More Dr.Dee… new Damon song performance (video, audio) new comment

Continuing our Dr.Dee coverage (rest assured, if there are any Gorillaz developments you’ll still hear about them here as soon as news becomes available)…

‘Apple Carts’ performance and Andrew Marr interview
Today Damon went on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show to talk about Dr.Dee and perform a song from the opera. You can watch a video of the performance on the BBC website here. You can download an mp3 of the performance here. If you are in the UK You can watch the whole Andrew Marr show (including the Damon interview – from around 33:00 to 38:30) on the BBC iplayer here for up to one week. You can also read a transcript of the interview by clicking ‘Read More’ below.

Second Dr.Dee trailer including Damon singing
A second Dr.Dee trailer was released last week on Youtube, and this one includes a brief clip of Damon singing. Check it out here

Damon comments to The Sun
The Sun sent someone along to speak to Damon at Dr.Dee rehearsals. Read some more of his comments on the The Sun website here. Excitingly, he hints that he may make an album out of the opera music at a later date.

The official Dr.Dee tumblr keeps posting interesting things like rehearsal photos so keep an eye on that ( here ). We’ve also sent your questions in to Damon so fingers crossed for a few answers fairly soon (we can’t send in any further questions now, sorry..).

Interview transcript. Couldn’t catch a couple of words, I think they are names of the instruments.

Andew Marr (AM): So.. John Dee. One of the oddest figures in Elizabethan history. What’s the appeal?

DA: Well, his ideas were so sort of broad, and his ambition was almost impossible to kind of grasp in one thing. I mean he..

AM: He’s often described as being ‘the magician’ and he had the wonderful white beard and all the rest of it, actually he was quite close to being a scientist, he was certainly a mathematician, he was very close to Elizabeth I…

DA: Well he did what I imagine was an incredibly important thing for the English, he translated the Euclid [sic] into English from Latin, so in a way gave the information that had been the sort of the reserve of the Church, and aristocrats.

AM: He was also the first person, I’ve read, to use the phrase ‘British Empire’..

DA: He did, he coined it. So that’s really interesting, that’s really interesting how you can.. I got an emotional connection with it by imagining what the British Empire would have been like if it had been informed by John Dee’s ideas, and less Walsingham..

AM: .. who was the spymaster.

DA: Exactly.

AM: It seems to me it is a meditation about Englishness as well. You’ve always been very interested in Englishness.

DA: Yeah, it’s got everything there, it’s got that connection with the more pagan aspects of Englishness. It doesn’t sort of er.. it alludes to the Age of Reason but isn’t quite there. And some of the ideas I think he was trying to express, are sort of, in a way, very modern ideas.

AM: Yeah. We’re going to hear some music at the end of the show, which has an almost madrigal quality to it, it’s an ethereal gentle piece.

DA: Well I.. at first I started writing it purely as a composer and I didn’t really imagine myself inside the story or in a sort of modern look at it, but I just felt it was more about England than just John Dee, but he was just this marvellous frame to express things that I couldn’t necessarily do in Blur or.. but I do find a connection to it, it’s weird, I think some of the songs could have sort of could come from that world. It’s.. I don’t really know what world I’m in at the moment, but it’s an interesting one.

AM: It is interesting, because obviously Blur were that great high peak of Britpop, and stadium bands, and that bigger sound, and since then you seem to have been constantly looking for new textures, and different kinds of complexities in your music. I’m thinking of Monkey, the opera.

DA: .. I think I just find all music.. there’s something in everything.

AM: When people go to Manchester, to watch this English opera, what’s it going to look like? What will they see on stage?

DA: We’ve kind of split into 3 realms, we have the celestial realm where there’s a consort of musicians with myself, [???], [??? – names of instruments?], but also Tony Allen the master drummer, Mamadou Diabate master kora player, recorders, it’s really interesting. And then we have the earth, where the play is taking place, and then we have the sort of underworld where the orchestra sort of… sulphuric orchestra.

[… other parts of the show.. ]

AM: It is father’s day, so we should say something about that I think. Damon what do you make of the call to be much tougher on absent fathers, people who walk away from children, from David Cameron?

DA: Ah… well personally I feel a father should be with his children, yeah.

AM: And so it’s a fair thing for a politician to say?

DA: Erhm… it’s a fair thing for a father to say.

Sun comments:-

“There’s a bit of making it up as we go along”

“I’m going to be playing myself. But there’s no chance I’ll be wearing a ruff.

“We called it an English opera because it’s not traditional. I’ve been listening to a lot of medieval church music for inspiration.”

“I’ve written ten songs and I would love to do an album of them. But I’ll have to finish writing it first, that’s the main thing to worry about.

“You’ll recognise everything in the opera from work I’ve done before – I don’t want people to think I have gone all New Age.”