Well, it was only a few days ago that I was writing about another song from Plastic Beach, so I won’t go ahead and give the whole spiel on thoughts and feelings on it. Might as well just redirect you to that very post though, only if you were grossly interested in this guy’s first encounter with the album. I want to say that the title track was one of my favourites from the very beginning. I clearly remember going on YouTube, finding ‘Plastic Beach’ – the song – online and pleading with people to see if they could hear the falsetto vocal that Damon Albarn carries on into the choruses after singing ‘It doesn’t know’. No one could come up with the answer I wanted, so whatever he is singing is still a mystery to me to this day. In fact, I think there are a lot of lyrics in here that lyrics sites don’t have down correctly, no matter how official or reliable they claim to be.

Without hearing any of the music and just looking at the tracklist, seeing the features, it was always going to be interesting to see how former Clash members Mick Jones and Paul Simonon would be involved on this specific track. They’d both taken lead vocals in the past on Clash songs. Very notable, famous ones too. But once that introduction starts, you can tell it’s Jones on that guitar and Simonon on the bass straight away. That whole introduction, so atmospheric and scene-building by the way, sounds like an instrumental Clash outtake, but with some synthesizers over the top. Very cool to see the two performing their take in the studio in the Plastic Beach documentary too. The introduction lasts for 40 seconds or so, giving way to the rest of the song is predominantly led by keyboards, synthesizers and the like, with an immediate groove and head-bopping rhythm, over which Albarn sings about about living on the plastic island depicted on the album’s ominous front cover. A picture that isn’t computer-generated, by the way. That’s an actual large-scale model that a crew took pictures of. Pretty cool to know.

If it wasn’t for that Jones/Simonon introduction, ‘Plastic Beach’ would follow a very simple structure I’ve come to realise. Without it is your standard track of a verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus/end, which you can find just about anywhere. Have a feeling Albarn wanted to spice things up a bit, and so recruited some help to make things a bit more interesting. But even then, the song hits the spot in so many ways. Albarn harmonises with himself, singing in quite the relaxed tone for the verses and too in the choruses, also changing the pitch of his vocals to achieve a harmonising effect. The high-pitched ‘Plastico, plastico’ vocals that come in before the final chorus I’ve come to not like as much. They feel a bit filler-y, just to add something in before things are rounded off. But they’re not enough to completely steer me away from the song. A shame that the lyrics aren’t completely valid wherever you look though. I actually uploaded these ones back around its release, taken from the iTunes lyrics that were on the Plastic Beach game on the band’s official website that was going on for a while. This is the closest I think you could get.