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Blur21 box,reissues / Download Dr.Dee track, 2 Damon programs coming up / Tinie Tempah mention

From the Gorillaz-Unofficial news LiveJournal, 18 April 2012. View the original ↗

Blur 21
Blur have announced today (April 19th) that they are releasing a 21 disc box set featuring remastered audio for all their albums as well as tons of rarities. They are also re-releasing their albums remastered for those that don’t want the whole set. And there’s a vinyl box set of just the albums on vinyl, too. It’s all out on 30th July. You can get all the information and see pictures here:- http://blur.co.uk/blur21/ . Amazon.co.uk has listings for the boxes at £157.99 each here (CD box) and here (vinyl box).

Download Dr.Dee track / 2 mainly-Dr.Dee Damon programs coming up on UK radio

  • Liz sends the news that you can download a free track from the Dr.Dee album (The Dancing King) in exchange for signing up to the Damon Albarn official mailing list. Get the track by signing up here
  • Damon will be promoting Dr.Dee (but also talking about other things) and there will be specially-recorded Dr.Dee tracks played on a show with Stuart Maconie on BBC6 Radio at 20:00 BST (British Summer Time) on 22nd April (Sunday). More information here and you can listen via the BBC site no matter where you are in the world.
  • Damon will also be on BBC Radio 4 on May 7th (time to be confirmed – we’ll post again with more details as we get them) for a feature interview with the program Front Row.

    Africa Express tour will feature a train and school performances

  • It’s been long known that Damon will tour his Africa Express collective throughout the UK for a week in September, to loosely coincide with the Olympics. Some further details emerged today in a mini interview (actually an excerpt from the interview that will play on May 7th on Radio 4) today. Damon revealed that Africa Express will be travelling around the country on a train and will be playing some music on that train as well as in concerts in the evenings, and in certain schools. More details as we get it. You can listen to the mp3 of the interview by grabbing it during the limited time it’s up on the BBC site here (the Damon bit is around 9:22 – 11:42 in the mp3).

    Tinie Tempah autobiography features a page on his work with Gorillaz

  • Villa_55 writes in that Tinie Tempah (UK rapper who collaborated with Gorillaz on the Jonathan Ross show performance of Clint Eastwood in 2010) dedicates a whole page to his work with Gorillaz in his recently published autobiography. He was very excited to work with Gorillaz and appear on the Jonathan Ross show. Read the whole extract from the autobiography by clicking ‘Read More’ below.

    Extract from Tinie Tempah’s biography:-

    “Damon Albarn has always been pretty interested in me and my music; he always wants to be kept in the loop with everything I’m doing, “I don’t think you should do that, this is where I think this person went wrong,” he’ll tell me. Damon is always giving me advice about music and who I should and shouldn’t collaborate with.

    I’ve always respected him cos he’s a rock star. A proper, certified rock star! At the GQ Men Of The Year Awards, Gorillaz won an award and so everyone was trying to go up and talk to him, all these industry people, fashion types and of course loads and loads of girls cos they all fancy him! “Just wait, I’m talking to Tinie,” he said to every single person that came up. “So anyway, Tinie, where were we…” We were talking for about 25 minutes! So he’s always been a really cool, down to earth dude.

    He called me one day, “We’re gonna do ‘Clint Eastwood’ on Jonathan Ross and we want you to do the rap.” It was amazing but I remember being under so much pressure to make sure I wrote something of Gorillaz’s standard – they do some of the best collaborations in the world. So I did it, I recorded it on my Mac, then I went into a studio and vocalled it. “Yes, good boy, this is wicked,” Damon grinned.

    When we went on to do Jonathan Ross, I was in the green room with Jamie Hewlett, who does all of the Gorillaz’s artwork. My palms were so sweaty and I think I must have gone to the toilet five times! With TV, they usually give you a couple of tries to get it right, but we nailed it the first time. Damon even dropped the mic stand but it was so perfect that he was like, “Just keep it.” Afterwards I got to meet Jonathan Ross who was wearing a tracksuit, which was pretty cool and a bit weird cos he always wears suits!