Alex James

It’s quite unusual to eat similar things together. If we’re having carrots, for example, it’s normal to eat only one type of carrot, but anyone who was to taste three completely different carrots one after the other — say a biodynamic baby carrot, a medium-sized organic purple one and a fat luminous orange one — just once would know, for ever, what type of carrot he prefers, which must surely be a useful thing to know. The point is that it’s really very hard to tell how much nicer one thing is than another unless you taste them side-by-side, and two or three similar things being served side-by-side is about the last thing that ever happens, normally.

I played Big Brownie in the Bournemouth scouts’ Gang Show at the Pavilion Theatre when I was 12 years old. That was the first time I had a dressing room. I must have spent a vast amount of time in dressing rooms from Greenland to New South Wales since then, countless hours and not so much as a moment’s anxiety about performing. But I’ve never dressed so carefully as I did on Thursday. I was terrified. I am quite at ease in my own comfort zone — playing loud and fast and hard — but orchestras are different. They are like stately homes, relics from a nobler age that nobody really knows what to do with. I suppose that’s why I get to have a go.

There is a line from J.B Priestley, from the novel The Image Men, which I’ve just started again. It’s a line spoken by an almost supernaturally clever character and goes something like ‘Relationships, on the cocktail-party level, are tedious. Parties are such a bore.’ And since I got married, I’ve found this audacious summary of these precious social gatherings to be disappointing but largely true. My wife turned 40 last week. ‘You know,’ I said to her, ‘a good rule of thumb for birthday parties is only to invite people who you know well enough to.’ Well, actually I think ‘fart in front of’ was how I put it to her. ‘Take intimacy over extravagance,’ I implored. ‘You’ll have a much nicer time.

We were about to leave. The bags were packed and loaded, the kids were strapped into the car. I embraced our host. He drained his glass, grinned, raised it and then hurled it through the air with a long, windmilling arm. It was a big throw, the biggest he could manage and the thing seemed to stay in the air for a long, long time. I heard my wife take a sharp breath as it left his hand and all heads present swivelled to watch the trajectory. And it was very quiet and still as the thing tumbled and spun along its arc. A tableau, a picture; it was as if everyone froze for a moment in a situation that had suddenly become dramatic.

It was ten o’clock in Bournemouth, Saturday night: silent and still with a faint hint of chilliness under the stars at Hengistbury Head, where my parents live. My wife, children and I had spent a gentle week with them, pottering and pootling. No better place for it either. Hengistbury Head is right at the other end of Bournemouth Bay from Sandbanks, the place you may have heard of where houses cost more than they do in the Hamptons, where you might see Harry Redknapp or Piers Morgan or Botox ladies. I’ve never seen anyone famous at Hengistbury Head and I really hope I never do. It’s a cosy little backwater (much prettier than Sandbanks), still quite underdeveloped, suburban even.

First day of the holidays and I’d promised the kids I’d take them to Oxford. As I reflect on this fatherly gesture of kindness, I realise it was for my benefit more than theirs. Specifically, they wanted to go to the toyshop on the ring road. That was all they wanted to do. Centuries of history and the aura of the gentle dignity of learning can’t compete with a pop-up shed full of brightly coloured plastic things when you’re five. I wanted to go to Oxford itself, to feel Oxford, to be a part of that silently whirring occult machinery. There are many things I always feel I should be doing more of: going for long walks, writing to my granny, taking photographs, braising, learning the names of birds and their tunes.

‘I wish I could be inside your head,’ she said, ‘on Sunday at Glastonbury. How must it feel to play to so many people?’ She wasn’t just saying it either. She really meant it, longed to know how it feels. Thinking about it now, I’m wondering whether the first bit is an appropriate thing for a married man to consider, but I am flattered and really, since I’ve been playing with Blur again, that’s what everyone wants to know more than anything else — not ‘How do you do that?’ but ‘How does it feel?’ So I will try to explain. Playing music triggers just the same feelings as those generated by listening to music. It’s the same picture.

Doing what I’m told ‘Do you still do music at all?’ she asked. I think I’ve told you before. That is a musician’s least favourite question. Normally my heart sinks when I get prodded with that one. All musicians still make music, of course they do, and it’s soul-destroying to be reminded that no one knows or cares. Suddenly, though, it was the funniest thing anyone had said for ages and I had to gulp down a smirk before it split my face in half. ‘Oh, yes, sometimes, sure,’ I said. Funny, because the previous night my old band had played our first gig for nine years and I was still glowing from it.

My heart’s beating faster. I’ve been completely immersed in pop music all week. Spent the days playing bass with Blur in a rehearsal studio complex, a dozen or more sticky soundproof cells right next to Pentonville Prison: overhearing The Pretenders, Ash and Feeder on my way to the bog; unidentified waterfalls of soul and volcanoes of rock billowing and erupting from windowless corridors. After ripping through 40 songs at high volume on Tuesday I went to meet my music publisher at the café by the Serpentine. Well, he was full of beans. Always is: the music industry runs on a mixture of enthusiasm, gossip and serendipity. We sat in deckchairs in the shade of a willow yammering 19 to the dozen as the sun went down.

Just slightly less brilliant than it had been outside, the weather suddenly became ordinary again: the heavens giving the correct salute to everything returning to routine. It had been a perfect long weekend. I can’t remember a nicer one. All thoughts of destination, deadline and doubt disappearing in the long and certain kiss of summertime, all present utterly content to do little beyond nothing whatsoever. Water pistols, cookery, dawdling and finally learning how to play C# diminished seventh on the guitar was about the size of it. But now the bouncy castle had been packed away — a bit like putting a genie back in a bottle, that: both a struggle and a shame; the blow-up mattresses and sleeping bags from the night in the tent rolled into neat sausages.

If there’s one thing that’s nicer than going on holiday, it’s getting home again. Particularly this time: the whole week we spent away, I was excited about coming home. It was a great holiday, soft splashing waves, sunshine and unfamiliar cheeses: the whole Bounty bar paradise package. I couldn’t have asked for more, but I’d arranged for the tent to go up in the garden at home while we were away, a surprise for the children. For nights I lay awake in my air-conditioned, five-star, fully serviced, grace-and-favour villa longing for that lovely old tent, turning it over and over in my mind as I dropped off. I got quite despondent two days before our return when I called the parish for a news update and heard it was raining: raining, windy and horrible.

I was in a heavy metal band once, kind of by accident, couldn’t help myself: said I’d play a couple of songs with them at a party and that was that, joined the circus. That band was called Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction and I loved them for many reasons: looked great; one really, really good song; guitar player was a karate black belt; drummer taught music at a high-security prison; the singer was a thoughtful and fearless vagabond king. They were all exceptionally bright and they got through a lot of bass players; some died, some ran away, but I was with them for ages, captivated by high voltage and high volume. I still have the heavily embroidered denim jacket the band bequeathed to me.

Possibly, the shoe was where it all started to go wrong for us as a species. Possibly, I say, the shoe represents the end of paradise. Possibly, we donned our size 12s and stomped right out of Eden. There we’d been, running barefoot through the trees with the sun on our faces, reconnecting with mother earth at every stride, a part of it all, part of a vast system that fitted us perfectly, until that very moment we stepped out of the invisible glove, out of the sensual world and into our shoes. Certainly, I’m happiest in bare feet, with nothing in my pockets. I mean, kick off your shoes and empty your pockets and you’re on holiday, back in a jungle where nothing can happen except nice things and dreams.

A marshmallow completely failed to live up to its promise yesterday. It’s a good while since I tasted a marshmallow and I was convinced it was going to be gorgeous. Inevitable, I suppose, one’s changing tastes, but somehow it always comes as a surprise when I find I don’t like things any more. Recently, certain books that I loved when I was younger: books that I once set my compasses by, I find repellent. There was a time in my life when everything Camus wrote came over as the voice of God speaking the divine language, such a mature way of looking at the world. Now it all strikes me as moody, childish, provincial and very short on laughs. Whole cities, I’ve tired of. Berlin, for example: how tedious.

Who knows when the sunshine of the sublime will pop out, which cloud the next wonderful thing is hiding behind? It’s rarely where I think it’s going to be. No. Inspiration never comes when it’s expected. I took Concorde once, expecting an unforgettably seamless, gentle hover in the stratosphere, a finely balanced tête-a-tête with luxury itself. Something really, you know, classy. You know what? It was just like getting on a cross-Channel ferry: great in all kinds of ways but not in the least bit chic or sophisticated. It was raucous, as bling as a billionaire’s barbecue. Everyone was overexcited: grinning and taking photos and saying things such as, ‘I can’t believe it.

Child’s play During the night or behind a cloud the sunshine had changed colour, and now as it shone all over me it launched cascades of contemplation, pleasant images flashing like fireworks as it smashed into my closed eyelids. Bang, bang, bang and involuntarily I was carried off, launched headlong down a fast-flowing river of rediscovered hopes. Whole new vistas came into view with those gold rays. Don’t even know what I’d been thinking about before, but with the warmth came a bigger picture, new horizons, thoughts of escape. We’ll do a week in Bournemouth. We’ll go to Scotland, Japan maybe, the whole world: all this unfolding quicker than a dream in a sleeping corner of my mind waking with that first kiss of 2009 vintage sunshine.

I said ‘bollocks’ on live daytime television last week, on a Sunday of all days. My children were watching, too. There were complaints, and quite right. I felt bad about it, even though it was absolutely the mot juste. I got rather carried away, frustrated that a good-looking boy with a lot of potential had apparently missed the point of everything so completely, and chosen to spend his three-and-a-half-minute stab at glory yodelling. And how far he had come to stand there, live, live, live in front of 12 cameras and a million people watching, stand there and blow it so utterly. Back in October we’d set out with a field of 1,600 bands that we’ve narrowed down over the past few months to a mere handful.

There were four brothers. They’d just been left their uncle’s farm in his will, a few dozen acres of Leicestershire. It was a fairly standard small-farm package. They’d all grown up with the place, working there through the summers: a red-brick farmhouse, pretty but practically derelict with a mixed bag of cute, lopsided outbuildings — some of these vast in terms of garden sheds or domestic garages but still far too small to be practical for the austere, superhuman scale of modern agriculture. There were a good couple of acres of old-fashioned orchard: apples, pears; a bit of nice pasture; a couple of chunks of woodland with busy streams running into ancient ponds.