Damon Albarn: From Cool Britannia to radical campaigner for peace

If today's anti-war march fulfils its organisers' predictions, it will see hundreds of thousands of protest virgins take to London's streets. Though the usual suspects will dutifully be in attendance – the Socialist Workers' Party handing out their customary placards – they're likely to be dwarfed by an ocean of newcomers, with precious little knowledge of the sectarian ways of the British Left.

When it comes to the demonstration's celebrity backers, however, fresh faces and new voices are conspicuous by their absence. One hesitates to use the phrase "usual suspects", but it's sorely tempting: aside from the fact that Jimmy Hill has backed The Mirror's anti-war stance, the build-up to the march has focused on such battle-hardened regulars as the actress Sheila Hancock, the film director Ken Loach, the DJ Andy Kershaw, the veteran singer Robert Wyatt and the actor/comedian Alexei Sayle - all of whom are indelibly associated with the culture wars of the 1980s.

The apparent lack of interest displayed by contemporary British musicians only seems to confirm such an impression. Two decades ago, a large part of British pop was bound up with the ongoing struggle against the Thatcher government. Only five currently successful British acts have added their voices to the anti-war tumult: the Scottish band Travis, the hugely successful R&B singers Craig David and Ms Dynamite, Robert "3-D" Del Naja of Massive Attack, and Blur's Damon Albarn. The last two have assumed de facto leadership of British music's tiny anti-war faction, funding a series of adverts in the music press, and dutifully turning out at a succession of demos and Parliamentary lobbies.

"Damon's preoccupied by the march at the moment, inclined to talk about that before anything else," says one of Albarn's associates. "But he's expressed a lot of annoyance about how it's become quite a battleground for old-school, radical left-wingers. He's been quite frustrated about that."

Albarn seems well aware of the loneliness of his position. "It puzzles me that so few musicians and people in the arts have raised their voices against the threat of war," he recently wrote. "It's hard to imagine an anti-war song becoming a radio hit, as it might have done in the 1960s. The way people listen to music has changed: ideas don't stay in the ether long enough to have the impact that songs might have 20 or 30 years ago."

Eight years ago, when Tony Blair was the leader of the Opposition, and his more famous backers viewed New Labour with an idealistic optimism, Albarn was one of Blair's celebrity associates. With Blur at the height of their Britpop-period success, and journalists suddenly interested in his political opinions, Albarn seemed only too happy to come aboard. "I will vote for a Labour government, definitely," he said, at the tail-end of 1994.

The following year, he had at least one informal meeting with Tony Blair at the Palace of Westminster. Rumours of the shirt-sleeved summit, which was fully in keeping with the Blairites' fondness for allying themselves with London's glamorous faces, only fed the idea that New Labour was an integral part of a modern cultural fantasia that harked back to the 1960s – a vision that subsequently cohered, and was much-ridiculed, as "Cool Britannia".

By the time the phrase was coined, however, Albarn had jumped ship: prior to the general election, his pronouncements about New Labour were suddenly couched in qualified terms. By 1998, he was expressing open hostility. He voiced particular objection to the Labour government's introduction of university tuition fees, appearing at a Westminster press conference in the company of Ken Livingstone, then Labour MP for Brent East. "I'm not surprised that most young people want to stay well clear of Labour and any of its ideas," said Albarn.

His most celebrated anti-Blair act, however, had taken place six months before. Albarn was invited to the infamous Downing Street reception at which Oasis's Noel Gallagher was photographed in animated conversation with the new Prime Minister – but Albarn had declined to attend.

"I feel no connection with this new vision for Britain," he commented. "I sent him [Blair] a note to the House of Commons saying, 'I'm sorry, I won't be attending as I am no longer a New Labour supporter. I am now a Communist. Enjoy the schmooze, Comrade. Love, Damon.''

Such was one marker on the road that has led him to Hyde Park. "I read about that some amusement," says Ken Loach, one of Albarn's fellow anti-war activists, and a friend of the singer. (His son-in-law is Blur's in-house saxophonist.) "We've chatted about it since. I thought it was a very gutsy response."

If one is truly to understand Albarn's anti-war stance, however, one has to trace Albarn's ancestry. "His pacifist, anti-war stance goes back a long, long way," says Mike Smith, Albarn's music publisher, and a close confidant since 1990. "The whole time I've known him, he's been staunchly anti-war. It's deep within his psyche, there from his upbringing."

Albarn's father, Keith, was an integral player in London's 1960s counterculture, presenting the BBC's Late-Night Line-Up programme and managing the jazz-rock band Soft Machine. (His mother, Hazel, was a theatrical set designer who worked on the satirical play Mrs Wilson's Diary.) Before Keith Albarn took up a post as the head of North Essex College of Art, he and his family lived in Leytonstone, east London, where the Albarn children were given the archetypal liberal upbringing "I always thought my parents were absolutely dead right," he said later. "I went against the grain in a weird way – by continually following them." On his father's side, Albarn's roots lie with Lincolnshire Quakers; during the Second World War, his grandfather declared himself a conscientious objector and was imprisoned.

Equally important are more recent developments within Albarn's artistic life. Through such albums as Modern Life Is Rubbish, Parklife and The Great Escape, Blur played the key role in popularising Britpop: a mélange that took in a reverence for the music of the 1960s, an over-arching sense of Englishness, and an attachment to the post-PC ways of the New Lad. Thanks to his relationship with Elastica's Justine Frischmann, Albarn was part of Britpop's ruling couple, chased by paparazzi whenever he left the couple's west London home.

That phase of his progress reached a peak in August 1995, when Blur and Oasis released two singles on the same day – "Country House" and "Roll with It" respectively – and vied for the number-one position. Blur proved victorious, but their raptures were short-lived: rather than Blur's artful, multifaceted music, the British public expressed a far greater fondness for Oasis's populist yob rock. By that Christmas, Noel Gallagher's "Wonderwall" had become an alternative national anthem, and Albarn was on the receiving end of occasional public ridicule.

The result, as of 1997's self-titled Blur album, was that he embraced a universe characterised by altogether more exotic colours than Britpop's red, white and blue. Blur was partly recorded in Iceland, Albarn's adopted second home; last year, he released Mali Music, a solo project undertaken with musicians from West Africa.

"He's a genuine heartfelt globalist, both culturally and politically," says one associate. "And I think that all comes down to that moment, at the peak of Britpop, when he realised that he didn't like England very much. He gave British music this philosophical undercarriage – but he didn't realise that no one was going to thank him for that. Soon after Parklife, he was walking down the street and being booed by Oasis fans, and I don't think he ever forgave Britain for that experience. That's partly what accounts for this new exotic life that he's acquired."

Compounding the impression of a mind that recognises few creative limits, in 2001 Albarn launched Gorillaz, an enterprise fronted by four cartoon characters conceived by the artist – and Albarn's sometime flatmate – Jamie Hewlett. Gorillaz's music was a startlingly commercial meld of pop and hip hop, which duly earned Albarn a Grammy nomination in the best rap performance category. Perhaps more importantly, the Gorillaz album has sold more than five million copies worldwide.

This year will see the first Blur album since 1999's 13, much of it recorded in Morocco. Most of the attention focused on it so far has been bound up with the exit from the group of Graham Coxon, the group's guitarist and Albarn's friend and collaborator since his schooldays. News of his departure prompted speculation as to whether Blur would carry on, but – in keeping with Albarn's reputation for bullishness – he, bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree have decided to persevere. According to those who know him, Albarn is relishing the fact that, once again, he has something to prove.

Many of his friends, in fact, claim that his artistic essence has changed very little since Blur first tumbled into the public domain. "He was an extremely driven, focused young man when I first met him," says Mike Smith. "He was bursting with ideas, very excited about his own potential. I'd been working in the music business for about four years then, and I hadn't met anyone who came close to him, in terms of his intensity. And he's still someone that's driven to make music every day of his life. He gets up every morning and writes, or makes music. I've never known anyone as prolific. He's shitting out ideas constantly. And because of that, he moves through music very quickly, and you see this incredible arc of development."

His presence at the Hyde Park rally – where he is scheduled to speak at around 4.30pm – is part and parcel of all that. Though most British rockers make up a remarkably timid, drab bunch, Albarn is consistently a more interesting figure: a musician, like they used to make them.

LIFE STORY

Born

23 March 1968; Whitechapel, London, son of Hazel and Keith Albarn. One sister, Jessica (born 1971).

Family

His Partner is the artist Suzi Winstanley; the couple had a daughter, Missy, on 2 October 1999.

Education

George Tomlinson Primary School and Stanway Comprehensive, Colchester, Essex, where he met Graham Coxon. East 15 Drama School, Debden. (He left after his first year.) Part-time music course at Goldsmiths College, London.

Before Blur

After drama school Albarn joined a synth band called Two's a Crowd and performed as a mime artist. He also a worked as a tea boy at the Beat Factory studio and became involved in two other bands, The Aftermath and Real Lives.

Albums

With Blur: Leisure (1991), Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993), Parklife (1994), The Great Escape (1995), Blur (1997), 13 (1999). Also, Gorillaz (2001) and Mali Music (2002)

He says

"I'm not working class and I've got a pretty face, otherwise I'd have been taken seriously all along."

They say

"I don't think he likes being disliked. But that's a funny charm of his: if you don't know him he can be quite offensive. He can seem a bit weird in that sometimes he seems to try too hard. And people take that as an opportunity to knock him down."

Former Blur guitarist Graham Coxon