Damon’s Opera Dr.Dee – Damon speaks (audio + transcript), trailer, official tumblr

(Moved this to its own dedicated post…)

Official Dr.Dee Tumblr
Check it out here:- http://doctorjohndee.tumblr.com/. Some exclusive content already and more promised for the coming days.

Dr.Dee Trailer

Damon talks about Dr.Dee on Radio 4
This week Damon made his very first media appearance of the year so far when he talked to the presenter of Radio 4’s Front Row show for a piece that was used on Radio 4’s morning show ‘Today’. He was discussing his forthcoming opera ‘Dr.Dee’. You can listen again to the segment on the BBC site here (the BBC have an article about the historical individual John Dee, on whom the opera is based at that link as well. Murdoc tweeted the link this week as well) or download an mp3 of the interview segment here. You can also read a transcript of Damon’s comments by clicking ‘Read More’ below.

Transcript of what Damon said to Radio 4:-

“We don’t really, really have a clear picture of our history because a lot of it has been severely edited, and John Dee is a very interesting subject to meditate upon that.

I had kind of heard of the name [of John Dee], I was aware of it through Shakespeare and Marlowe, and I’ve always really been into Arthur and Merlin. I really like the magic and mystery, it’s a very potent part of what it is to be English.

It’s an English Opera. It’s an ongoing dilemma, what do you call something that is new. [“it doesn’t have a template”] yeah. That’s really why I made the decision to enter into the drama myself and be onstage and singing. I am performing, yes. I’m myself. Damon Albarn. Not a narrator. As I said at the beginning I’ve got a really snrang emotional connection and it really gets to me, that sort of haunted magical england. It’s something that really stirs me in an irrational way. At the royal wedding, when they played Jerusalem, I’m not ashamed to say I was stirred enough to experience something very strange, and contradictory, and I love that idea and the only way I could honestly write about Dee was to involve myself in the whole thing. And I’m not walking around in a ruff and tights. It’s modern. Without giving too much away, and I can’t give too… because we’re still… wekk in a sense, we find ourselves predominantly at the end of Elizabeth I’s reign and at the beginning of a puritanical purge and I exist towards the end of another Elizabeth’s reign, her sort of golden twilight years and so there’s a real connection. So I’m in the modern, I’m onstage here now.

[regarding the music] I hope it comes from the heart. I’m not a Rennaissance scholar. It’s very hard to say what it does sound like. I always feel like a bit of a novice. And I am. I’m quite happy to stay a novice.

[“You’re a Renniassiance man yourself, a modern Dr.Dee figure, in the musical world”] In a way but I don’t think that’s… I’m in it because I feel like it’s a chance to express something about England. You’ve got to go right back to even understand the context, you’ve got to have an understanding of all the Renaissance people like [???] and [???] and Roger Bacon and all of that amazing stuff and then it goes all over the place, and then you go up to that golden door and Rosicrucianism and then you sort of understand that and you can go to our northern european pagan roots and then look at everything, and england, Stone Henge, the Celtic stuff, I mean everything is connected, that’s what’s so fascinating about it. Imagine the English now if we’d have kept that spirit in our hearts. We’d be a very different place.”