Damon Albarn Quotes

In the Sixties people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird, people take Prozac to make it normal.

I was approached by Oxfam to go to Mali as their ambassador and get involved in their various initiatives out there. But I felt that was missing the point of using me, a musician

Music is something that should speak for itself, straight from the heart. It took me a long time to understand that.

Being in Blur has allowed me to travel and hear the music that's being made all over the world.

Change terrifies people. They like new, but they don't like new with change.

I've always known I'm incredibly special. All my life. You know? It's not a big deal.

Oasis were like the bullies I had to put up with at school.

I was naive enough to believe it would be enough to replace the government. Well, I made fun of the people in the government and then realized that even if we got rid of them, they were replaced by exactly the same guys.

And there are no stars and that you're never really sure who's doing what and what voice is what and, you know what I mean? It's supposed to be quite elusive

Each individual has their own opinions about whether war is an answer to any problems. Personally I think it's a waste of time, but I think more importantly, that it's is an issue that we haven't had any say in. That's why I feel so strongly about it. I don't feel like we've really been given any choice in this matter. I think if you had a referendum tomorrow, Tony Blair would have no choice but to call off the war.

There's need to be some sort of disturbance in your psyche for creativity to be sparked.

Every time I go to Africa, I see the future. I see what the Western world is going to become. It's a very futuristic place.

As a musician usually music is your way out.

There's always been a hip-hop element to my trousers.

If you don't see something as a career but as an important part of your life, you don't know how you're going to feel about it.

My guaranteed way of sending myself into deep depression is to read music trade papers and watch MTV.

I like to put my iPad on the window and leave it there for however long the journey is, so that I'm staring out, and it's staring out. We're kind of staring out together. It's very poetic to me, watching that absent-minded passing of time. You realize how much you've taken in. What is left of that memory of you staring out of the window for an hour? It's all on the iPad.

The best way to get to know Africa is to go there and see what it is. To know somewhere that crazy and that magnificent, you have to spend some time among people, the rhythm of their lives.

The Gorillaz cartoons seem more real to me than the actual people on TV. Because at least you know that there's some intelligence behind the cartoons, and there's a lot of work that's gone into it, so it can't all be just a lie

No, every album is something like a snapshot. It only shows one moment in time. It shows what we feel and think right at that point in time, nothing more and nothing less

It's important that Oasis are rude about everybody and that they get drunk...Fair enough. It's nice, isn't it? But it's nothing to do with me. They came to see us in Manchester and they were very pleasant boys. Very nice. I'd like to see that as a quote. Oasis are very nice boys.

A lot of Gorillaz songs were very personal. I mean, that's why it was interesting, because it wasn't music being made for a cartoon. It was something different. It was a much more emotional affair. I wasn't necessarily thinking in the third-person then.

If punk was about getting rid of hippies, then I'm getting rid of grunge.

I have to wear a new T-shirt every night. I throw them into the audience. One day I'm going to go around the world and reclaim all my T-shirts

The whole period has taught me that I enjoy being part of an ensemble rather than just a front man. Don't get me wrong - I enjoy that too, but I get more enjoyment out of really listening to everyone.

I can't be bothered anymore about giving songs titles.

I used to go to work and take heroin in the studio and then stop when I came home.

The cartoon is a metaphor really for the fact that it's almost impossible in our celebrity obsessed culture to move around genres and sort of change you ideas, change your face, you know?

More and more, cultural groups are cross-pollinating, and we're getting much more interesting art as a result.

Well, as resources inevitably disappear [in Africa], people have to make do with a lot less. You have to be much more ingenious with a lot less, and accept that you can't get your perfect tuna sandwich on a street corner.

The things that make me happy most are my family and working.

I'm an English songwriter/composer, working in Mandarin and trying to find something about Chinese culture that I really relate to and respect and feel some genuine emotions for - and it's quite hard, the pentatonic scale, and that, in a way, is why I think it works. Because I'm forced to limit myself to quite strict rules about what I did. Maybe that's how I avoided pastiche.

Danger Mouse is now working on a bunch of other records, translating his ideas about remixing into all sorts of other projects.

When you're doing a deal with someone in the southern Sahara, it's a very different way of doing business than in London. You can't sign them in the usual way because they'd end up getting ripped off, which would defeat the object of setting up a label like this

The whole Gorillaz concept is one for mavericks; it's a way for people who never have a chance to work together being able to ally behind the cartoons.

What you learn from working with other performers and musicians is invaluable, really, and can only help you grow. I mean, if you spend your whole life focusing on yourself, you're not really learning much.

I was going through a break up. I was depressed... I really did need to do something. Recording an album was a great escape. I don't know what would have happened if I wouldn't have started to work.

Yeah. You've seen The Sun today; I've got myself a big house, settled down. Apart from the odd night out with the New Fathers' Club, I'm a family man now.

I'm slightly ambivalent to the whole relationship between the whole advertising world and music. I think sometimes it works and sometimes it's a really bad mismatch. I think on this occasion its fine because the iPod is like your own mini-library and that can't be a bad thing. It promotes eclecticism and that's very much what we are about so it's a good relationship.

I used to be younger than my producers but now I'm older than my producers and I think that works for me, that works better cause you get a good kick up the ... everyday.

Trying to write music that's sensitive to 400 years ago takes a bit of madness, as it's such a long stretch of time.

I'm not really one of those people who believes that if you're a musician you can just leave that behind and start getting into politics