Anglo-Saxon pop, unsullied by outside influences, Albarn has scoured the world in search of sound: archiving dance music from Trinidad to Iraq, collaborating with Mali’s finest musicians, forming a band with Nigeria’s greatest drummer, and writing a Chinese opera.Īnd, more to the point, he’s emerged as one of the few Brits who is still able to do what all great British pop stars have done since The Beatles – add a subversive art-school twist to African-American music and sell it back to the States. It sometimes seems he’s spent the last decade apologising for this. On the recent Blur documentary film No Distance Left To Run, Damon Albarn casually claims that he “invented Britpop”.

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