Here's Part 2!
Stuart Pot considers his escape a miracle, admitting that he wasn't capable of engineering such a plot. "Unlike with Noodle, I wasn't gettin' out in any conspiracies with Muds," he said, recalling the controversial "El Mañana" music video shoot, as well as the nickname the band had coined for their bassist. "So, well, duh, I knew I was going to need help. From someplace, I 'unno…I heard Muds got a decoy to stand in 'is place and then just left. I wished I'd thought of that."
What Mr. Pot did have to his advantage were two prime things: first, that the surveillance camera to his room had grainy visual and no sound, and second, his mechanical abilities and endeavors were amplified by his very own Doncamatic device. "The Donkatron—er, Doncamatic, it's known as now—that's what Daley was calling his anyway—this device was just like a miniature of Russel's—my mate—Russel's Hip Hop Machine; I mean, the whole idea is sound; only this time, I wasn't archiving sound, or making another The Fall album, or something. This time, I was, well, utilizing it. I was making, sor' of, phone calls, basically; an SOS."
Mr. Pot's Doncamatic device, he explained to me, is truly a universal device—"well, a' leas' on Earth, tha' is"—in that it can create and manipulate sound waves in any frequency. "An' i's all just mainly because I'm a mechanical wiz with electronic instruments," he boasted. "I'm not joking. All I need is a bi' of sound, and then I can do a ton of things with it. That's what real musicianship is. It's fanks to that my father was a mechanic, o' course. We used to customize piano keyboarded instruments all the time together, when he was alive. Otherwise my mind would turn to jello at the inside of a keyboard. Uh, oh yeah, and I also sometimes got wifi on my computer, for some reason, so I sometimes could use my iPad to send out video messages to whoever I was sending out messages to. I would just say what was on my mind. Stuff like 'Help me please!' or 'Hello? Is anybody there? Hello?' or once, 'Talk to me, talk to me, talk to me, talk to me, talk to me!' But yeah, that rarely happened…"
With his device, Stuart Pot sent out various signals and messages from his underwater room of the rotten junk island. "I 'ad to work manually. I had to to send the messages by aiming the signals at the bottom of the ocean, and then they would bounce back up, because if I sent them upwards or straightways, then Muds would've picked them up easy on radar or somefink. Still, he was intoxicated, or high or both whenever I saw him, so I dunno know how much it would've mattered. He was like that at dinner, or recording sessions, or when we went swimming or anything. I think it was just the stench was getting too much to him. There was no running water, or soap, or…stuff…"
Mr. Pot sent out messages to many of his cohorts, including Damon Albarn and Jaimie Hewlett, both of whom in return offered little help. "Those blokes even said they might come to that damn place and bring a party or somefing! They had no clue about what was happening to us!" Stuart sent messages to as many people as could think of. "With the amount of stuff coming basically out of the arse of Plastic Beach, I'm surprised no one picked anything up or came down to ask or check about ruckus or all. Except that Cyborg Noodle. She'd come down, routine ev'y day, to watch me, an' act blank an'—an' creep me out for half and hour or so."
Stuart received very few replies, as he feared; most of these messages were probably disregarded as Gorillaz promos, and very few people would likely even know how to reply. "I'm sure I messed up a few myself, so they never reached their destinations, but only a few." Slightly dejected, Stuart had few options. He made a few more failed escape attempts before being forced to accommodate the whole Gorillaz-collaboration group on the Escape to Plastic Beach World Tour, in which he was infamously stuck in dressing rooms with Murdoc and the Cyborg Noodle concert after concert. "That was just about the worst leg of the 'journey'. Murdoc was always freaking out and goin' on rampages, and he would tear the nobs off of every door he could find, and I had to find someplace to just hide before the people could get us out. In Toronto I actually dumped the dirt out of a big flower pot and I hid there for about half the time. I think he might've killed a custodian lady at the O2, she's still missing, they said…"
Upon returning to a Plastic Beach that was now surrounded by pirates, Stuart knew that he'd had enough. He was more than sure that Murdoc had something to do with the bad business of the ambiguous Boogieman that was appearing wherever they went and would later come to terrorize the island as is depicted in the "Rhinestone Eyes" storyboard. Murdoc had also swiped Stuart's iPad away from him and downloaded the entire "The Fall" album to use for his "Pirate Radio" show, slapping a Gorillaz label on it when Stuart had been hoping to keep it for himself. "That was very personal work I'd done there, and he had no right to it whatsoever. I don' care that it go' very well received. I mean, part of me is glad, because I'm really happy to see fans and people and such, being made happy, with this music that I made, but on the Murdoc side of it, it don't mean anything to me. My privacy was violated, again, only this time on a fucking larger scale than before. I mean, killing someone or beating someone up or trying to barf all over Cameron Diaz is one thing for me, but pirating music, and my personal stuff, yeah, I think that is really going overboard ("heh, tha'll make a good pun," he commented afterward). So whether I could or couldn't, I felt like I had no choice but to get away." (Stuart here emphatically tapped the air with a pointed finger before folding his arms together and crisscrossing his legs on the bed.)
Niccals' only compensation for his bout of music piracy was to let Stuart appear on his Pirate Radio show, on the last two episodes that would be produced at Plastic Beach. He still took the liberties of slapping, punching and chloroforming Stuart whenever he felt like it. "I was in a better mood the second time around because the first time—on 'Episode 4', right—he dragged me out of bed at 4:36 in the morning—that's, er, 12:36 Greenwich Time, I think—and the one run we took was really bad. He didn't know what to do with me, and I really just wished he wasn't there at all, so he knocked me out. But the second time I came on I was in a much better mood—it was daylight, first of all, and a bunch of the collaborators sat me down and we talked over Murdoc stealing the music and having abducted more than half of us, and so I felt a bit less raw about it. I guess they basically buttered me up for the show—which was nice of them—and I went on and me and Murdoc did the show, an' I redid all the sound mixing in fron' of 'im, and we worked with each other a lot better, despite all the projectiles and such flying at us from these sodding pirates. Looking back though, I'm still pretty sore with him, and not just because of the music piracy and 'bad contact' and such. Oh, an' also there was those other things, like the iTunes interview (at this he shuddered and scrounged his face). Maybe I'll make up with him later, but I was so sick of all the crap I'd gone through in that whole year that I just didn't see the point anymore. I guess I thought to myself, if Gorillaz was something this scattered, with i's band members literally not knowing the 'alf of what was going on and not being able to make music together, and if they were reduced to something like stealing music from one another, then I really saw no point to calling myself Gorillaz anymore. I was through with it. It was a commitment that felt like suicide, but I'd never felt so sure about something in my life—uh, well, besides my love of music. So I decided to try, just one more time…An' it worked! Under strange circumstances…"
The siege on Plastic Beach in fact became Stuart's savior. Straight after Niccals' fifth broadcast, Stuart bolted from the mansion and out onto the island as Plastic Beach was assailed by gunfire and cannonballs. Having no plan at all, and being lucky to have gotten this far, he was even more dumbstruck to see a squat submarine approach and pull up to the island. Out popped Daley, and the pop tenor singer stretched his hand out to the skinny baritone. "I was a little skeptical, but then I thought, 'Well, a singer to another singer, maybe I can trust he's not working for Muds.' And I got in, and we took off. Apparently, HE'D gotten one of my SOSs, to'ally by accident, of course. Think of 'at? I just dunno, I would never have thought of asking another person on that island to help me. Though it makes perfect sense now, I guess I'd just lost a sense of brotherhood by then, in anyone I had met on Plastic Beach. I guess you'd call it a sense of anti-brotherhood I'd gotten."
I asked him if he blamed Murdoc for that, and he said, "For the most part, yeah…but really, I just had to get away from everything going on there. So anyway, yeah, that's what it was…that's what Plastic Beach was like."
That's Part 2!
