DIY doesn’t interview teenage cartoon guitarists every day of the week. Still, given the chance to get the word from Gorillaz’ Noodle about their new single ‘DARE’, and recording with Shaun Ryder seemed too good a chance to pass up.



What was the inspiration for the track DARE?

We wanted to put a track on the album that was reminiscent of the electronic club sounds that came out of Manchester, in the 80’s. A big sounding tune that has…. an eerie haunting melodic sense to it as well. If you listen to D.A.R.E. you can hear there is an ‘Ennio Morricone’ type of melody that floats across the beat, drifting through the wall of electronic rhythms and noises. We also wanted someone to sing it who came from that kind of background.



How did you get Shaun Ryder involved?

Shaun has been a friend of our bass player Murdoc for a long time, and I think they we’re out together one night in a drinking club in Soho. That’s when Murdoc suggested that Shaun should sing the vocal on this track. It didn’t happen straight away because both of them immediately forgot the idea. It wasn’t until Murdoc found the receipt for the bar-bill in his pocket a month later, that he remembered. We then phone Shaun and he came down to Kong Studios to record it.



What was he like to work with?

With Mr. Ryder, the sound of his voice worked very well against the sweetness of the backing vocal. Shaun has quite a rough shouting style to his vocal delivery that fitted the sense of the lyrics. It was great fun making the video with him. He was very professional. To make him appear to be so enormous compared to me, we had to build a filmset around him. This way it would look like his giant head was on the floor. Although he had to stay inside the set for hours on end, he never complained once.



Any in the studio stories from your time working with him?

When we recorded the original vocal that Shaun did he was stuck in the vocal booth with his headphones on, but he couldn’t hear us. So he shouted over to us to turn the headphones up.



‘I Can’t hear myself…I Can’t hear myself. Hey! Turn up the headphones would ya!’



So we’re turning them up and he’s going ‘Yes…..it’s coming up a bit….it’s coming up…it’s coming up…it’s coming up….It’s there!’



It sounded so good that we decided to use that bit for the chorus.



Who came up for the concept of the new video?

As usual we worked with Jamie Hewlett again to give a visual interpretation for the song. We sent him a CD of the track and he sent us some cool ideas of how the video could be shot. We all like the idea of ‘Re-Animating’ Shaun, so that’s the one we went with.



Again, to make it, we worked with the reliable combination of Passion Pictures, Jamie Hewlett and Pete Candeland.



The video is shot in my bedroom at Kong Studios. The lighting that they used gives the room a dramatic dark red quality to it. The set was built in miniature to make Shaun look massive compared to me. The person who designed the set had just been working on the ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ film. We can see Shaun’s massive head fixed into the bedroom floor, and he has all these tubes sticking out of his head.



As the tune starts, I flick a switch and all the tubes begin pumping various liquids into Shaun’s head. The combination of the liquid and the music is irresistible and Shaun comes to life! It was really fun to work with Shaun. Even the mistakes he makes seem to add to his performance. The music’s so good I start busting some incredible moves. The sound of the music makes me come alive too and I do the ‘D.A.R.E. dance routine’.



The big re-animated head starts singing, as I dance around the room. I grab various keyboards and play along too.



At the end Mr. Ryder wakes up in bed and it seems like he was stuck in a terrible hallucination or a dream. But as he slumps back into bed you can see that Murdoc’s in bed next to him. This is double trouble!



But then Murdoc wakes up in his Winnebago, his heart is pounding and a car alarm is screaming. It actually appears that the whole thing has been Murdoc’s nightmare.



Did you have a choreographer or did you come up with the moves yourself?

Most of the moves I came up with myself, just on the spur of the moment. Some of them were known dance moves and some of them I learnt from watching the girl, ‘Charley’, from the program ‘The Banana Splits Show’. She was one who delivered the messages for the Sour Grapes. In the show, as she delivered the message she would dance across the room. I think the name of the dance she did was called ‘The Skate’, but there are other moves in there such as ‘The Pony’ and ‘The Swim’…There’s even a little shimmy in there too.



Talk us through some of the moves…

The dance is a combination of moves. Some classic, some new. Maybe even a little sixties swingout. First I do a twist, then a kickout, a dynamite jumpskip, then a hipshake to the side. Next you turn, shuffle, hop-skip, shimmy and finish with a leaning bow. It’s the Shizney!



I think it’s a great dance…. like a shuffle with a sliding-wingback



If you practise enough it comes out really smooth. Once you’ve got this you can add you’re own handclaps and fingerclicks! It’s the first time I’ve ever really danced on camera, and this video is going to be shown to millions of people. I thought my white outfit brought all the moves to life too.



After I had done maybe seven or eight different takes of my dancing, Jamie cut all the different angles together so the moves look…really professional. Watch me shake a tail-feather!



How does it feel to steal the limelight in the new video?

I decided that for this video I would be the main performer. I saw way too much of Murdoc showing off in the ‘Feel Good Inc.’ video and I thought that the boys misbehaved badly in it. So I decided to start shooting the video with Jamie and Pete without telling the other members of Gorillaz. It does make me laugh because it seems to have really bothered Murdoc that he’s not in this video very much. But I think it’s only right that I appear at the front, anyway, as I wrote this song.



Did the rest of the band mind?

I’m not sure if the rest of the band mind that I’m the star of this video, but whatever, as I said, it’s my song, you know, I wrote it. So I can chose who’s going in the video and how it’s going to be made. In fact when we started shooting the video I didn’t actually tell any of the band that we had begun. You can see 2D is listening through the floorboards unaware of what is happening, and Russel is on the toilet reading a newspaper, also wondering what the noise is. They just don’t know what’s going on. Murdoc wasn’t even there. He was asleep in his Winnebago and missed out on the whole shoot until right at the end, when the camera’s come into his bedroom. But it’s his own fault. I think he should pay more attention.