Deltron 3030 Talks About Creating Gorillaz’s Classic Song “Clint Eastwood”

If you grew up watching MTV in the 2000s, chances are you saw the video for “Clint Eastwood.” The clip introduced us to the animated version of the band Gorillaz, a collaborative project between Blur frontman Damon Albarn and comic book artist Jamie Hewlett, best known for his work on Tank Girl.

“Clint Eastwood” was the first single from the group’s self-titled debut album, which dropped March 26, 2001, and the song attracted fans of both alternative music and hip-hop, thanks to production work from Dan The Automator and verses by Del The Funky Homosapien. Del and Dan formed Deltron 3030 with Kid Koala in 1999 and released their conceptual self-titled debut a year later, right around the time Gorillaz were recording their LP. It was Dan who tapped Del at the last minute to contribute lines to what would become “Clint Eastwood.”

15 years later, Dan The Automator and Del The Funky Homosapien talked to Genius about their contributions to Gorillaz’s classic single.

Dan The Automator: “I was in Germany, and Damon tried to find me. I was on Handsome Boy Modeling School’s promo tour. He had called me up and said, ‘Would you be interested in kind of this new project?’ I was a big fan of Blur and whatnot, so I went from Germany right to London.

“When I got to Gorillaz, there were demos. There were little snippets and stuff. We fleshed them out and realized them. There’s some truth to the sense that the Gorillaz sound, the Deltron sound were being developed at the same time, so there’s some overlap. I think the heaviest influence the Gorillaz had on me is a lot of reggae. I was not making as much at the time. But a lot of reggae influences creeped into my work, and probably more of the alt-y space stuff crept its way into the Gorillaz.”

Del The Funky Homosapien: “Me and Dan was finishing up the first Deltron album. He was simultaneously working on the Gorillaz project. So, we were finishing up Deltron, and [Dan] was supposed to be taking me home to the other side of the bridge. He stayed in San Francisco. At the last minute, he was like, ‘I kind of need you to do something for me. Could you clean up these lyrics for this song I got on this Gorillaz project?’ I was like, ‘Man, take me home, dude.’

“So late at night, we’d already finished recording and stuff, and I didn’t want to do nothing else. He kind of kept pushing like, ‘You know you could do it in 30 minutes.’ Which he’s right. I finally did it.

“Dan gave me very little information to work with. He told me the song came from the point of view of Russel. And there’s a ghost living in his head of a dead friend I believe or something like that. So his spirit is still with him. So I’m like, ‘OK, and what else? That’s it? I’m supposed to write something with just that?’ He’s like, ‘Just be creative. You have creative license to do what you think it’s about from there.’”

Dan The Automator: “I didn’t think it was going to sell millions of records. I thought it was going to sell Blur numbers. The second me and Damon hit the studio together, we hit it off. I knew we were going to make stuff creatively.”

Del The Funky Homosapien: “I still perform it. A lot of people coming to the performances, they were introduced to me through Gorillaz. And the people that were involved in that project, I have a lot of respect for too. It’s not like it was some throwaway shit [that] I just did to try and make a hit. That was some real shit that just happened to blow up because it was so great.”