Damon Albarn is late. After several phone calls and round trips to his room by the publicity person, the Blur singer finally appears, sleepy-eyed and crumpled, in the bar of the Clarence Hotel, and orders a pint of Guinness as a pick-me-up.
It's not the rock 'n' roll lifestyle but the experience of having a nine-week-old daughter, he says, that has him so tired. "So when I see a bed, I throw myself into it. It's something wonderful in my life at the moment to see a clean, empty bed."
Albarn is here to talk about his music for Thaddeus O'Sullivan's Ordinary Decent Criminal, currently running in Irish cinemas. "I like the film - it's about 90 per cent of the way there," he says. "And I do like Kevin Spacey as an actor - there's something very compelling about him."
This is Albarn's second film score in the last 12 months, having collaborated with Michael Nyman on Antonia Bird's gothic drama, Ravenous. "That was a very different kind of score," he says. "The funny thing with that score was that I'd be very interested to see what people thought was Nyman's and what was mine. It's about a 60-40 split in my favour. Obviously he'd already been a huge influence on me, along with Philip Glass, just because they figured out this really good method of finding one good riff and working it through, which is perfect for someone of my limited means."
But he's been reading up on the history of Hollywood as a result of his dealings with American studios in recent times. "That whole experience of dealing with 20th Century Fox on Ravenous terrified me - the level of corruption that was there, and how hard I had to fight to get any level of creative control, especially since I was a first-timer. These days, as far as film scores are concerned, you have the director and the producer, and if you're lucky they agree with you. Then you have this very sinister person called the music adviser, who remains in the shadows most of the time. With this soundtrack - and I don't think Thaddeus is very happy about it either - we had to put loads of songs on there that didn't appear in the film, because it had been decided in advance.
"It's really hard to write a proper soundtrack to a good film these days unless you're one of those really schmaltzy, established composers who get all the big jobs. With films for young people, they only see it as viable if you put loads of hit songs on there. So I fought very hard on this film to get what I wanted. The compromise was that I had to write some songs for it, which was interesting, because you can do what you want in whatever style. But I've subsequently been offered jobs on other films and turned them down because you're ultimately going to be asked to fill in the spaces between the pop songs."
He agrees that that's one of the inevitable side-effects of being perceived as a pop star first and a film composer second. "Yeah, they like the idea, but when it comes down to it they'd ultimately prefer to sacrifice you, and stick in stuff by whoever's popular at the time."
He cites the upcoming Leonardo Di Caprio film, The Beach, as an example of what he's talking about. "They asked me to do a score for that, and then I realised that they basically wanted to get loads of songs in and have another film that has no real identity."
Given that The Beach was made by the team responsible for Trainspotting, one of the most commercially successful film/soundtrack tie-ins of the 1990s (to which Albarn contributed two songs), that probably wasn't surprising. "Trainspotting's influence has been really negative in a way," says Albarn. "It was a successful soundtrack and it did actually relate to the film, but that's because the film's about music, in a way, as well as about drugs. But generally in Hollywood they'll follow that same route with any film. I always say to them: look at films like The Breakfast Club, which look so dated and crap now, because they used all those songs from the period. But they don't really care. Having spent 10 years having problems with the music business in America, I'm now finding it's exactly the same thing with the film business. It's extraordinary, they just don't like foreigners who have an attitude."
Actually, Albarn's breezy, swinging score for Ordinary Decent Criminal is one of the best things about the film. He agrees that it has echoes of classic 1960s scores for films like The Italian Job. "Yeah, and at one point I remember Thaddeus coming in and being shocked by how caper-ish it was. I just thought, given that it was a gangster movie set in Dublin, that it would be very funny to give it a sort of Latiny feel, a sense of somewhere a lot warmer than Dublin. It's the same kind of thing in my music with Blur, that I'm always accused of having too high an irony level. I prefer to think of it as playful."
Ordinary Decent Criminal is on general release