Damon Albarn has revealed that a meeting with Tony Blair put him off politics.
The English songwriter chatted to Metro’s Guilty Pleasures column, and revealed that a meeting with the former Labour leader left him “terrified”.
The conversation took place in Britpop’s pomp, in the run up to Labour’s historic election victory in 1997.
Yet the meeting didn’t quite have the envisioned impact, with Damon Albarn left “scared” by the politician.
“Politics is such a murky business,” he said. “I would be lying if I said I hadn’t considered it when I was younger…”
“I even went and had a strategic meeting with Tony Blair before he became Prime Minister, but that terrified me so much. [I thought] ‘I don’t know if this is for me at all. I’m not a politician, I am a musician’.”
Speaking in 2015 Damon Albarn made similar statements to Channel 4, commenting: “I met Tony Blair and had a sort of premature insight into the dark mechanics of politics and at that point I honestly felt terrified about Tony Blair…”
He continued: “I picked up on something kind of odd about him that I didn’t understand. I was a bit scared of him, if I’m honest with you.”
The meeting didn’t put off Blur drummer Dave Rowntree, however – the musician unsuccessfully ran to become a Labour MP in 2010, and currently works as a Labour councillor in Norfolk in 2017.
Damon Albarn’s new album ‘The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows’ is out now.
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