Mojo - The Music Magazine

Blur’s Alex James used to be a pop star. Now he’s a ubiquitous, self-promoting windbag. Andrew Male wishes he would stop.

BEFORE WE BEGIN THIS here discourse, I must declare an interest. In 1999 I wrote a glowing profile of Alex James for the now defunct Select music magazine. Back then I surfed the mucilaginous wave of London excess in a deluded state of liverish repletion, convinced that James was a cherished icon of Soho bohemia. He led me out of the bathroom window of The Colony Room, across the rooftops of Soho and into the waste hollow of the night. And in return I wrote this.

I’m not proud of that piece but it must be said that we were both very, very drunk. And now I am sober, he is sober, those obsolete conventions are behind us and I would like him to do something for me: I’d like him to stop, I’d like him to go away.

When Alex James was in Blur his sanguine ways seemed somehow necessary to the balance of the band, his gaily amorous and foolishly optimistic outlook a necessary foil to the band’s three other humours: phlegmatic Damon, melancholic Dave and the ever choleric Graham. He was a pop star, that was his job. He even wrote two or three decent songs. Especially that one about stars on Park Life. Even his first forays into the extra-curricular world of the rock-star hobby were fittingly star-shaped: flying light aircraft and becoming involved in an ill-fated UK space probe project.

However, following his marriage to video producer Claire Neate in 2003, James bought a 200 acre farm in Kingham, Oxfordshire. Since then he has become independently ubiquitous. Firstly, there was his unctuous memoir, Bit Of A Blur, in which James yomped through the froth of his past with the affected air of some All Bar One George Sanders. Not a crime, granted, but in the foamy wake of this light-hearted piffle, came the deluge.

Now James is everywhere. He’s been a judge on Mobile Act Unsigned (the supposed “credible" Pop Idol), a guest on Question Time (Steve Harley: “Watching him made me ashamed to be a rock singer”), and has presented an episode of Panorama on Columbia’s cocaine problem. And everywhere he is writing about the joys of the countryside with the same pontifical arrogance with which he once sung the pleasures of city and gutter.

It is now near impossible to escape his casually offensive style: a carefree mix of urban namedropping, country proselytising and self-marketing. Unlike say, The Guardian’s Country Diary or the thoughts of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall there is nothing enlightening or educational here. We learn that he has a wife, three children, 400 sheep, some cows and a cheese factory. He hopes to sell this cheese. He endlessly promotes this cheese.

Perhaps, following the expense of converting his 200 acres from intensive beef to organic pasture he is now genuinely desperate for the trickles of cash that may come from writing for the Independent, the Guardian, The Observer Food Monthly et al. Yes, a man’s got to earn a living, and his current shameless ubiquity might well be a result of his former careless profligacy - spending all his cash on booze and drugs while Graham and Damon made records and Dave became a computer animator - but I know how I’d feel if I was a struggling farmer who couldn’t use my pretty-boy pop star grin and media connections to promote my produce in the nationals.

Actually, that’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is that the man has not changed – this is all still about him and the glorious life that he leads and that is all we learn. He is the 21st Century point at which shallow blog solipsism and empty celebrity sheen unite. All he cares about is selling – himself and his cheese. Well, I’m not buying. He can shut up, take out an advert for his cheese and bloody well get on with it like the rest of us.

Andrew Male