Team Gorillaz on why and how they made an opera.

We remember Monkey from when we were growing up—it was a TV series in England, in the late ‘70s early ‘80s. It was a really wacky Japanese TV show that became the biggest show in England for a while. For my generation—the sort of 38 to 42, people in that age now, everybody knows it.

The most interesting thing about Monkey is that the story is extremely old. You’ve read the whole 16th century book? It goes back a lot further than that. There’s this cave painting in China, which sort of suggests the story. So China has had sort of superheroes who fly around and blow up things and save people for thousands of years.

They had the original superhero…..monkey.

We didn’t have any idea it would be quite this large scale when we started writing this opera. We originally thought it’d be six months’ work, and it ended up taking, well, three years from when we first sort of went to China. We ended up going to China five times, three weeks at a time, but the work started after we got back from our second trip.

We have to be quite careful what we did with the story and not get carried away with it because it’s a sacred text essentially. It was a political satire but I mean what it was satirizing is so lost in the midst of time. The record is much more political than the show. I had to take out quite a few things actually from the record. Like you can’t just touch. I had him sort of popping up as a ghost on the record just sort of chatting away. But I tried to get a sense of the size of China and there’s quite a lot of sinister sounding music on it.

A used lot of my electronics and drum machines, I try to sort of keep them less apparent. So on the record it’s much more kind of my time of production. It’s not really a case of compromise because it’s a different form. It’s long form music. It’s not just a series of 3-minute 4-minute moments it’s got continuity from beginning to end. Its composition is not summarizing itself…

It’s quite hard to write in the pentatonic scale because theirs is only five notes. It’s quite hard to feel it because you’re always going back to where you started. In that sense, that was the hardest thing. How could I write this and it not sound really cliché and not like a westerner trying do Chinese music. And I came up with this really simple system when I was looking at the communist five point star. I got a tin one from China and I had it stuck on my mixing desk. So I put the two together—five stars, five notes. So I designated the points on the star to a note and I did lots of the same kind of stars and I had them all moving. So then the numbers start rearranging themselves and that’s how I started doing the writing for this. It kind of became semi-automatic and I didn’t have to worry about it being a cliché or not because it never was because it was something that you wouldn’t forget. But I liked drawing them all out. But you can’t lose yourself after a while when you got 15 points. You got grids like this with numbers but it’s great because it always sound interesting at least.

When we first put Gorillaz out, we were like, “This is just gonna kill it in Japan. It’s gonna kill it in Japan.” But it didn’t! Because of Noodle’s eyes. Because in anime, they’ve all got the big eyes. It was a real problem, and it’s okay now. They’ve kind of accepted it. But at the time, it was a problem. And when we got some of the costumes for Monkey back, they got misinterpreted, and they ended up looking like “Disney on Ice” costumes. We didn’t have time or money to remake them, so we actually ended up going to a kung fu store in Manchester, buying loads of kung fu stuff, messing with it.

When the performers arrived in Paris for rehearsals, some of them couldn’t sing. And the other ones that were cast from Beijing’s school of performing arts had a very strange idea of how they should sing. They kind of sounded like something off Pop Idol. We had to kick all of that out. Just be yourself, don’t try to sound Western. Don’t try to mutate into something ’cause it could get a bit ugly.

As we don’t speak mandarin, we were helpless essentially in working with the cast. The director Chen Shi-Zheng did all the work in China, and he came back with this amazing group of kids. Some of them were really young, some of the stuff they do….the contortionist, your body can’t do what they do after about the age of 18, 19—it’s just impossible.

There were many different parties involved in this when we were putting this show together. Costumes were being made in China, Paris, London. Things were just spread out. In fact all the different parts of the show from the orchestra, the costumes, the cast, the set pieces, were all happening in different parts of the world and they didn’t actually come together for rehearsals until a couple of weeks before it opened. That was incredibly scary because you didn’t know if it was going to fit or not.

All in all, I think it’s just reintroducing a fantastic ancient Chinese story to the west that we have forgotten or that needs to be updated— especially in America because it’s not a very well known story at all.