They haven't got a name, but that looks like all they're missing. A stellar line-up of Paul Simonon, Damon Albarn, Tony Allen and Simon Tong have come together to celebrate the musical melting pot that is London. They've got a message for Tony Blair as well, Simonon tells Brian Boyd.

TILBURY Dock on the north bank of the Thames is still best known as the place from where the "Ten Pound Poms" set sail for their new life in Australia. But in 1948 a ship arrived at Tilbury that was to have huge implications for British cultural life - particularly music culture. That ship was the Empire Windrush, which brought the first large group of West Indian immigrants to the UK.

The Pathé newsreel footage of the passengers docking is often used to document the beginning of modern multicultural Britain. One of the passengers was the famous calypsonian Lord Kitchener, who had composed a new song to mark the occasion called London Is the Place for Me, which he performed on the dockside.

Calypso, ska and reggae arrived with the Windrush and quite a few of the passengers ended up living in the Notting Hill/North Kensington area of London. The Clash's bass player, Paul Simonon, remembers going to school with the children of the Windrush generation.

"The area I lived in had a strong West Indian influence and it can only rub off on you," he says. "After school I'd go back to the houses of the immigrant kids and be exposed to this totally different culture. I was listening to dub reggae from the age of five or six - although I didn't know it was called dub reggae then; it was just music to me. That music always stayed with me and I brought it with me when I joined The Clash."

Many years later, and Damon Albarn is trying to get his Gorillaz project off the ground. His record company agrees to fund it if he goes back into the studio to record the obligatory "bonus track" to tack on to the end of a Blur greatest hits album. He comes up with Music Is My Radar, at the end of which he repeats the phrase "Tony Allen got me dancing".

Tony Allen is the legendary Afrobeat percussionist best known for his work with Fela Kuti. Allen heard of the song and invited Albarn to join him at a show he was doing. He then persuaded Albarn and Gorillaz producer Danger Mouse to record in Nigeria, though not much work got done. What Albarn really wanted to do was a "London" record. Realising that when it comes to London and music The Clash wrote the score, he got in touch with his Westbourne Grove neighbour, Paul Simonon, to talk about books.

"I had just finished reading Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography and Damon was reading Peter Linebaugh's The London Hanged," says Simonon. "We spent a lot of time talking and talking about the area of London we lived in and the history behind it - the slums, the gentrification and the different immigrant groups. First it was the Irish, then the West Indians and now it's Romanians and Algerians. And you have the very rich living beside the very poor, wealthy houses backing on to council estates. There's a whole eco system here, and the Portobello Road seems to be the real focus for the community."

Their conversations about shared local knowledge eventually turned into plans for an album, called The Good, the Bad and the Queen, produced by Danger Mouse.

"I was aware, of course, of Damon's work with Blur, but I was always more of a Gorillaz fan. In fact, I saw their first-ever show," says Simonon. "What always impressed me about him was that he was one of the few Britpop musicians who refused to attend that party in Downing Street that Blair hosted soon after he got into power."

Joining Albarn and Simonon on the album are Tony Allen and ex-Verve guitarist Simon Tong. "The group, and please don't call us a supergroup, aren't called The Good, the Bad and the Queen," says Simonon. "The album is called that because it's a lyric on one of the songs, but this group doesn't have a name. I suppose we'll be known as The Good, the Bad and the Queen, but if we release a second album then we'll be known by the name of that album."

One of the most intriguing albums of the past few years, TGTBATQ, with its dub reggae basslines, afrobeat percussion and odd flashes of limpid guitar rock, is an evocation of a melted urban pot. With its cross-cultural references it belongs in the same lineage as anything done by PiL or Big Audio Dynamite.

This, though, is a downbeat, melancholic affair which is overshadowed by the Iraq War. "There's a line in the song Kingdom of Doom where Damon sings 'Drinking all day 'cos the country's at war'," says Simonon. "You have this backdrop of how the biggest ever public protest in London's history, when one million people marched against the plans to go to war with Iraq, was simply ignored by the government. It's just that sense of helplessness - the country is at war and people are drinking all day trying to ignore it because they feel powerless.

"It's interesting to contrast what's happening today with what happened back in 1977. Back then it was more black and white in that the Conservatives were the party of the right and Labour were the party of the left, but not anymore."

Simonon acknowledges that the album is hardly likely to be described as "exuberant," but he prefers to see it as a work of "melancholic positiveness".

"Certainly you would take it to be downbeat on the first listen, but I think that there is some hope in there. It's a bit like what they used to say about the Romantic poets: that they had mournfully inspired hope. There are lyrics about wars and tidal waves and modern life being rubbish, and the music does reflect that. But there is something else in there besides the obvious downbeat atmosphere."

The title The Good, the Bad, and the Queen is by no means a harking back to the days of John Lydon's God Save the Queen. "No, she's just in there because it's about life in London," he says. "It's a strange thing in London because it always seems to be the working class who respect the Queen most. It was the working class who had all the street parties during the Silver Jubilee. Even going around to West Indian people's homes with my school friends, there would always be a picture of the Queen on the wall."

Prior to this album, Simonon had left music behind after The Clash disbanded to go back to doing what he was doing before The Clash formed: working as an artist.

"There were musical offers over the years but I was happy doing my paintings," he says. "In fact, the studio I still work in is just below the Westway (the flyover immortalised in Clash songs), so there really is no getting away from the place for me. But what really attracted me to this project was the fact that I wasn't being used as a session musician - I was a collaborator on the music.

"And there was also the line-up. For a bass player to be asked to be play with Tony Allen, who has been described as the musician of the century, is really something. I found it very difficult at first because he has a real jazz approach to percussion. He would always say to me, 'Whatever you do with your bass line, just don't follow me', which was kind of strange but I soon got used to it."

Live outings by this supergroup who don't like being called a supergroup have already been acclaimed in a series of superlatives. Their first outing was at the BBC's Electric Proms series of shows late last year and since then there have been a few one-off gigs in unlikely venues, where they have mostly played to a maximum of 300 people.

"We do want to do some more shows," Simonon says. "But there's not going to be any massive world tour or anything like that. I don't want to have to get the leather trousers out again."

The Good, the Bad and the Queen is released today