I Like Bananaz
Bananaz are good.
And very loud, too. Charting 6 years of the progress of Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s cartoon band Gorillaz, it’s amusing enough, if all rather ‘Britpop is dead. Long live Britpop’. This is a shame in a way, because what I’ve always liked about Gorillaz is that it took Albarn a little apart from that. Here, he comes across as something of a rock’n'roll Jamie Oliver - you get what he’s doing, it tastes good, but you suspect he might get a little slappable after a while.
The film has a similar tone - all lads together - that would be tiresome over a longer period than the film’s 90 minutes.
The music - of course - is the film’s strong suit, and you do get a sense of the sound (as multi-faceted as it is) coming together, particularly in the earlier stages. And the immediacy of recording the music is neatly set off against the slower process of animating the band (and Hewlett’s attendant frustation with the same).
There are lots of nice little moments - Hewlett messing with the American press, Albarn listening to Dennis Hopper record his spoken section for ‘Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head‘, Albarn bluffing madly with an African-American choirmistress over the lyrics her children are singing (from ‘Dirty Harry’: “I need a gun to keep myself from harm” -”No, it’s ‘to keep myself amongst’”)
(I was trying to work out who Jamie Hewlett reminded me of, and it struck me - in the feature film version, he’d be played by Andy Serkis, while Albarn would be played by Jude Law (which doesn’t seem fair, somehow…))
Gorillaz ‘Clint Eastwood’: