Personal Life
In 2005 Albarn, among others, criticised the London Live 8 concert for not featuring enough black artists; among the few included were Ms. Dynamite, Snoop Dogg, and Youssou N'Dour. Eventually the organisers added a separate concert at the Eden Project in Cornwall to the programme in order to showcase African musicians. Albarn said he did not want to perform at Live 8 because he thought it was too "exclusive" and may have been motivated by self-promotion.
Albarn has been a vocal critic of celebrity culture:
"We need to dismantle very significant parts of our culture and really re-examine them. I suppose you start with the celebrity thing... you have to get rid of things like The X Factor immediately."
In 2006, Albarn was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from the University of East London, saying it was "great to receive award from an institution where my dad used to work and which I, as a child, used to think of as that big building with lots of interesting people in".
Albarn is a vegetarian, and a fan of English football club Chelsea.
In the 1990s he spent a good deal of time in Reykjavík, and owns a home in Grafarvogur, a suburb of Reykjavík. He currently lives in Bayswater, London, with his family.
Read more about this topic: Damon Albarn
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“... feminism is a political term and it must be recognized as such: it is political in women’s terms. What are these terms? Essentially it means making connections: between personal power and economic power, between domestic oppression and labor exploitation, between plants and chemicals, feelings and theories; it means making connections between our inside worlds and the outside world.”
—Anica Vesel Mander, U.S. author and feminist, and Anne Kent Rush (b. 1945)
“We realize that we are laggards from the past century, still living in what Marx kindly calls ‘the idiocy of rural life,’ and we know that our rural life is like that of the past, not like that of much of the present.”
—For the State of Vermont, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)