Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz) and Paul Simonon (The Clash) have a new group together. It’s called the Good, the Bad and the Queen. The music they play is loose like comfy clothes and stylistically untucked—English songs constructed without zips and buttons, but underpinned with a twangy gusset courtesy of Tony Allen, the Nigerian drum master. Their first, eponymous album was released in early 2007 on the Parlophone/ Honest Jons label.

If the group has a purpose, it is to explore themes arising from Albarn and Simonon’s mutual love of their home territory: North Kensington, that storied part of west London mythologized by The Clash following the fiery race riots of ’76. This handsomely decayed (and renewed) couple of square miles is variously identified as “Notting Hill,” “Ladbroke Grove” and “Portobello” by those who live there, depending on which bit of it they choose to identify themselves with. “Notting Hill” usually means well-heeled bohemian; “Portobello” means mercantile bohemian; “Ladbroke Grove” or “The Grove” means you have a lot of reggae records. Well, it used to. Paul Simonon has spent much of the past thirty years drawing and painting the area: its people, its weather, its fetishes, its street furniture, its debris. The area proudly retains a melting-pot identity, but be aware: there’s an awful lot more money now than there was in ’76.

The Believer met Paul and Damon in a swanky new café off Powis Square. Both men wore black pinstripe suits and open-necked shirts, Paul’s in the open-weave, big-collared Jamaican style. He wore a key round his neck on a chain. The cafe would not permit the members of the Good, the Bad and the Queen to smoke.

—Nick Coleman

I. BANKRUPT GROVE

THE BELIEVER: How did you meet?

PAUL SIMONON: Our first contact was… well, it’s the old Chrissie Hynde story.

DAMON ALBARN: I got a little demo through the post from Chrissie Hynde, which turned out to be Ray Davies [Kinks singer] writing “We Close Our Eyes” at the piano many, many years ago. Don’t know exactly when. It might have even been the sixties, actually. So I’ve got this recording of him at the piano… She was doing some performance for MTV or something, back in 1994, and she wanted me to play the piano while she sang. She didn’t want a big arrangement. She just wanted it to sound like it was her and him. I expect she asked me because there were glaring similarities between what we [Blur] were doing then and what the Kinks had done. Also, about a month before I’d sung “Waterloo Sunset” with Ray, so I was having a real moment. My first contact with what, at that...