Smart Alex Still Grinning
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday June 30, 2007
Blur's resident hedonist has found a new calling in the English countryside.
ALEX JAMES DOESN'T necessarily mean to rub it in. After all, it's not as if he set out to have the ideal life. Sure, when he played bass onstage in Blur, tall, slim and exceedingly pretty under a floppy fringe, while the other three members looked either intense and serious or enigmatic, he always wore the grin of the man thinking "how good is this".Yes, he did for a decade or so drink and shag his way across the world, usually in the company of the most gorgeous, the wittiest or the most talented of the denizens of London's artistic life. ("I decided to concentrate on being an alcoholic genius," he quips in his autobiography, Bit of a Blur.)All that before marrying a beautiful woman, Claire, and having three children - Geronimo, 3, and twins Artemis and Galileo, 1 - and living on a farm in a pretty corner of the Cotswolds. There is no denying either that he has talked cheese with French pop legend Francoise Hardy, socialised with Marianne Faithful, bantered with the Queen, helped provide the music accompanying the European space enterprise the Beagle and learnt to fly. Nor that his weekly column in The Independent provides a wry, charming and often funny antidote to the regular goings-on of British life. And that Bit of a Blur is a self-aware but in no way self-conscious celebration of all that, complete with wicked lines that would get up the noses of those, such as the Gallagher brothers of Oasis, who were wont to describe him as a "grinning middle-class twat". Lines such as: "It's hard to wear a bass and not look cool. It's like sitting in an Aston Martin." Today, while rain drizzles over his farm, sitting in baggy green cord trousers above old brown suede lace-less shoes and a white business shirt with black and yellow tie (successful young man in the City above the waist, musty farmer John below) he defends the line, even while laughing at it.So he didn't just put it in there to get up the noses of those ready to dismiss him as unnecessarily talented, successful and good-looking,"Idiot goes on the end of that. And conceited," he laughs, his fringe flopping. "I was talking to my manager about it and he said all bands he's ever managed have had basically somebody who is very much in charge and very driven. In Blur it was Damon [Albarn, Blur's singer]. We were all vital pieces of the jigsaw but without Damon's drive and ambition and songwriting ability. Damon is quite conscientious and actually morally principled, and Graham [Coxon, Blur's guitarist] is like a proper artist. I am just a lighthearted, grinning hedonist."Well, yes and no. Hedonist once, yes; lightweight, maybe not. We're sitting in the music room annex of his 80-hectare farm, a double bass and old upright piano sharing the room with state-of-the-art microphones and recording equipment and a book called Songs of Gods, Songs of Humans. Once James has separated his dog from a decidedly dead rabbit it has just caught, he explains that his next year will include a spell at Oxford as artist in residence in the school of astro-physics ("I don't know what I'll do, make some kind of gadget possibly") and in September his first cheeses (what he calls "pickled cheese, No. 1") will be unveiled. "It's revolutionary," he boasts cheerfully. Meanwhile there are problems with the local health inspector wanting to check his several thousand sheep, he's planning the next excavation with his favoured tractor-cum-digger and preparing for the hedge man coming with his "topper" to give the meadow its yearly cut. It's not rock'n'roll."I think [living on a farm] would have driven me completely mad even five years ago," the 38-year-old says. "But we [he and Claire] were renting a place here at weekends, then we saw this place and bought it on our honeymoon. Everybody said, 'You're completely mad, buying a farm in the middle of nowhere when you don't know anything about farming.' But then I didn't really know anything about music."Alex James's Bit of a Blur is out now, published by Hachette Livre.
© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald
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