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It’s a different level of the same fantasy. It’s within the dark world, but The Now Now finds itself firmly placed in those pockets of light.

Did it surprise you that the Gorillaz came back so soon?

We always had the thought of doing a festival in the U.S. and then this amazing venue became available outside Los Angeles and it just sort of seemed to be a nice kind of The Now Now place to play.

With song titles like Hollywood, Kansas and Idaho, you recorded a lot of The Now Now in hotels. Why was that?

That’s something I’ve kind of gotten adept at doing. I’ve always found with touring that I have an inordinate amount of free time and I always like to keep working. I’ve also developed this sort of tradition where we stay at the tops of hotels and it’s kind of an economic way to keep recording all the time, in a weird way.

In addition to the Gorillaz, you have your own solo work, then there’s Blur, who came back in 2015 and the new The Good, the Bad & the Queen. How do you decide who gets what?

If I was going to come and do something again in North America and play festivals in Europe, I knew I wanted to have another instalment of the Gorillaz, so that it’s a new experience. The world you create when you release a new record that’s a really great thing and that’s what’s great about the Gorillaz. There’s always a sense that the band is changing. It isn’t always something dramatic, but the story being told inevitably changes because of the imagery. The two videos that we’ve made for The Now Now are very different and give a fresh take on the ideas of animation and reality. But we’ve come, in a sense, to the end of another chapter.