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Damon Albarn on the album he nearly made with David Bowie and Ray Davies
In a revelation that feels like a lost chord from music history's greatest 'what if' session, Damon Albarn recently pulled back the curtain on an album that nearly materialized in the 1990s, a project that would have been a landmark collaboration with the otherworldly David Bowie and the quintessentially British Ray Davies. Picture the scene: the decade where Britpop was king, Blur was battling Oasis for chart supremacy, and Albarn, already a defining voice, was sketching the blueprints for what would become Gorillaz.Into this creative ferment walked two giants, architects of the very sounds that shaped him. The conversations, as Albarn recalls, were not just casual studio hangouts but deep, resonant dialogues about songcraft, a meeting of minds across generations that buzzed with the potential for something truly genre-shattering.It was to be more than a supergroup; it was a convergence of Bowie's chameleonic art-rock, Davies' sharp, observational storytelling from The Kinks, and Albarn's own burgeoning genre-fluidity. One can almost hear the ghost of this record—the glam-inflected rhythms clashing with music-hall piano, the lyrical wit of 'Waterloo Sunset' meeting the cosmic weirdness of 'Space Oddity,' all underpinned by Albarn's nascent electronic experiments.The reasons it remained a beautiful, unrealized idea are as poignant as the prospect itself: scheduling nightmares, the sheer gravitational pull of three monumental careers, and perhaps the fragile, fleeting nature of artistic alignment. It’s a symphony that never left the rehearsal room, a masterpiece that exists only in the negative space of our record collections.Yet, from the ashes of that near-miss came other brilliant fires. Albarn, ever the generous collaborator, also took a moment to sing the praises of his 'favourite' co-conspirators from his Gorillaz years, that virtual band that became a real-world nexus for genius.He spoke of the raw, unpredictable energy of Del the Funky Homosapien on 'Clint Eastwood,' the soulful gravity of Bobby Womack, and the playful chaos of MF DOOM. Each of these partnerships, in their own way, is a testament to Albarn's core belief that music is a conversation, a river where different currents can merge to create something new and powerful.This reflection isn't just nostalgia; it's a reminder that an artist's discography is as much defined by the ghosts of projects past as it is by the albums that made it to the pressing plant. The legacy of that almost-album with Bowie and Davies lingers not as a failure, but as a perfect, suspended moment of potential, a harmonic that continues to resonate through everything Albarn has done since, a silent partner in his relentless musical journey.
#Damon Albarn
#David Bowie
#Ray Davies
#Gorillaz
#Britpop
#collaboration
#featured
