DARE

People (DARE Demo)
DARE ("2D Demo")
DARE
DARE (Music Video Version)
DARE (Demon Detour, with Roses Gabor & Shaun Ryder)
DARE (Demon Days Live, with Roses Gabor & Shaun Ryder)
DARE (Live 2010, Damon Albarn on vocals)
DARE (Live 2010, with Roses Gabor & Shaun Ryder)
DARE (Escape To Plastic Beach Tour, featuring Roses Gabor)
DARE (Damon Albarn, Noel Gallagher, Paul Simonon, Jeff Wootton & Cass Browne live @ Paul Simonon's birthday party 2015, possible "Humanz" live band template?)
DARE (Live 2017, with Roses Gabor & Shaun Ryder)
DARE (Humanz Live, featuring Rebecca Freckleton & Imani Vonsha)

"Yes, there are elements of humor and playfulness on the album ("Demon Days"). ("DARE" was made) to balance out the darker songs and sounds. I think even on "Demon Days" you must have humor to keep your spirits up and help you fight the battles you face. When we recorded (Shaun Ryder's) vocal... 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. 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 coming up... it's there!" It sounded so good we decided to use that bit for the chorus."
- Noodle

"DARE", Gorillaz first and, as of now, only number one hit in England is just a dance party track meant to showcase Noodle as they were building her up as a character during this phase (for reasons that were explained in the "El Mañana" entry). It doesn't really fit into the "Demon Days" storyline, aside from the fact that Noodle wrote this song with producer Danger Mouse. Everything on this track is her's from the synth heavy instrumental to her vocals. It also of course features Shaun Ryder, lead singer of Happy Mondays, an English indie rock group which also had a major foot in the "dance" scene in the 90's, starting the "Madchester" movement. However, "DARE" has many different versions, so to start off this entry, we are going to be taking a look at all of the many versions of this song that eventually became the track we know and love today.

People

"People" is the first demo made for the song that eventually became "DARE". Damon Albarn obviously wanted to include an eighties type dance track on the album in order to lighten the mood among the album's dark and bleak atmosphere, so he and Danger Mouse made this. The vocals are Damon in pure 2D voice, if "DARE" was a song made with Noodle in mind, "People" was made with 2D in mind. It's goofy, silly and a fun track to jam to. The instrumental is a bit more bare bones, and doesn't have the main synth riff which "DARE" would be centered around. But it does have the many Damon synthesizer countermelodies, crowd & party noise samples from Daft Punk's "Revolution 909", and Danger Mouse's drum machine which bears a striking (but not exact) resemblance to Kurtis Blow's "The Breaks", another fun party song from back in the day.

It's Coming Up...

Now every single Gorillaz song with a guest vocalist has a demo of Damon singing it so the guest can sing along to it when recording and get it down right. This is called a "guide vocal". The version I have linked is not this exact demo, but a close replication of it using the vocal track from James Murphy's (the man behind LCD Soundsystem and future Gorillaz collaborator) remix of "DARE" which used Damon Albarn's "guide vocal"as the lead vocal for it (by the way if you have never heard any of LCD Soundsystem's songs I request u check the project out right now, they have made some of the best songs to come out of this millennium). Damon sings his vocal completely in classic "2D" falsetto and it's really good, a part of me likes this more than the original. But Jamie Hewlett thought that Noodle needed her own track, so out went Damon's vocal and in came the version that was released on "Demon Days".

It's DARE!

Now the first thing we hear in this song is a new rave up intro to the song, lead by Shaun Ryder (who asked to be left alone in the vocal booth while recording). Damon Albarn was a good friend of Shaun Ryder back in the days of his old band Blur, so it was easy to ask him to be on this track. The title and main hook of the song came from Shaun Ryder telling Damon Albarn & Danger Mouse that he couldn't hear the track in his headphones, so they turned up the volume and as they turned it up he shouted "it's coming up... it's coming up... it's coming up... it's coming up... it's there." Someone then had the epiphany to make that into the song's main hook.

The voice of Noodle for this song is Roses Gabor (then known as Rosie Wilson, not to be confused with Rosie Gaines, powerhouse backing singer who worked on some of Prince's projects), a member of the album's in-house backing vocal section who Damon chose to sing this song. Roses Gabor (along with the ghost of Damon's "guide vocal" heard in the background) is perfect on this song, acting as a diva MC to a hopping dance party, shouting out instructions to the crowd. "You've got to press it on you. You just to think it. That's what you do baby. Hold it down, DARE. Jump with them all and move it. Jump back and forth. Feel like you were there yourself. Work it out." She's teaching the crowd how to do the fictional dance of the "DARE".

Everything about this song is it's own hook, from Damon's main synth melody to Roses' and Shaun's repeated vocals of "It's coming up it's DARE", "never did no harm" and Noodle's dance instructions mentioned above. The song ends with Noodle & Shaun singing at the same time, and eventually quieting down to Damon's army of pop synths, Danger Mouse's drum programming and Roses' doing an impressively long phrase of vocal "oohs". The song then stops, the party's over, now back to your regularly scheduled program of darkness and despair in these "Demon Days" we live in.

Never Did No Harm

"DARE" is notoriously awful live. Shaun Ryder, who is a huge drug addict, usually butchers the song live, particularly during the band's shows in 2005 and 2006. However, the band at the "Demon Days Live" did a superb job with the song. Jeff Wootton strummed on an acoustic guitar adding a Latin bolero elect to the song and Simon Tong doubled the main synth melody (played here by Mike Smith) with an electric slide guitar. When the song was played at the band's somewhat misjudged Glastonbury show in 2010, Shaun Ryder was actually on point while Roses Gabor was the one whose vocals let the song down. She got better on the "Escape To Plastic Beach Tour" though where Gabriel Mauris Wallace & Cass Browne added a "new wave" edge to the drumming on the song similar to that of Chris Frantz' drumming for Tom Tom Club and Talking Heads. On the band's tour for "Humanz", the song gave time for the band's star backing vocalists, Rebecca Freckleton and Imani Vonsha,  to carry a song all on their own and the two of them killed it. "DARE" is Gorillaz pop song and it's impact on pop music can still be heard today among all of our generation's many dance-pop anthems and particularly with the Black Eyed Peas who used this song as a template for all their recent sell out songs. Now this might be a part of the reason I'm not a huge fan of this song, because it reminds me of these songs as well as the fact that it doesn't really fit on "Demon Days" in my opinion. But I like the song nonetheless, I just don't love it. Regardless, "DARE" is a good song and will remain a huge part of the band's legacy.