Damon Albarn used a “replica of Lou Reed’s voice” on Gorillaz track The Plastic Guru.
The 57-year-old singer included contributions from a number of his late collaborators on the band’s new album The Mountain – including Mark E. Smith and rapper Proof – but he’s revealed issues with Reed’s estate prevented him from using a recording of his voice on the new track so he had to come up with an alternative way to feature his late pal, who died in 2013.
During an appearance on The Needle Drop, Damon explained the inspiration for featuring stars who had previously worked with Gorillaz came during a visit to the Indian city of Varanasi when he realised he wanted to bring these “amazing dead musicians … back to life”. He said: “[It’s] not so much a tribute.
“It’s just it felt like, you know, when you’re … Especially in Varanasi, where public cremation has been going on for 5,000 years every day, every night, you really are amongst the dead. It literally is the city of the dead.
“That’s where I kind of came up with the idea that, you know, I wanted to bring those amazing dead musicians kind of back to life in this context.
“But I didn’t think about it until that moment.”
Damon revealed he then asked his production team to start combing the archives to find audio outtakes that hadn’t been used. He added: “I got on the phone to London, and I was going: ‘Can everyone start looking through all of the outtakes in the recordings?’
“And some of them go back a long way, you know, to get something from Proof. I also looked for something from Terry Hall there, but his tracks have been completely cleaned up because sometimes over the years, I’ve worked with very efficient engineers who just leave the strip clean and just have the performance on it. Others were not so tidy in their job.
“And actually, that’s where I got the most interesting stuff that I could use, because it was like: ‘I don’t want to use something I’ve already used. It’s just got to be if there are any outside things’.”
Damon went on to explain how he ran into trouble when he tried to feature Reed’s voice, saying: “And then, some people, their estates wouldn’t allow me. On The Plastic Guru, the voice at the beginning it’s actually a replica of Lou Reed’s voice.
“It was Lou Reed, and then I was told to take it off. So, I didn’t want to take what he’d said to me off … Because I thought it was really interesting.”
Damon went on to add of the project: “I just tried to do it intuitively. Someone like Mark E. Smith had loads of stuff left that I hadn’t used when we did [The Mountain track] Glitter Freeze.
“And I thought, well, there’s enough here for me to try and – you know, his words are so interesting and weirdly so modern-sounding … He was a pretty lyricist, so why waste one word of Mark E. Smith?”