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Gorillaz are pulling together all their chart dominating moments for one release, The Singles Collection 2001-2011 which is out on Monday (November 28). To make sense of this culture-defining epic there was only man to turn to (Damon Albarn - Who? Jamie Hewlett? Never heard of him...), Gorillaz' erstwhile leader, raconteur and amateur gun-runner Murdoc Faust Niccals. Here is the first installment of his three part track-by-track guide to Gorillaz' singles. Names have not been changed to protect the innocent.

Tomorrow Comes Today

"This is was where it all began; our opening intro and Gorillaz calling card. Year zero for Gorillaz, but it's already all in there. You can hear it. The Augustus Pablo-esqe melodicas, subsonic dubby basslines, a beat-broken drum line, and some knackered monks chanting ominously in the background.....over this 2D intones his sweet, sonorous vocal. It's a ray of dark sunshine this one, West London in a jar.

It's funny...if you look at the video for this - us racing through the nocturnal imagery of London - we focused in on a little piece of graffiti by a then unknown artist called Banksy. It was a spray painted image we found daubed on a wall, a bit of graffiti of a monkey wearing the statement Laugh Now But One Day We'll Be In Charge, as a kind of placard-cum-apron. I thought it was a good piece of imagery to stick in. Kind of summed up how I felt about our band. I think we almost got sued for using it though. Which I thought was a bit rich..., y'know...you will go and leave your, er...'art' lying round in public. Anyway, it rung true didn't it. Well. For us it did. Don't know what happened to him after that....he kind of disappeared off the map.

Sorry, where was I? Right, this song is sort of about the idea that.... you think you'll ignore tomorrow and have your fun today. Take it all up front, y'know? Which sounds like a great idea until you realize that you're writing off today by taking tomorrow now. "I'll pay with tomorrow...."? Yeah? It's kinda deep....Anyway. That was our first single and a fantastic introduction, if I do say so myself.

Right, NEXT!"

Clint Eastwood

"Four cymbal smashes that changed the world! Wow! This was the big one really. The song that changed the whole game for us. It's like Godzilla this one. Just kind of stomped its way out the speakers and smashed its way right across the world, ripping up cities and eating them whole. This was the first track we released that featured Del, The Ghost Rapper, a part of our original crew. He was the spirit of our drummer Russel's dead friend, who ended up kind of possessing Russel...um...don't ask.

You see him in the video, (again one of the best four minutes of celluloid you're ever likely to see, by the way). Del just busts out of Russel and lays down this whole rubbery rap over the dub. Incredible piece of footage, that. Zombie apes, undead rappers, Noodle's fung-ku kick,...some horrific hand shoots out of the ground at one point and grabs me right by my plums. Great video! And I think the scratching's done by Kid Koala. My be wrong because I was quite monged when we laid this down, just to get into the vibe...
But yeah, Clint Eastwood, this is where things really kicked off for Gorillaz. We sold nearly 12 million Clint Eastwood singles JUST IN THE UK! Imagine that. Oh no, you can't: it's 2011 and the music industry's on the skids. I'm getting out of show business now, as you may have heard. I've put my money into arms: you know where you are with a bazooka and people will always need death, right? The gift that keeps on giving.

Back to the tunes, though - that track's still a monster. I've said it before but, Clint Eastwood is now like a big canvas, almost like a standard for rappers to make their own. Who's done it? Del The Ghost Rapper for starters, then Si and Life from Phi Life Cipher, they toured it with us. Jamal Gray, on the US tour back in 2002. Tinier Tempah's bounced all over it on the Jonathan Ross TV show. Mr Snoop Dogg swaggered his shizzle at Glastonbury, which just lit up that field, y'know? Then Bashy and Kano offered up their takes on the Plastic Beach World Tour. Eslaam Jawaard through his set into the mix most recently in Syria, in Damascus at the show we did at The Citadel. It's a truly continental cut is that Clint Eastwood song, it can travel anywhere....You stick it on anywhere... Instant Party.

There's only three songs in the history of music that universally, wherever you go, people know how to play. Louie Louie, White Christmas and Clint Eastwood. Just those three...

It's funny to think, how tiny its origins were. I'd been out in Denmark Street, in London's West End, picking up some gear, and I bought myself a little Honda Z-chord autoharp. Great things. I unwrapped it, popped in the batteries and was fiddling with the presets. I just pushed the button marked 'Reggae setting' on it, turned the knob from 'flop' to 'hit', on the dial, and out popped this little classic. Obviously the vocals helped a bit, but really this came out fully formed. So there you go. Ten years, 40 million record sales and a whole career later... And no, we never did hear from Clint about whether he liked the song or not. Not even a postcard....what's next?

19-2000

"This is the sound of Gorillaz having a laugh. A throwaway pop song. Get the cool shoeshine doesn't mean anything, does it? We worked with Talking Head's Tina Weymouth on this one - I've always been a massive fan of their cerebral pop. That's what Gorillaz always wanted to be: smart, yet dumb enough to be massively popular. There's a fine line between 'clever' and 'stupid', right kids?? It's a thin line to tread but I'm not scared.

As ever, we made an eyeball-meltingly good video to go with this one: it was a roadtrip to end them all, except I was so off my face on black bombers that I nearly drove into an elk. Luckily, it was only a metaphor and we were never in any real danger - it was the elk that stands between a creative traveler and Valhalla of artistic potential. So that was OK.

I wrote this around the end of the last millennium, as the clocks were changing and the 21st century was dawning. A new age was upon us. It would be ridiculous for the occasion to go unmarked by a band as forward thinking and iconic as Gorillaz. I just needed a title that reflected that change. 19-2000 fitted the bill. It was that or Millennium and that's a shit name for a song."

Rock The House

"I won this song in a raffle. For trivial pursuit fans I can tell you that the main break is lifted from jazz legend John Dankworth's Modesty Blaise tune. Russel sampled it and then chopped it up a bit, and then kinda laid some other bits over the top and then we just let Del The Ghost Rapper roll out his spooky elasticated raps over the top of it. Still sounds great today, doesn't it? Like it was made this morning...

I've got one regret though. I remember recording this. It was all sounding really good actually, until I left the studio. At that point 2D stuck these panpipes over the top, on the chorus. Panpipes? I mean...really? I must say, truthfully, there's not really a great deal I regret about the Gorillaz career to date. Other than that. I should've blocked the release of that one or had those taken off the tracks. There's no reason for panpipes to be in the charts, is there?

The video is one of our more outré efforts: it's an homage to the films Rollerball and Mister Freedom. At the time we were being sued by someone who claimed he'd 'invented' Gorillaz and was demanding rights over my music, brain, image and face, which obviously made my blood boil. It felt like we were under attack from a hail of bullets. So we took that feeling and made it visual, into a video! Some of Gorillaz chose to avoid the bullets, while some of them ie., myself, chose to face them head on and physically deflect the incoming missiles. With my nob! You may think that's infantile, but y'know...whatever, that's how I felt. I just wished all this lot would just cock off.

And, right, I think we can all agree that I look pretty, pretty good in this video. Think the song would've done better without the panpipes."

Join us tomorrow (23 November) for Part 2 of Murdoc's track-by-track guide to The Singles Collection 2001-2011

12:30 PM | 22/11/2011