Modern life is great

He may have knocked drink and drugs on the head when he swapped late nights at the Groucho for country squiredom in the Cotswolds, but Alex James will be demanding that there’s something equally as addictive on the rider when Blur play their Friday night headliner at Oxegen.

“I fucking love Clonakilty Black Pudding,” he grins impishly. “I had it for the first time a couple of years ago when I was in Dublin, and can eat my body weight in it. I shall be insisting on a Full Irish before we go on.”
Blur will have to come up with their own version of the Buzzcocks’ great pre-show mantra: “No Moët, no show-ay, no Chandon, no band on!”
“No pudding, no… shit, I can’t think of a rhyme!”
The 40-year-old – Jesus, doesn’t time fly? – has done a lot of talking about food (cheese mainly) since 2003 when Blur decided to go on their… well, what was it?
“I don’t think we ever had a word for it – ones like ‘hiatus’, ‘sabbatical’ and ‘career break’ have been bandied around, but not by us,” Alex, who’s on a tour bus en route to the Manchester MEN Arena with the rest of Blur, reflects. “The thing about this… I just needed it to happen for me for several reasons, the big one being the reconciliation of friendships. I’ve started to think that as a default situation all bands end up hating each other. The Rolling Stones hated each other, Pink Floyd hated each other, the remaining members of The Who don’t seem to like each other very much. My favourite band New Order have fallen out. Love and hate are very, very close and can easily turn into each other. I got all I needed from the four of us getting back in a room and playing all the old songs. The memories they evoke… it’s just brilliant. I’d almost forgotten about the playing in front of an audience side of it until the first gig (two weeks ago for 150 friends, family and über-liggers) in Colchester. The reaction has been absolutely overwhelming. We’ve had people crying. The popularity of the band has grown to a level which, honestly and truthfully, we didn’t expect. We’re being asked to play places in America now, that we’d never have filled before even when we were at our biggest.”
All of which is delivered with the breathless enthusiasm of someone who really, really wants you to know how big a deal Blur getting back together is for him. While James makes this reunion malarkey sound like a stroll in the park (life), just how profound their personal and musical differences had become was evident in July 2004 when Graham Coxon, promoting his Happiness In Magazines solo album, told Hot Press: “I wasn’t happy with any of that Britpop stuff. It was just perfunctorily strumming away to some mid-tempo, anthemic bollocks. It was fuckin’ rubbish, it really got on my nerves. We’d be on tour buses, I’d stick on something like Spiderland or Tweeze and everyone would just be like, ‘Turn that fucking shit off!’”
The Coxsonian venting got worse.
“Something that really used to bother me in Blur was that there was this attitude of, ‘Oh, this week we’re into disco, let’s do ‘Girls & Boys’. Now we’re into Pavement and Beck, let’s do some stuff in that vein. Okay, now that’s rubbish, let’s go to Africa and hear someone play the bongos’. I had a problem with that.”
A chasm that wasn’t so much yawning as in an advanced state of narcolepsy.
“I was at college when Blur got signed,” says James bringing things back to the here and now. “The only things I’d done were working in supermarkets and building sites. It was 15 years we’d had of it, and what does fucking success teach you? It doesn’t fucking teach you anything. It’s fucking useless.”
If only we had a Hot Press swear box, we’d be (fucking) quids in.
“We needed to work out who we were outside of this Blur thing,” he resumes. “We’ve all done that now, which means we can come back to it with the same sense of joy and no-strings-attached verve that we had at the very beginning. All bands start out like The Beatles running around in Help! against the world and having a hoot, and ten years later there’s a sense of obligation and it’s become work. There’s none of that now – there’s no strings attached, there’s no pressure. I don’t know if it goes any further than this, and frankly I don’t care. We’re loving being in each other’s company again.”
Were there texts passing back and forth over the past six years saying, “Great newspaper article Alex”/“Thank you Damon, love the Chinese opera”?
“(laughs) The inter-band relationships are all different. It’s like a family, really. We didn’t necessarily speak to each other every day or every week or every month sometimes, but we all knew what each other was up to. I used to spend the whole year with my band and see my family at Christmas – now it’s the other way around.”
James agrees that Blur getting back together was by no means an inevitability.
“What struck me at that first gig in Colchester was, ‘Fuck, I really thought I was never going to hear this sound again.’ The four of us playing together again… it’s amazing.”
Coming at the back catalogue afresh, are there songs he wasn’t too keen on then that he loves now, and vice versa?
“It changes all the time, really, the ones you like. When you play a song every night for ten years – like we did ‘She’s So High’ and ‘There’s No Other Way’ – you can hone them into a really high-quality product, which is what a good pop song should be. You do get to a point though where there’s no more honing to be done, and they stop giving you much back. They’re all brand new again though now! We’re excited, the audience is excited… it’s just ballistic.”
If Schoolboyish Enthusiasm were an Olympic sport, James would be on the podium now tearfully brandishing his gold medal. When I last met Alex (July 25, 2007 in the Merrion Hotel where his Clonakilty Black Pudding epiphany happened) he was confident that were Blur to get back together, the old magic would still be there.
“We’ll do what we’ve always done,” he asserted, “which is turn up, plug in and enjoy the ride. Getting the four of us into the same room is hard, but once we’re there magic always occurs.”
Did his prophecy come to pass?
“The first rehearsal was like walking into ten years ago. It was straight off the bat. I did wonder how quickly we’d be able to pick it all up again, but really it all clicked straight away. Because we’ve all been doing other things as producers, writers and performers, we play better now.”
They weren’t bad to start with.
“Well, thank you! I also play louder with Blur than I do with other people. Everyone wonders at 25 what they’ll be doing when they’re 40 – well, we’re having a second life, which is just as good as the first one.”
Have they gone off-piste during rehearsals and come up with ideas for new songs?
“The music’s never been a problem for Blur. Whenever we’re playing together, someone will start playing a riff and everyone joins in. That bit’s easy. What happens next I don’t know, and I quite like not knowing!”
Rarely has a question been sidestepped so masterfully! They mightn’t have the luxury of quite so much time at Punchestown, but up to this point Blur’s sets have been a Springsteenesque 130 minutes. Who’s the alpha male who decides which songs to play?
“One of our roadies, Stuart, has the casting vote. It’s a little bit done by committee – most things aren’t! It’s very tricky, but we’ve got something we’re happy with.”
Before Blur decided to reunite, Alex was to be found keeping his bass-player’s hand in with Bad Lieutenent, which is basically him and the members of New Order who aren’t Peter Hook.
“I wish Barney and Hooky would just give each other a cuddle,” he says ruefully. “They’re probably the reason I wanted to be in a band. I absolutely loved their records and listened to them again and again and again. I wrote some tracks with Bernard a few years ago, which appear to have been requisitioned for Bad Lieutenant. He’s coming to the Manchester show tonight – as are The Wiggles! – so I’ll find out what’s going on then.”
I’d be guilty of gross dereliction of journalistic duty if I didn’t ask Alex for his thoughts on Michael Jackson, whose death was announced just eleven hours before we spoke. Did Blur ever come into his orbit?
“I don’t want to get into any of that,” he parries, making it clear that the Jacko media feeding frenzy is going to have to do without him. Damon Albarn is less reticent that night, telling the Manchester MEN crowd: “The death of Michael Jackson is very sad. Obviously it’s a banquet for the media, but they created him. The tabloids, bless ‘em, don’t half distort things.” Damon had pulled no punches in 1996 when, in the wake of Jarvis disrupting his BRIT Awards performance, he told Hot Press: “Michael Jackson is mentally ill, in my opinion. And should not be allowed to do what he’s doing. But how can you stop him? Most people who are ill, mentally, are interned.”
As you can see from Colm Russell’s fine efforts elsewhere in this feature, when it comes to Ireland Blur have plenty of previous.
“The first time me, Damon, Dave and Graham got on an airplane together was to play at the wedding of the first journalist who wrote about us – an absolutely lovely Irish guy called Leo Finlay,” he recalls. “That was in the days when they still gave you champagne on flights. Standards have bloody slipped! My next trip to Ireland will hopefully be out to West Cork to see Bill Hogan.”
The producer of two thermophilic cheeses, using unpasteurised summer milk from small local herds that graze on the surrounding pastures of wild grass and heather?
“That’s the geezer, he’s a fucking legend!”
Has the gamekeeper turned poacher act of becoming a journalist – his Rural Notebook column appears every Wednesday in the UK Independent – changed Alex in any way?
“Journalism’s a bit like drinking. It makes you bold and willing to go up to people and ask them questions that you probably wouldn’t do otherwise. Being in a band, and then not being in a band took me out of my comfort zone and I fucking needed that. In terms of human development, (Blur taking time out) was absolutely the best thing that could have happened to us.”
Next Alex will be telling us that he’s turned into a grown-up!
“Being the father of four children, I’d want to be!”
How old is the youngest?
“Nine months. I’ve had them all since the last Blur gig, so they’re finally discovering what daddy really does. They thought I was conductor because of the show (Make Me A Maestro) I did last year. The three-year-olds don’t mind Blur, but they’re more into The Ramones. The five-year-old fucking loved it though – he went to Colchester and thought it was amazing.”
When not wielding a baton or travelling to Colombia to front another BBC series on the cocaine trade, Alex can be found perfecting his hoofed mammal produce – a “dripper” of a goat’s cheese called Little Wallop, and the self-explanatory Pickled Cheese #1, which is yer’ only man between two slices of granary. Would the other things in his life make him reluctant to go full-time into music again?
“On the day that we’re playing Oxegen, the British Cheese Awards are happening on my farm. I’m missing a thousand different varieties of cheese, that’s how committed I am to Blur!”

Blur headline Oxegen on Friday July 12

To read Colm Russell's account of every Irish Blur gig, click here

To read reviews of Blur's pre-Oxegen gigs, click here