Dave Rowntree, Damon Albarn, Alex James and Graham Coxon of Blur (Image: Getty Images)
Blur bassist Alex James has revealed how the band was fined £20,000 for smoking on stage when they played their two massive reunion gigs at Wembley Stadium. The musician turned farmer, who was rarely without a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth in the Britpop band’s nineties heyday, chuckles: “It’s all there in the tour accounts!”
By then, having played to 180,000 ecstatic fans at the sold-out London shows – their best ever, he believes – as well as tens of thousands more around the world, Blur could afford the write-off. But rewind to the run-up to last year’s reunion, and James admits money was so tight he was forced to borrow from his mother-in-law.
Sitting on a sofa in a converted threshing barn, his angular cheekbones still visible under his trademark mop of dark hair, he takes a sip of coffee, lights up (no smoking ban here) and leans back contentedly.
Outside is a cherry orchard and, over yonder, a herd of sheep (Texels, he thinks), owned by his near-neighbour Carole Bamford, wife of JCB mogul Sir Anthony and founder of the Daylesford Farmshop down the road. James first fell in love with the Cotswolds in a very rock star way, flying back from gigs in bandmate Dave Rowntree’s light aircraft.
“We’d always come home by the Cotswolds if we could,” he tells me. “We’d drop down to 500ft, actually sometimes we’d turn the transponder off and go even lower.”
Today it’s a bucolic scene, a million miles from James’ former life, though clues of his rock star heritage are scattered around – a pile of vinyl records by a pair of DJ decks, a Brit Award and a recording studio-cum-rehearsal space at the end of the building.
Oh, and the huge glitter ball hanging from the ceiling. It’s fitting because we’re talking today about Over The Rainbow (its title refers to the sense of enchantment), James’s beautifully-written and gloriously funny behind-the-scenes account of 2022-23 and Blur’s triumphant reunion.
“Writing is normally horrible,” he sighs. “The first big challenge is the blank page. That’s f***ing terrifying, but this was just pouring out of me. I was sitting there chuckling away.” Subtitled Tales From An Unexpected Year, the book also documents his efforts to lose weight – a staggering four stone – and organise his own annual festival, the Big Feastival, on the 200-acre Cotswolds farm where he has lived with his wife, film producer Claire Neate, and their five children (Geronimo, twins Artemis and Galileo, Sable and Beatrix) since 2003.
Alex James pictured at his home in the Cotswolds (Image: Sophie Davidson)
The love for family and bandmates shines through. “I don’t think I knew I was going to write a book until the end of the tour. It was such a f***ing crazy time,” he says. “There was a sense of witchcraft about the whole year. The premise of any story is, they say, a stranger comes to town. I guess Blur getting back together was that trigger. Here I was living a strange, almost monastic, existence, and the reunion blows it all out of the water.”
James, who once claimed to have spent £1million on champagne in three years (you eat carrots to stop bad breath, apparently) is now 56. By his own admission, he has morphed from “nocturnal metropolitan vampire into quiet country gentleman”.
The last Blur gigs had been in 2015, with the band on a not-entirely-comfortable eight-year hiatus while its members pursued other projects.
“All the kids were in short trousers back then,” recalls James. “It was very different, their idea of a good day out was Legoland and now they want to go to Glastonbury.”
What hadn’t changed was Blur’s ability to make extraordinary music together, as evidenced by comeback LP The Ballad of Darren, now considered among their best.
Alex James and his wife Claire, left, attend the 24th GQ Men of the Year Awards (Image: Dave Benett/Getty)
But even when the four old friends met in December 2022, after an “unexpected” call asking if James would like to play Wembley (“Yes!”), there was no guarantee it would happen. Their last meeting, he explains, was “a car crash that had haunted me daily ever since”. Today he sighs diplomatically: “I can’t remember why, but it was really unpleasant. I think I’ve blocked it all out.
“I was absolutely cacking it driving up the M40. I was thinking, ‘What the f*** is going to happen? What band doesn’t hate each other 35 years in? What band has ever made a good record 35 years in?’ I was hugely fat as well.”
What saved the day, as it always has, was the music. Picking up their instruments, they launched into She’s So High, the first song they wrote together: “We just did it and f***ing hell… there’s always this awkward sort of dancing when we all get in a room together. But as soon as we start playing, it’s always, always been like that, there’s a sense of magic about it.”
James continues: “We had all those years of playing together for hours and hours every day. We were incredibly lucky to have had the chance to kind of learn music as a craft, a proper craft. So the chemistry’s always been there, honed by years of doing it and being better informed by working with other people.”
Indeed, post-Blur, singer and songwriter Damon Albarn – “the boss”, as James describes him – launched a second globally-famous group, Gorillaz, recording with everyone from Noel Gallagher to Elton John; guitarist Graham Coxon made a string of well-received solo albums before turning to folk music and film scores; drummer Dave retrained as a solicitor and became a Labour councillor, eventually standing (unsuccessfully) for Parliament at the general election.
Alex James smoking on stage at Wembley Stadium in London in July 2023 (Image: PA)
“I’m filled with more admiration and respect and love for Damon now more than ever, he’s incredibly demanding but all just in the name of making the music as brilliant as it can possibly be,” says James. “If you can’t continue to evolve, you can’t keep coming back, or at least you’ll just end up a parody of yourselves or a nostalgia thing.” For his part, James had reinvented himself as a food writer, cheesemaker, festival entrepreneur and, more recently, creator of an English sparkling wine called Britpop (he trademarked the name a decade ago in a flash of inspiration).
Music might be in his blood – he’s justly proud that, on Spotify, a song from pretty much every Blur album is listed in their most-played tracks – but it’s food that sparks his imagination.
Some of the funniest passages in his book relate to his attempts to lose weight (“You just can’t point a Super Trouper [spotlight] at a lard arse”). “Rock’n’roll is normally what sends people off the rails and into excess, so it was slightly alarming that my band was going to be rehab for me,” he smiles.
As for the rest of Blur, still relatively trim, he says: “They’re not surrounded by a huge family – it’s like cooking Christmas Dinner every day – I’m surrounded by cheese, I live on a f***ing food machine, we organise a food festival. It was self-indulgent happy fat, not cry-for-help fat.”
Having dug out his “Britpop trousers” – getting back into them became his abiding ambition – he opted for late night runs, ice baths and a personal trainer because he “needed professional help”.
“The first week, I was collapsing in bed at night, so tired and so hungry and so broken. But the great thing is that when you’re really fat, you start getting results quickly.
“You go to the studio to make a mid-career album, it doesn’t matter how hard you work, there’s no guarantee it’ll be a success; likewise, with a festival, you spend all year planning and there’s no guarantee it’s not going to rain all weekend.
“But if you go to the gym, eat less and exercise more, you’re going to start looking great and feeling great. There’s a point when it starts giving you energy.”
Having met Claire by chance one night in Covent Garden, they fell in love in (and with) the Cotswolds, purchasing the farm while they were on their honeymoon.
“Everybody dreams of the cottage with the roses round around the door. When we bought it, I thought, ‘This is a reckless and bold, romantic, daring leap into the unknown’. But it’s literally just the next cliché in the book of rock clichés, isn’t it?
“As soon as we rolled up the drive, I felt like I didn’t ever want to leave. It was more like buying a kind of little village. The only reason these buildings weren’t knocked down is because it cost money, so they’d completely fallen into disrepair.
“I got a letter from somebody saying they were born on the farm – it turned out in our bedroom – in 1940, asking if he could come back and have a look around. It was absolutely amazing, we were both crying.”
Alex has written about Blur’s 2023 reunion in Over the Rainbow: Tales From An Unexpected Year (Image: Particular Books)
Despite making millions from his music career over the years, money is a constant worry owning a farm – with previous Blur reunions having paid for improvements.
“Just to get the ship on an even keel took years,” he says. “My job was being in a band. Music suddenly became free and my band split up. I was f***ed. I had to roll my sleeves up.
“Fortunately I was young enough to have enough energy. But you’ve just got to get up in the morning and get on with it.”
Ironically, in early 2023, James was earning more money from Vindaloo, the novelty football song he wrote with Keith Allen in 1998, than he was from the entire Blur back catalogue. Post-Covid money was extremely tight; he couldn’t get a bank loan and wouldn’t be paid for the Blur reunion for six months because money was tied up in the tour. Thankfully, his mother-in-law stepped in to bail the family out. “I don’t know how a band like Blur would survive now if we were starting,” he says. “But there is a thriving culture of independent and boutique food production now. So it’s really good having one foot in a really buoyant market.”
The profits from the tour are gone now, ploughed back into the farm. As for the Government’s changes to inheritance tax, James is reluctant to get involved in a political row, but describes it with understatement as a “kick in the nuts”.
It’s a rare low point in an otherwise optimistic conversation. Will Blur do it all again?
He’d love to, but it seems unlikely.
“Even though we never fell out or anything, everyone’s in a good place now,” he adds. “It’s like a sibling thing. There’s an Entente Cordiale and everybody’s involved.”
Over the Rainbow: Tales From An Unexpected Year, by Alex James (Particular Books, £18.99) is out now. Visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25
