There’s something nice, even reassuring, about Damon Albarn being such a circumspect, unglamorous, art-focused guy. But despite staying in the background behind he and Jamie Hewlett’s animated Gorillaz characters (except when on stage), Albarn has been a heavy-hitting, moving force in the background of Britpop and global music for decades. Besides being the soul of Gorillaz and Blur (the latter of which are way bigger in the U.K. than the U.S., by the way), Albarn is a collaborator with other projects like the supergroup The Good, the Bad, and the Queen, musicians like the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Flea, the musically cross-cultural non-profit organization Africa Express, the music-sourcing collective Electric Wave Bureau, and more.
And yet, some still wonder what Albarn looks like — and maybe not for no reason. His voice is very distinctive, and no doubt a big chunk of why his music has caught on. But Albarn himself? Toss glasses on him and a baseball hat — as he often prefers — and there’s no real particular reason he’d stand out in a crowd of people.
But that’s likely just fine to Albarn, who runs against the current in every way. In a 2022 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Albarn describes his distaste for basically everything that defines modern pop music: relying on “sound and attitude” rather than composition, co-writing songs rather than writing them oneself, wanting nothing to do with reissues and redoes of old material, and wanting only to do “weird things” in the future.
