FOR Blur rocker and Sun foodie Alex James, 2023 was a whirlwind.
He reunited with Nineties bandmates Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon and Dave Rowntree for two blistering Wembley Stadium gigs.
Then the Britpop icons hit the road to play festivals across Europe, Japan and South America – as well as Coachella in California.
But while reliving his indie heyday with Blur was a dream for Alex, getting fit again was a different story.
The musician has documented it all with trademark honesty in hilarious new book Over The Rainbow: Tales From An Unexpected Year.
Here, he writes about the 12 months that changed his life . . .
WHAT a year it was. It was magic. There’s a sense of enchantment about the whole Blur story, in fact.
Graham, Blur’s guitarist, was the very first person I set eyes on when I arrived in London to study French at university.
He was getting out of his parents’ car outside the halls of residence, holding a guitar. I was getting out of my parents’ car, also holding a guitar.
Graham introduced me to his old schoolfriend Damon and, at our very first rehearsal, we wrote a song that we still play today.
So it all just snapped together perfectly, instantly, and for the next 15 years Blur was all we did and all we wanted to do, all day, every day.
Although we never actually split up, inevitably there came a point where we wanted to do other things.
I got married and moved to a farm and, among other things, became the food columnist for this newspaper.
The band did get back together occasionally, but we had barely spoken since 2015 and I was starting to think maybe it would never happen.
Completely out of the blue, just before Christmas the year before last, I got a call from Blur’s live agent saying an extra slot had just become available at Wembley Stadium the following July and maybe we should all have a meeting to discuss it.
We’d never played Wembley. It would be our biggest ever show. I guess it is the biggest show there is.
I couldn’t see a downside or actually what there was to discuss about it.
It was a simple “yes” from me, but I dutifully rocked up at Damon’s studio in London for a “discussion”.
And after about five minutes of slightly awkward “How’s it going, then?” type stuff, we’d picked up our instruments and bashed through that first song we wrote at that very first rehearsal.
It felt so good, we said “yes” to the show and thought maybe we’d make a new record as well.
To my great surprise, the show sold out in five minutes flat and we added another night, so that was easier than expected.
But there were numerous trickier challenges to overcome. Not least of which was that I was enormously fat.
I live on a farm — a food machine, basically. It is a farm that has 19 kitchens because my day job is organising Feastival, a food and music festival which takes place here in the Cotswolds every August Bank Holiday weekend.
It was painful, but the great thing about the weight loss formula is that it is absolutely guaranteed to work.
Alex James
So I am constantly surrounded by chefs, and when I am not writing about food, I’m eating it.
I was so fat that when I went to Decathlon, the big sports shop in Oxford, to start my new fitness regime on January 2 and told the assistant I needed some running shoes, they asked: “Who are they for?”
I spent practically the whole of January in the gym. The daily murder of relentless burpees, push-ups and pull-ups wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the other half of the weight loss formula, which is a simple one.
You have to exercise more and to eat less. Eating less is horrible.
I lived off bone broth, basically. We’d fattened up a couple of pigs for Christmas.
And I’d kept all the best bits — the bones and the trotters — to make a pork “life support” potion which kept me going through the winter months.
It was painful, but the great thing about the weight loss formula is that it is absolutely guaranteed to work.
If you eat less and exercise more, you will definitely lose weight.
Unfortunately, there were no guarantees around February’s big challenge, which was making a new record. On the way to the studio, I was absolutely cacking it.
What had started as one show at Wembley had basically quickly extended and expanded into a steeplechase of global hedonistic extravaganzas
Alex James
I could barely think of any bands who didn’t all hate each other after this many years together — that first rehearsal was in December 1988 — and I couldn’t think of a single band that had made a decent record this far into their career.
Whenever the Rolling Stones or AC/DC play one from the new album, everyone pops to the bar for a drink.
I got to the studio on time and waited an hour or two for the singer and the guitar player to turn up.
The minute we started playing, it was instantly all ok. By the time we stopped for lunch (not that I was having lunch) we had a master take in the bag and it sounded like one of the best things we’d ever done.
I wasn’t intending to write a book chronicling the band’s unexpected rebirth until about three quarters of the way through that magical year.
I still didn’t know how it was all going to end at that point, but I realised that, whatever happened, it was going to be a good story.
I think people are always fascinated by what goes on behind the scenes at a big rock show.
The band made a documentary, To The End, about the journey to Wembley, which is screening on TV over Christmas.
But a documentary film crew are always on the outside looking in, whereas a book by the bass player is slightly different because I am on the inside looking out. Someone once said the basis of all stories is, “A stranger comes to town . . .”
So in The Hobbit, it’s a wizard. In Treasure Island, it’s a pirate, and in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, it’s a flying car. In my case, the stranger was Blur, coming back into my life after so many years.
Everyone in the band has gone on to have an interesting second life.
We were all still young enough when Blur stopped being a full-time job to have enough energy to pursue other dreams.
My first endeavour, post-Blur, was making cheese.
People often say, “Music and cheese? That’s a strange combination”. But monks have been singing in the morning and making cheese in the afternoon for centuries.
I’ve since moved into making sparkling wine (which was also invented by monks) and hosting a festival.
And all festivals, even the eating and boozing binges that are Easter and Christmas, were originally religious festivals — initiated by monks!
So I live a faintly monastic existence in relative isolation in the peace and quiet of the beautiful English countryside.
There, most of my time is actually spent trying to deal with five teenage children too young to remember Blur the last time we went on tour.
And who all thought I was a fat idiot until they came to the first warm-up show.
What had started as one show at Wembley had basically quickly extended and expanded into a steeplechase of global hedonistic extravaganzas — all the world’s biggest and best festivals, from Roskilde in Denmark to Coachella via Japan and South America.
There were ups and there were downs. There always are.
I arrived in Denmark without any recollection of how I’d got there.
I had to leave my wife and children in charge of the Feastival build, while I popped off to Asia for the weekend.
Whatever you do for a living and however much money you’ve got, or how cool you are, friends and family are the most precious thing.
Alex James
But the Wembley shows were hailed as the best we’ve ever done and, perhaps even more surprisingly, the new album, The Ballad Of Darren, was widely acclaimed to be our finest work.
But that, somehow, was all a piece of cake compared to being a parent to five teenagers.
All teenagers want to do, as far as I can tell, is drink and shag — and it’s people in bands who are the ones supposed to be doing that.
I wasn’t prepared for how much kids, not just mine, like Blur. The band seem to have found a whole new audience and, just for five minutes (it’s worn off already), I was a cool dad again.
Any writer worth their salt will tell you that writing is pure pain, and that a blank sheet of paper is possibly the most terrifying thing there is.
But I knew I had a story to tell and, as I sat down to write it this January, it all just flowed.
I found myself chuckling away as I typed. And if you can make yourself laugh, there’s a chance other people might laugh with you.
Over The Rainbow tells the story of a crazy year of stadium-rocking exhilaration and globe-trotting mayhem, but at its heart it is really a story about reconnecting with friends and family.
Christmas is where the book starts and ends. It’s my favourite time of year — the time when we all hopefully get to reconnect with our friends and our families.
Whatever you do for a living and however much money you’ve got, or how cool you are, friends and family are the most precious thing.
A lot of people have asked me what it felt like playing to 100,000 ecstatic, pogo-ing people at Wembley. It felt good, obviously!
But I went to a carol service yesterday with my wife and kids, and we were all singing O Come, All Ye Faithful, and as the descant harmonies kicked in for the last verse, it brought a tear to my eye.
Smashing it at Wembley feels exactly the same as that.
Happy Christmas!
