Believe or not, Damon Albarn's opera about alchemist John Dee is truly happening, after teasing us with will-they-won't-they news for a couple of years. The show will debut at Palace Theater in Manchester on July 1st.
A few days ago, Albarn went on the Andrew Marr Show on BBC to preview "Apple Carts," a song from the opera that was originally going to be on Gorillaz's Plastic Beach. But what about legendary comic book writer Alan Moore, whose idea this whole thing was in the first place?
For a while, the project was simply known to people as "The Alan Moore Gorillaz Opera," which just conjured images of mischievously violent simians engaging in dark magick and dry humor. As Moore told the story, Albarn initially came to Moore wanting him to write a superhero opera for them. Moore refused, not wanting to write anything about superheroes ("wretched creatures," as he calls 'em now) anymore, but suggested that Albarn do an opera about 16th Century English alchemist Dr. John Dee instead. So they began to work on that.
Unfortunately, a year ago, news broke out that Alan Moore had backed out of the project. Old school anti-corporate artist that he is, he worked on the opera without an official contract, instead agreeing on handshakes that he would be compensated for his writing by having Albarn's camp provide him with a short Gorillaz comic to publish in the third issue of his underground magazine Dodgem Logic. Really cool quid pro quo between artists, right? Well, when Albarn failed to deliver his promise, Moore decided to stop working on the opera, but said to Albarn, "You can do your own opera about Dr. Dee, I don't own Dr. Dee, I don't own the concept of opera."
So he did, called Dr. Dee: An English Opera. You can buy tickets here.
As for the song "Apple Carts," the video is below, and it's a beautifully haunting acoustic song that's a fresh break from the electronic sounds that probably would have accompanied it had it stayed a Gorillaz song.
