Gorillaz: Damon Albarn on India, reincarnation and The Mountain before Bradford Live, Manchester Co-op Live and Leeds First Direct Arena gigs

Damon Albarn is slouched on a sofa in his dressing room at Bradford Live. It is five days after his band Gorillaz made their debut performance on legendary New York City late night talk show Saturday Night Live.

Quite obviously, despite the name sharing, very different prospects. But the West Yorkshire city is the unexpected destination for his part-animated group’s two warm-up shows tonight and tomorrow – ahead of an arena run which will come to Leeds – and playing here was another first for the veteran frontman.

"I think I wanted to see Bradford,” Albarn tells The Yorkshire Post on the evening before the first gig after the band has soundchecked.

“I wanted to do something distinctively multicultural in this city because, yet again, we find ourselves in a situation where there is a tendency to overgeneralise and pigeonhole people in a negative way, happening in our culture. In fact, in culture generally, ghosts that we thought we'd vanquished and cast out have come back again.”

It is a fitting for Albarn that the UK shows – in support of latest album The Mountain, which is heavily influenced by Indian music and culture – begin in a city so steeped in South Asian heritage.

"I think that was definitely another reason for our orientation towards this neck of the woods,” he says.

And he is impressed by Bradford Live, the restored former Odeon in the city centre which finally opened last year after delays.

“Comparatively, this country is very small, but you just go up the road and it's different, you know? I was just interested in the culture of Bradford and it turns out you've got this amazing renovated space. It's absolutely beautiful.”

There aren’t many records which have a backstory like the ninth album by Gorillaz, their third to hit number one after 2005’s Demon Days and 2023’s Cracker Island.

Towards the end of 2022, the band’s illustrator Jamie Hewlett travelled to India when his mother-in-law suffered a stroke and went into a coma while she was in the state of Rajasthan with his wife, Emma. Despite the circumstances, he fell in love with the region’s capital, Jaipur, and when he returned to London, recommended to Albarn that they go to India for a Gorillaz project.

They took their first trip in May 2023. But after returning, Albarn’s father, Keith, died. Ten days later, Hewlett’s own father passed away, followed, in later months, by his mother-in-law. The pair visited India again and Albarn scattered his father’s ashes in the Ganges river in Varanasi.

Subsequently, The Mountain’s 15 tracks about life, death and much more besides feature musical styles from around the world with songs sung and rapped in five languages – Arabic, English, Hindi, Spanish and Yoruba – by more than 20 guest artists including sitar player Anoushka Shankar, guitarist Johnny Marr and famous Indian vocalists such as Asha Bhosle and Asha Puthli.

Gorillaz have always been about collaboration, however, some of those featured this time are included posthumously: Bobby Womack, Dave Jolicoeur, Dennis Hopper, Mark E Smith, Proof and Tony Allen.

“Well, it is a form of reincarnation, isn't it?” says Albarn, 57. “I mean, they're fragments but then reincarnation is about essence, it's not about physical reproduction.

"It's about the obliteration of something and then it somehow is there again, but in a different manifestation.”

It wasn’t just the India trip that got him thinking this way – it was something that interested his parents, particularly his father, he says. He repeats something similar to what he has said in other interviews: “It’s not an exaggeration that I listened to Ravi Shankar before I listened to The Beatles.”

In promotional material, there is a quote from Albarn in which he says “the challenge we set ourselves was to make an album about death that made people feel less afraid of death”.

In Bradford, though, he says: "Oh, I didn't want to create an album about death at all. It's just both our dads died while we were in the process of making this record. And what do you do? Do you just compartmentalise your grief and the whole experience of watching someone die and wait until you finish doing what you were doing, or do you just carry it with you and make it part of the infusion? And that's what we did.

"It turns out India's an incredibly open place to receive grief and kind of let it pass. No more evident than Varanasi, which is a place where they’ve practised cremation by the river Ganges for anything up to 5,000 years, every day. So it's very comfortable with the whole life cycle. Ideal place, really, when you're carrying that.”

After monumental success with Blur in the Britpop era, Albarn joined up with Hewlett to found Gorillaz in 1998, complete with four animated characters: 2-D, Murdoc Niccals, Russel Hobbs and Noodle. Songs such as Clint Eastwood and DARE were some of the biggest in the late 1990s and 2000s and, to this day, the characters are part of the band – and now they feature in a short film, set of course in India, made by Hewlett to accompany this album.

One past collaborator not on The Mountain is cult rapper MF Doom. Dumile Daniel Thompson, who was raised in Long Island, New York, and described in a recent BBC Sounds podcast as “your favourite rapper’s favourite rapper”, to the surprise of many lived his final days in Leeds before his death aged 49 on October 31, 2020.

Albarn says he wanted to include Doom, known for his trademark metal mask, on The Mountain but discovered that the material from their sessions together had already been used by fellow collaborator Danger Mouse.

“The first time I met him (Doom) was in Austin, Texas, and I met him in a bar, and he wore his mask for the whole time,” says Albarn.

“I’d never sat in a bar with someone in a mask. And then after that, he didn't wear his mask when we worked together. He was a very brilliant guy. Very tragic circumstances.

He adds: “He was a very quiet man. The mask was part of that, really. Considering how much he's inspired and influenced people, he was a very low key, very humble guy.”

The Mountain has been out since February 27 and Albarn says people have told him it’s a piece of work which has meaning for them.

That must be gratifying? “I don’t really look at it like that,” he says. “I've been doing this for so long now, I've seen my star rise and fall many times. But you carry on and you carry on because you're in love with it and the whole thing. Going to a new place, a new town and playing new music, I'll never tire of that.”

Gorillaz – The Mountain Tour in the UK and Ireland starts at Manchester’s Co-op Live on March 21 and comes to Leeds First Direct Arena on March 25 after two warm-up gigs at Bradford Live tonight and tomorrow. Tickets: gorillaz.com