Only Damon Albarn strode triumphantly from the wreckage of Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia. Rock bands vanished, the Millennium Dome bombed and even Blair is now history. But Albarn – once the front man of Blur, the best of the Britpoppers – now teeters on the brink of becoming a national treasure.

Blur fell apart, as all the best bands do, after producing some of the most cunningly sophisticated Britpop songs – Park Life, Country House, Girls and Boys. Albarn went on to form the even more successful Gorillaz, a cartoon band drawn by the animator Jamie Hewlett. Then the two of them, in collaboration with the Chinese director Chen Shi-Zheng, made Monkey: Journey to the West, an opera based on a 16th-century Chinese novel. It was so successful that it made Albarn our man in China. He had the images and the sounds so, naturally enough, it is an Albarn-Hewlett Monkey cartoon that has been opening and closing the BBC’s Olympic coverage.

Next year he’s doing a ballet. Last year there was another Albarn band, The Good, the Bad & the Queen. He’s about to release an LP – the real vinyl thing – of Chinese traffic noise. He’s also got some project boiling inside him about which he refuses to speak: “I don’t want to call it anything because as soon as you do it’s all over the internet and it becomes just one word, it becomes your word.”

Albarn is now an industry. We are talking in the sound and image factory that he has recently created in Kensington, west London. It’s a studio/office complex full of machines that he doesn’t know how to work – others do it for him. He prefers to cling on to the old familiar technologies. He’s probably the only rock star still working with C90 tape cassettes.

Now 40, but boyish and rock star-ishly pretty in appearance, he is wearing big falling-down jeans and a white T-shirt. He smokes roll-ups. His manner is introspective and self-deprecating. He agonises over his words, not wishing to be pigeonholed or pinned down. About China, however, he is more definite. He sees engaging with that nation as one of our most vital obligations.

“This China thing,” he says passionately, “can we get our heads round it? Unless we can do that, we are never going to see eye to eye and they’re going to screw with us.” He’s impatient with our high-minded criticisms of China.

"We’ve got to get over thinking we have the moral high ground because I just don’t think we do. I’ve read too much about our bloody cynical history, you know, and let it not be forgotten that we sold opium, which we took from India through Hong Kong and, like, disabled vast tracts of China for 80 years . . . or something like that.

“That’s quite a big hurt to heal and you know the fact that they are prepared to talk to us in every sense of the word, I think means we have to try and get on and get to know each other. And, as a musician, all you can do is just play music with them.”

There was, I point out, the awkward fact that Mao Tse-tung killed 70m of his own people, an achievement that puts our own opium trade oppression in the shade.

“I realise that, I am aware of that, but there is also the argument that something like 400m people were taken out of extreme poverty.”

Passionate he may be, but at the same time he’s uncertain and aware of his limitations. Brought up by highly creative and intelligent parents, he didn’t excel at school. He failed his 11-plus and reckons he had only one really good year at school. I ask him if he regrets not going to university. There is a deathly 17-second pause.

“I can’t answer that one, nobody’s ever asked me that. I lost out, I didn’t even get past my music A-level. It’s frustrating but that’s just the way it went. I just didn’t do very well at school, but I had a fantastic music teacher and fantastic parents. Maybe if I’d gone to a slightly better school they would have been able to help me and I would have gone to university. I really do feel we should try again with the state system and give everyone the same education, it’s so important.”

He recently spoke out about the need to teach children to read music. It comes up when I ask him if he is now, with an opera to his credit and a ballet on the way, moving over to classical music composition. He winces and squirms: “No, no, no. Because, you know, a classical musician is supposed to be able to play it as well. Around [piano] grade 6 or 7, when I was 14 or 15, I started losing the plot after a few bars. I didn’t lose interest, I got terribly diverted.” Not having a degree has its advantages, however. Like many creative people whose educations were interrupted, he is driven by a desire to catch up and by a nagging feeling that he has missed something. He’s sensitive about what he doesn’t know, but equally he uses that to justify a certain deliberate obscurity. Rightly he thinks that mystery is intrinsic to music. It was Albarn, against the wishes of everybody, who forced through the decision to make Monkey entirely in Mandarin.

“The director wanted to do it in English and so did everybody else, but I knew it would ruin me. I find it really frightening when I become too familiar with anything. I don’t like it. I love listening to stuff when I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Albarn’s instincts have kept seeing him through. The switch from Blur to Gorillaz was commercially sharp and culturally adept. As Britpop played itself out, the cartoon signalled a move to a more aggressively international and theatrical style.

Now he regards rock’n’roll life with wry dismay. He says he was very bad at being a rock star and winces slightly and murmurs “God” after I bring up the old days, when the so-called “battle of the bands” – Blur versus Oasis – became one of the big background stories of Blair’s first term.

He launches into an agonised, inconclusive analysis of what it was all about involving the Beatles, the Who, the Sex Pistols, the Kinks and new Labour with “their strange, dark materials”.

Perhaps, I suggest, it was simply that Blur were more satirical than Oasis: “Well, angry, a different kind of anger. Theirs was more visceral. I’m still trying to find that clarity, I can’t really say it how I feel it.”

Some things never change, though: “I saw Oasis about a year and a half ago and it was the same old thing. I always get on well with Liam Gallagher, but Noel Gallagher doesn’t talk to me and hurls abuse over the other side of the room.”

Blur seem unlikely to make a comeback. Unlike some – the Spice Girls, say – Albarn certainly doesn’t seem to need it. He has his factory, his dizzying list of projects and a stable relationship with the artist Suzi Winstanley. They have an eight-year-old daughter, Missy, of whom he is fondly protective.

Another reason for not going back to Blur is because he suffers from rock star exhaustion. Gorillaz was born in part from a disgust with the boredom of industrialised pop: “There’s nothing on MTV – well, that’s not true. I like a bit of the Cribs and Pimp My Ride, but it does go on and on and you get bored with it. Why do we need to repeat everything so much that we get bored?”

With a suddenly vivid analogy, he compares the pop industry with a Moroccan souk. Business is bad in the souks, nothing is selling and the stalls are filling up with slippers and mini tagines.

“People can’t stop making this stuff because that’s how they get paid. Soon you won’t be able to get into the souk any more, you’ll be fighting to get through. We’ve got to keep it interesting, you know, so that things are truly inspiring. We’ve got to be selective – that’s a dangerous word. That’s really why I’m doing stuff in Mandarin and not just going around touring with a band.”

He is – both in what he embraces and what he rejects – a man who embodies his generation. In the 1990s he was, perhaps reluctantly, recruited into the whole new Britain idea that was intrinsic to Blair’s first election win. Just as the Beatles in Harold Wilson’s Britain symbolised the fun way out of the strictures of the 1940s and 1950s, so Blur and Oasis epitomised the national feeling of relief that accompanied Blair’s defeat of a demoralised Conservative party.

But Cool Britannia didn’t last long and its failure left Albarn’s generation with a problem of identity. The 1960s generation had all kinds of ideals to hold them together. The 1990s kids had nothing.

Albarn’s background made him just the man to embody the need for purpose. He has thought long and hard about this. A question about his upbringing produces a long thoughtful silence. The ensuing analysis is inconclusive but revealing.

“To be totally honest, I come from two sets of families, one that got an MBE for farming – my mother’s side – and, on my father’s side, a slightly odd Quaker thing. My dad was never a Quaker but it manifested itself in him in an interest in Indian trance and Sufism. That’s how he could express this emotion, and it is an emotion, and I do channel into that purity – it’s not Christian or Islamic, it’s just the essence of the magic.”

It is, of course, this undirected, undefined spirituality that is the heart of the matter. The 1960s generation had rebellion and the alternative way; the 1990s generation had the aspiration, but comfortable commercialism denied them definition. They just kind of hung out and, occasionally, dreamt. But now – and this may be a world-changing truth – they seem to have China to fill the void. Albarn cannot stop enthusing.

“I even love the Chinese dietary thing, it’s very balanced, very nutritious and healthy, and they drink green tea all day. I love that and I love the sort of slow-motion punching of imaginary clouds every morning. It’s so beautiful. We do need to engage with them, the ecology of the world is reliant on our engagement with them. That’s where my politics lie. With my music I’m just trying to create interest in the idea of learning other stuff.”

And then the inevitable disclaimer of the boy who failed his 11-plus: “Sorry, it all sounds very Zoolander.”

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