I have no idea where I first heard On Melancholy Hill. A film, maybe, or a series. What I can tell you is exactly when I decided it was staying, because when I went looking for the date, Google offered me a 5.2 GB download of everything I’d ever done on YouTube. Somewhere in there, a few kilobytes long, was the answer: I added it to my playlist on Monday, 9 December 2019, at 4:39 in the afternoon. That’s how focused I can get on something, or, some might say, how much time I have to waste.
The one thing I do remember is reaching for Shazam. I’d only had it for a couple of years. My friend Sarath introduced me to it in China in 2017, at a club, when a killer track came on and I asked him if he knew what it was. “Not yet,” he said, opened an app, and a few seconds later he had the name. I’d been typing half-remembered lyrics into Google for years, and it had never once occurred to me that my phone could simply listen. Two years later, it listened to On Melancholy Hill and told me it was Gorillaz. My Shazam was linked to YouTube, so it went straight to the video.
That was my introduction to them and, through them, to Damon Albarn. Gorillaz are a virtual band, four cartoon members drawn by Jamie Hewlett, with Albarn making the music behind them, and they’re strange in the best way. The four have stories of their own that run alongside the albums. 2-D is the singer with the blacked-out eyes, Murdoc is the bassist and the band’s resident villain, Russel is the drummer, and Noodle, the guitarist, arrived as a child in a FedEx crate. Like any band, the fans have their favourites among the four, and mine is Noodle. She’s the first one you see when the video for On Melancholy Hill starts, so she was the first of them I ever knew.
On Melancholy Hill is probably the most straightforward song they’ve made, gentle and warm and almost simple, and it’s the one that got me. I came to it late. It was released in 2010, on Plastic Beach, so by the time I found it the song was nearly ten years old, and it still felt like hearing something for the first time. From there I went back through the rest: the songs most people know them by, like Clint Eastwood, Feel Good Inc., DARE and Stylo, and then the albums. Demon Days, Plastic Beach and Humanz each sound like a different band, and yet you always know it’s them. Albarn has never seemed interested in repeating himself, and somewhere along the way they became one of my favourite bands. Gorillaz is one of the four or five YouTube channels I keep notifications on for, and when something new comes out I open it straight away, the way I did in January when the video for Orange County dropped.
It also arrived at the right time. That December I was almost certainly on my way home to Bhilai from Pune. Around that time every year, a friend came to India from the States, and I went back to see her. She was a school friend and my first girlfriend, and she was also the person I needed to move on from. It had always been complicated between us, and by the end of 2019 I’d decided to make myself the priority and start again.
She was the first person I ever shared music with. That’s how it started between us, talking about songs, because back then our tastes were close. They’re hardly similar now, though I still send her something once in a while. Finding people who like the same music as you is hard, and harder still when you listen as broadly as I do, so these days I hardly share music with anyone. I find something I like, and it goes on the playlist. Maybe that’s why On Melancholy Hill means more to me than most. It came along the winter I finally moved on.
Less than two months later, at the start of February 2020, I flew to Rwanda for work. The trip was meant to last a month. Then the pandemic shut the world down, and I didn’t get home until September, close to eight months later, the same stretch that got me hooked on black coffee. The days ran from seven in the morning to seven at night, which left me a couple of hours in the evening to myself. Most nights, after dinner, I’d be back in my room, lying in bed and waiting for sleep with this song playing. I’m glad I had it for company.
There’s one couplet I’ve kept coming back to ever since.
It’s simple and sincere, and it still comforts me every time I hear it.
It’s been on every playlist I’ve made since, and it fits all of it, happy days and bad ones, long drives and late nights, without trying to. Orange County is the only other Gorillaz song that does this to me, but that one is the happier of the two. This one sits closer to missing someone.
