In a cavernous studio at the soon to be vacant BBC building on Oxford Road, the station’s Philharmonic orchestra is working through a plaintive section of Elizabethan-sounding music.

Behind them, a sextet of still more musicians blow unusual wind instruments and a further three pluck eight-stringed guitars and tickle rhythms from African drums.

At the end, staring intensely into a black notebook emblazoned with a white pentagram, is Damon Albarn – frontman of Blur, Gorillaz and The Good, The Bad & The Queen. He pores over words and illustrations, quietly singing small passages and beating partial rhythms out on the wooden floor with his boating shoes.
 
He’s in Manchester for rehearsals for his latest piece of work – Dr Dee, a English opera co-created with Broadway director Rufus Norris for the 2011 Manchester International Festival, for which Albarn has been something of a creative ambassador since his pre-festival commission Demon Days Live in 2005.

As the 23-piece BBC Phil strike up one movement, Albarn emerges from behind a line of brass bells and (just as intensely) delivers his vocals. At the end of each run, a satisfied smile sweeps across his face; seconds later, it gives way to more agonised contemplation.

Albarn – now 43 and marking his maturing years with a thick beard that Guy Garvey might raise an envious eyebrow at – has a reputation for being a perfectionist. He’s an artist that refuses to shy away from scratching any itch he gets, but Dr Dee is without doubt his most ambitious project so far.

Given the story he is here to tell, though, it’s only right that Albarn should be in for a pound.

His opera is based on the life of John Dee; a man who was once so well regarded in the English court that he was a confidant to Elizabeth I.

But he was also a mass of contradictions: a great thinker for whom science and maths were passions, but a deeply religious man ultimately betrayed by his belief in magic.

As well as being the kind of archetypal English gentleman you would expect Albarn to be fascinated with, Dee also had connections to Manchester – a city he learned to loathe after being posted here as warden to Christ’s College (now Manchester Cathedral) in 1595.

Despite his high position, he was hated by his Fellows and moved back to London where he died a somewhat broken, aged 82.

The opera’s staging is intended to reflect Dee’s personal tug of war with light and dark influences.

It’s played out on three levels – the orchestra pit representing the underworld, the stage the earth and a balcony the heavens – and Albarn will visibly perform his part from the top tier, as captain of the celestial level.

Post rehearsals, we talk at a nearby bar and though Albarn is in characteristically reticent form, a year researching the life of Dee makes him keen to play down the doctor’s dislike of the city.

“Towards the end of his life, when they really wanted to get rid of him, they posted him up here,” he says.

“He thought it’d be a nice cushy number because he was coming to the end of his life, that he could really concentrate on getting all the rest of his writing done.

“But it proved to be a really administrative, austerity-times job. Talk to anyone in politics; that’s no time to be posted into a job like that.”

Dee finds himself the focus of Albarn’s second MIF opera. His first – Monkey: Journey To The West created with the artist behind Gorillaz and Tank Girl, Jamie Hewlett – was an international success story. 

He says he feels no sense of ‘pressure’ to replicate its success, but he knows this one also has legs. It has already been confirmed for the Cultural Olympiad in 2012.

“It’s a lot of work, and it needs to grow if it can,” he adds.

“I’d be happy if it never went any further than Manchester but it’d be a shame because so many people have put so much work into it.”

Hewlett was originally part of the plan for Dr Dee, as well as reclusive graphic novelist and John Dee enthusiast Alan Moore (Watchmen, V For Vendetta), but in the end Albarn has used it as an opportunity to revisit a stalled attempt to work with Rufus Norris from five years previously.

Former colleagues Andre de Ridder (conductor) and drummer Tony Allen are part of the 60-person set up required to bring Dr Dee to life at the Palace Theatre from July 1-9, too (“It’s not the easiest theatre,” says Damon, “we’re figuring out how to make it work for us.”).

We ask how the experience of bringing this size of show together has been. “This size of stress?” he laughs. “It’s been quite hard. But, there’s a need to do it and if you’ve got a need you’re prepared to do whatever it takes.

“You learn a lot from each thing you do, and then you pull all that into your next project, so it’s exponential really. The harder you work, the more you learn; the more you learn, the harder you work.”

Musically and lyrically, it couldn’t complete Albarn’s circle more poetically either.

“I read everything I could get hold of about English spirituality and where that comes from: the Islamic influences, the Greek influences, Egyptian, Nordic, Jewish, Kibalan.

“When you’re writing about someone as grown up as Dee, you have to be quite grown up with your research.

“I flunked out of college in the first year, so this has been properly like what I would have been doing at college, studying history.

“I relate to a lot of the ideas that John Dee explored; I’m not a mathematician or chemist by any stretch of the imagination, but the idea of being informed by a spiritual influence, that’s very important to me. Not a specific religion; I’m not God squad. Just the idea of there being an over-arching force. I’m in a way singing about my England, telling him what happened to the British Empire (a phrase Dee coined).

“But parallel to that is the very big drama of his own life and the way he was a determined free thinker and, in the end, that was his downfall.

“The whole thing is melancholic – it’s a melancholidy,” he smiles. “Or something like that.

“I think Dee would feel melancholic; I would imagine he would find our lack of spiritual awareness troubling. Or he might have been incredibly excited by the amazing science we possess?

“It’s as much a meditation on Englishness as it is on John Dee. So in many ways, I haven’t really changed as a writer at all; I’ve just learnt a lot more about how to express my interests.

“I’m very pleased that the festival has been in my life because I don’t know whether I’d ever summon the energy to do something like this, or have the confidence to do it.

“This festival encourages ambition, and I think it’s an antidote to all the things that we pass off as entertainment-stroke-culture. This is culture that’s entertaining.

“Hopefully,” he laughs. “God willing.”

Dr Dee, Palace Theatre (July 1-9), £16-£45.

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