Thoughts
on the album "Merrie Land" by The Good The Bad and The Queen
Originally
written in December 2018
Although unlikely to garner
much attention during next year's award season, one of my absolute favourite
on-screen performances this year is Damon Albarn's beguiling turn as the
ventriloquist dummy that appears in all ten promotional videos released in
support of Merrie Land (2018): the second and very much long-awaited new album
from Albarn's non-Blur, non-Gorrilaz side-project, The Good The Bad and The
Queen.
As a more-than-worthy
follow-up to the band's brilliant, self-titled 2007 debut, this second release
continues the same approach of exploring the vague notions of "British
identity" against a diverse musical soundscape, while at the same time presenting
a wry but evocative commentary on the modern cultural landscape, its politics
and the general mood of the day.
If the first album took as
its focus the growing surveillance state of New Labour's "broken" Britain
- still caught within the grip of post-7/7 terrorism, the illegal wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan and the climate of economic excess that would inevitably lead to
the financial collapse of the following year - then Merrie Land finds its
obvious target in the disastrous Brexit situation.
By focusing specifically
on the fallout from Brexit - with every element of the album, from its music
and lyrics, to its song-titles and packaging managing to evoke the current
zeitgeist of confusion, fear and cultural disagreement - Albarn and company
have succeeded in producing not just a 'complete work', in the artistic sense, but
a genuine statement.
The Truce of Twilight
(Performance Video) [Paul Simonon, 2019]:
Beginning with the first
track, a short piece of dialog sampled from the Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger masterpiece A Canterbury Tale (1944), the album establishes a context
of old English parochialism: that "martyr's dream" of an Arcadian idyll,
all stiff-upper lipped determination, quaint village greens and cathedrals heralding
the glories of God. From this point on, the subsequent ten songs offer a clear thread
of wry observational commentary backed by engaging instrumentation, as the ensuing
album traverses the outer reaches of the British landscape; from the cities and
their surrounding suburbs, to the quiet villages and once-thriving coastal towns.
The ten videos produced to
accompany the majority of songs taken from the album find Albarn buried beneath
layers of intricate prosthetics to become the ventriloquist dummy. In each of
the videos he sits in front of an
intentionally flat, two-dimensional green-screen backdrop, which changes from
one song to the next in order to better present a specific mood, character or
emotion.
Each persona, while
uniform and unchanging, captures a different facet of the British
"identity" (though the term itself is a misnomer: there is no one
cultural identity definable as British, but countless different identities, all
of them "British", all of them occupying the same plot of land.)
However we chose to identify ourselves, personally or politically - whether we
voted to 'leave' or 'remain', or didn't vote at all, whichever the case may be
- the dummy here is us.
2. Merrie Land
3. Gun to Head
4. Nineteen Seventeen
5. The Great Fire
6. Lady Boston
7. Drifters and Trawlers
8. The Truce of Twilight
9. Ribbons
10. The Last Man to Leave
11. The Pioson Tree
The appearance of the
dummy itself is inspired by a segment from the Ealing Studios anthology film Dead
of Night (1945). The segment, titled The Ventriloquist's Dummy, sees the
titular object develop a mind of its own, terrorising its master who can no
longer control its amoral urges. Or does it? Is the dummy really possessed, or
is the ventriloquist simply losing his grip on reality? Significantly, a still
image from the film also features as part of the album's artwork.
Merrie
Land [The Good The Bad and The Queen, 2018]:
In the presentation of the
dummy, Albarn finds the perfect symbol for Brexit, if not Britain itself. This
thing that has somehow gotten away from its own master, saying and doing
appalling things without punishment, and destroying the psyche of the
individual that can who can no longer control it.
Merrie Land combines the
same musical influences of The Good The Bad and The Queen's first album,
chiefly folk, ska and dub, but adds an element of music hall. In interviews
accompanying the album's release, Albarn said he was influenced by the Northern
English town of Blackpool. Fittingly, the music here has the feel of faded
seaside glamour, empty funfairs and a world where the last bastions of "Englishness"
(fish and chips, novelty postcards, cups of tea) struggle to remain relevant.
