M1 A1

A1 M1 (Ruff Mix)
M1 A1
M1 A1 (Gorillaz Live Tour 2001)
M1 A1 (Humanz Live)

The following is an edited transcript from an interview with Gorillaz by Cass Browne from their biography "Rise Of The Ogre":

" 2D: Me and Russel got together one afternoon and I showed him loads of films that I'm into. All these knackered-out old zombie films. There's something that, like, resonates in me, really haunting, the same thing I get with music. This sense, of, like, being the only conscious soul. The difficulty in communicating makes you feel like you're trapped under ice. Searching, lost and... dislocated. Plus I like all the gory bit where they, like, eat each other's heads and stuff.

Russel:  I picked up on what (he) was trynna say, so I took this sample (from George A. Romero's zombie film "Day Of The Dead")... it just sets the scene. You're the lone soul searching for life.

2D: Lyrically I think I was trying to capture a sense of movement, speed and geography. "M1 A1", you know? To place Gorillaz metaphorically zooming down the great British motorway of life.

Murdoc: Empty motorways always alarm me and suggest... imminent zombie attack.

Noodle: I triple-tracked the guitars to make it sound like there was a bagful of cats being dragged behind the car. Then I screamed over the top."

Imagine the conversation between the cartoons in the quote above as a conversation between Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett and it's easy to see how "M1 A1" was birthed. "M1 A1" is the last track off of Gorillaz debut record and it ends the record with a bang. It's an experimental punk rock 3 minute blast that only a band like Gorillaz would make.

"M1 A1" started out as a jam with Damon on guitar and Dave Rowntree on drums. It was a simple two chord riff but it was powerful enough to build a slow and heavy instrumental off of. About a minute into the jam, bassist Junior Dan comes in adding a dubby bass riff on top of the noise (a common practice in experimental post-punk music used by bands like Public Image Ltd. and Magazine). Soon all the instruments drop out leaving Blur drummer Dave Rowntree alone on the live drums, the song then suddenly ends as most free style jams do. The evidence of this jam was recorded on what can assumed to be Damon Albarn's 4 track due to it's lo-fi quality, and was titled "A1 M1".

Jamie Hewlett wanted to make sure the album had all of the themes that he had come up with for the Gorillaz storyline, and one of the themes that wasn't present was zombies. Zombies as well as zombie movie culture would play a major role in the characters. 2D would be obsessed with George A. Romero movies, the band would live in a graveyard where band members could be possessed or mauled, and one of the ways the band described themselves in the early days was "Zombie Hip Hop." There were tracks recorded about zombies like "Hip Albatross" (which we will get to later) but a lot of these tracks would not make it on to the record. So Jamie suggested that Damon sample a clip from George A. Romero's movie "Day Of The Dead" on one of the album's tracks. As the two began to watch the movie looking for good lines to use, the movie began. The main characters are alone in a world, everyone else is dead or undead. They then go to search for life, going around with a megaphone asking, "HELLO?! IS ANYONE THERE?!" While this is going on, a minimal and sinister synthesizer instrumental is playing in the background.  As Damon was watching this, he then began to play his guitar along with the movie, and that's how they found their sample. Now they just had to find a track to tack it on to...

Damon decided to put it on top of "A1 M1", and gave the song to Dan The Automator who cleaned the demo up and smoothly transitioned the song's new intro into the song itself. Damon then added two more guitar overdubs as well as the album's only guitar solo, to give the track a noisy and dissonant type of chaos. The sample brought out the idea that it was about searching for life on a forgotten world. Damon wrote lyrics about this and the song became about 2D, Murdoc, Russel and Noodle searching for life across a British wasteland. Traveling on the M1 A1, a road that stretches across the entirety of Britain, at "a thousand miles per hour." They are screaming and chanting to see if anyone is there, Russel even bangs on a bass drum in an effort to get someone to respond. In the end, no one responds, so the band ends their efforts, leaving us with sustain from the multi-tudes of guitars on the track. They are the last living souls.

While "M1 A1" was the closing track on the band's first album, it was the opener on the band's first tour. The song was given a new context, it was no longer a cry for help but a hard rocker used to hype people up. ("HELLO?! IS ANYONE THERE?!" *crowd cheers*) It was probably one of the best songs in the Gorillaz Live band's repertoire. Simon Katz tears it up on the guitar, while Damon goes all out with the crowd from behind the screen, and of course, we can't forget about the amazing rhythm section of Junior Dan and Cass Browne. The song was never played live again, but many fans hope "M1 A1" (along with a multitude of other songs from the band's debut) come back to the band's ever changing live set. It finally came back on the Humanz Tour with Damon singing lead and strapping on an electric guitar, it became the opener proving that the band does listen to the fans after all. "M1 A1" is not only a fantastic and exhilarating album closer, but it is also one that foreshadows the dark direction Gorillaz would go in on their next album, "Demon Days".