The Good, The Bad & The Queen "The Good, The Bad & The Queen"

Artist: The Good, The Bad & The Queen
Album: The Good, The Bad & The Queen
Label: Parlophone
Release date: 22 January 2007
Genre: Rock
Style: Indie Rock

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Tracklisting:
01. History Song
02. 80's Life
03. Northern Whale
04. Kingdom Of Doom
05. Herculean
06. Behind The Sun
07. The Bunting Song
08. Nature Springs
09. A Soldier's Tale
10. Three Changes
11. Green Fields
12. The Good, The Bad & The Queen
Total running time: 42' 55"

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[The Good, The Bad & The Queen - Kingdom Of Doom - Video Clip]

"What is it about the clunky phrase 'the good, the bad & the queen' that made Damon Albarn want to use it as both the name of his new Notting Hill-based supergroup and the title of their debut album? Whether the original intention was to use his audience's knowledge of spaghetti westerns to impute ugliness to Elizabeth II, or to posit the monarchy as some kind of post-patriotic middle ground between virtue and wickedness, the ultimate effect is unchanged. It lowers expectations for this latest side-project to almost subliminal levels.

But far from the pointless exercise in tune-free trustafarian whimsy many people were expecting, The Good, the Bad & the Queen turns out to be one of the most surprising and magical records for which Damon Albarn has ever been responsible. At first sight, recruiting the Clash's Paul Simonon on bass and Afro-beat legend Tony Allen on drums seemed a brazen ploy to bolster Albarn's shaky credentials as (in Alex James's satirical description of his sometime Blur bandmate) 'the blackest man in west London'. But the beautiful music this all-star rhythm section makes together cannot be corralled within such a cynical explanation. And from the great moment in the opening 'History Song', when Simon Tong's subterranean guitar rumble joins Albarn's fairground organ in picking up Simonon's loping beat, it's clear this whole enterprise is going to hang together much better than its fractured provenance suggested it ought to.

Begun in Nigeria in 2004, as a sister-project to the excellent Mali Music, The Good, the Bad & the Queen was first set aside in favour of Gorillaz' Demon Days, and then reactivated by the involvement of that multi-million selling album's producer Brian 'Danger Mouse' Burton. It was Burton, US hip-hop's pre-eminent Anglophile, who gave the record its new, explicitly 'London-y' direction. And it's the breadth and intensity of that engagement with the capital's history and geography which elevates this album far above the Portobello Road love-in which the spin-doctoring of Albarn and Simonon seemed to herald.

If there's a dominant topography in the lyrics, it's not the over-familiar contours of the Westway, but the murky outer reaches of the Thames estuary. The melancholic 'Herculean' felt like an odd choice of first single (given the availability of both '80s Life"s inspired David Lynch soundtrack rewrite of 'The Monster Mash' and the apocalyptic lullaby that is 'Kingdom of Doom'), but this spiralling canal-side elegy is actually the perfect way into The Good, the Bad & the Queen's watery open-spaces. And the liquid elegance of the music reflects the fluidity of the social currents which supply its subject matter with shimmering exactness.

The title-track's raggedly exuberant finale talks about 'moving out of dreams with no physical damage at all'. And that's exactly what this record seems to do. Floating effortlessly from Goldhawk Road to Tilbury and back again, it's a celebration not just of the city's streets and people and waterways, but of the countryside they've over-run.

'We saw the green fields turn into stone/ Such lonely homes,' Albarn intones grandly in the penultimate 'Green Fields', locating The Good, the Bad & the Queen as a kind of multicultural, Barratt Home Britain sequel to Ray Davies's Village Green Preservation Society. And if Damon's embrace of Tony Allen's sumptuous West African polyrhythms is simply the next stage in a sub-conscious process of atonement for the way Blur bleached out the black roots out of their 1960s source material back in the Britpop dark ages, well, long may that process continue." [source]

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