Interview with Gorillaz, on the new album “The Mountain” and 25 years together – The video

Zane Lowe met Gorillaz at the House of Kong in Los Angeles, the immersive experience celebrating the British band's 25th anniversary, to talk about their latest album, "The Mountain". The men behind Gorillaz, Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, sit down with Zane to discuss the new project, how they found inspiration by confronting loss and grief, and to reflect on their 25 years together. Here is the full interview from The Zane Lowe Show on Apple Music 1.

Gorillaz tell Apple Music about their new album, "The Mountain"

Damon Albarn: Oh, definitely. Definitely. And it was a bit like the follow-up to "Plastic Beach". There's dissonance in the middle of it, but it still feels like it was an interesting period with a lot of interesting things going on inside it. But in terms of cohesion, narrative and that sense of "unity", I think this is clearly something I'd call the next chapter in that world, you know, applying the principle of the adventure.

Jamie Hewlett: And with a narrative that presented itself to us pretty forcefully. It was practically inevitable.

Gorillaz tell Apple Music about their Glastonbury performances and how they changed their live approach

Damon Albarn: Well, I'll tell you what happened. It happened because we got a last-minute call to headline Glastonbury. And we had this band, and we were still applying the principle we'd used in our live shows with Demon Days, where everyone is almost in silhouette, you know, and the band doesn't really put itself front and centre. You know, that's what we wanted to do. And yet, what happened was a strange kind of disconnect. It looks great on TV, but a strange disconnect, out there in that huge field, and afterwards I thought: I've got this band, I need to... I need to rethink this, because it's the only way to play at that scale. You know what I mean?

Zane Lowe: You can't stay in silhouette on the Pyramid Stage.

Damon Albarn: No, no, you can't. That's what I'm saying, you know. So the following weekend was Roskilde and I said: “Screw it, I'm going to do what I can do,” you know. I'm not going to hold this back because it's simply pointless in that context. So yes, it became more of a live band. But for some reason we've now managed to get things back on track a bit.

Gorillaz tell Apple Music about interviews in the early years of their career

Jamie Hewlett: We were simply trying to take the idea of celebrity out of the equation.

Damon Albarn: But we were really bad at it. Every time we tried… our first interview in America was with Rolling Stone or something like that, right? And we were all on different phones playing the characters. Remi was doing Russell, I was doing 2D, he [Jamie] was doing Murdoc. I don't think Noodle was even around yet. We were trying to do it all, you know what I mean, brilliantly and… you know, that side of things we never really fully mastered.

Gorillaz tell Apple Music about their attempts to perform as holograms

Jamie Hewlett: On TV it looked incredible.

Damon Albarn: On TV it was a hit. It was really brilliant. On TV it was fantastic. But in the room it was terrible.

Zane Lowe: I remember thinking at the time: you could do 12 shows simultaneously all over the world.

Damon Albarn: That was genuinely a credible conversation, before ABBA had the money to actually do it.

Jamie Hewlett: It was too expensive and the technology wasn't developed enough yet: in a live situation you had to keep the music very low, because the invisible screen vibrates when you turn up the bass and drums, and so the animations make sounds, vibrations. When we were at the Grammys and they appeared, it was really very quiet. And people were talking, they didn't even realize the show had started because it was so quiet.

Gorillaz tell Apple Music about their bond with Daft Punk

Damon Albarn: It definitely felt like: "Ok, they're doing what we're doing." But they had the advantage of not having a britpop face trying to hide itself. I was at a disadvantage.

Zane Lowe: Victim of your own face. We've been saying that for 30 years now.

Gorillaz tell Apple Music about their process for making music videos

Jamie Hewlett: I don't mind. I mean, there are a lot of storyboards for so many videos that have never been seen. And what I do is put as much work as possible into the storyboard, so that when we start, the animators know exactly what it's supposed to look like. Instead of just doing stick figures and little sketches with camera movements and stuff like that, I try to do more. They've become increasingly complex and then I started cutting the storyboards to the music, so I'd deliver an animatic and, you know, it would end up being like 350 drawings just to tell a four-minute video. So it's nice, it's nice to show them, I mean.

Damon Albarn: It was a happy life, I'd play a track and run over to Jamie's studio at Buspace, on the second floor, and play it for him, and he'd listen to it and then start drawing, you know, and that happened every day. It was fantastic.

Zane Lowe: Ok, so usually what happens with music videos is that someone writes the idea and then the director decides where and how to shoot it and puts together a production crew to make it happen, but in your case, you're effectively directing the video while you're storyboarding it and breaking it all down. So do you build a narrative before you even start storyboarding, or does the narrative sometimes emerge as you go along drawing?

Jamie Hewlett: I listen to the song and decide what the story is going to be and I talk to him [Damon] about it. We say: yeah, that's cool, and then I draw it. It's actually pretty simple. Then I change some parts and sometimes he says he doesn't like something and so I change it. It's not a big team, but I deliver the complete idea and then we bring in the animators and so on, and they say: well, that's too expensive, you don't have enough money, and so some things have to change and you tweak bits, but I try to deliver the complete idea without needing anyone else to step in, you know?

Gorillaz tell Apple Music about their personal connection to the characters

Damon Albarn: There was a moment in this strange little journey where, when I first did it, the hair literally stood up on the back of my neck because it felt strange. It felt strange, like they were right around the corner. Like they really existed.

Gorillaz tell Apple Music how they developed the band's characters

Jamie Hewlett: You start out designing just enough to get going and then you keep adding and adding, so they've developed over the course of 25 years. But yeah, I mean, Murdoc as a satanist was a pretty easy one.

Zane Lowe: Russell coming from New York.

Jamie Hewlett: Russell coming from New York and — well, in our original manifesto there was this idea that Russell was the character able to summon spirits, dead rappers or artists who had passed away, which seemed like a fantastic idea to us, and then we never did anything with it. I mean, we had Del coming out of him like a ghost, but we didn't carry that idea forward until this album, when it sort of started to make sense, you know? Because in the meantime 25 years had gone by, we'd worked with these people, we'd built a relationship with them and then they'd passed away, so that idea started to make sense. But when we came up with it, there was no one to do it with, unless they were fictional characters. So it was a seed planted a long time ago and now it's coming to life.

Gorillaz tell Apple Music about the film they almost made and the inspiration behind Cracker Island

Jamie Hewlett: If we'd made a film 25 years ago, fine, but the idea of making one now doesn't interest me at all. No interest whatsoever. It's not an interesting idea, it's not an original idea, it's like... we had this moment with Netflix where we were literally told: you can do whatever you want and we'll give you all the money you need, and we were like: OK, great. We had brilliant ideas, but everything moved so slowly and the person we were working with left and they said: don't worry, we'll find someone else, and you think: OK, there's going to be another year of conversations before this gets going again. So we pulled out.

Damon Albarn: It just felt like we were standing there waiting for what felt like an eternity.

Jamie Hewlett: So, while we were waiting, we basically made an album.

Damon Albarn: About waiting for an eternity.

Gorillaz tell Apple Music about grief during the making of "The Mountain"

Jamie Hewlett: We were shooting the live action sequences for the video for “Silent Running” from the last album, and we were in Serbia together, while my wife was in India with her mother. They were supposed to fly home and her mother had a stroke. So I had to go from Belgrade to London and then to India in early December 2022, and then we were in Jaipur for six, seven weeks, until mid-January I think, still trying to bring her mother home in a coma, which was a pretty tough and quite traumatic experience, but at the same time I had an incredible experience in India, you know, people were very warm and that really helped the situation. So when I got back, I was really keen to talk to Damon about the idea of going together. There wasn't a big plan at that point yet, just the idea of going to India together, having an experience and seeing if we could make an album, a Gorillaz record, in India. And then, between one trip and another, we lost our fathers — first Damon's father, and ten days later mine, which was very strange because we were born ten days apart. It's a lot, you start to feel it's pretty eerie and strange. Not eerie in a scary way, but more like: okay, this is something big that has to be dealt with, or I don't know, we had to think about how to move forward, because you know, when you lose your father, you level up in the great video game of life and become the patriarch, and it's very strange, no matter what your relationship was like, good or bad, it doesn't matter.

Damon Albarn: It changes you.

Jamie Hewlett: It changes you.

Damon Albarn: It really changes you.

Jamie Hewlett: Because you've had a kind of cushion, a safety zone, your whole life, and when that suddenly disappears, you think: oh s***.

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