9781802067156

‘Joyfully chaotic … a memoir of Blur’s comeback year ’ GUARDIAN

Over the Rainbow ALEX JAMES

‘Warm and funny ... a gorgeous book’ THE TIMES

penguin books

Over the Rainbow

‘When the possibility arose of getting Blur back together for a gig at Wembley, Alex James jumped at the chance. Now he’s written a book, Over the Rainbow, about what happened next . . . James is a true writer’ The Times

‘A charming account of a year in his life. And this isn’t any old year – it’s 2023, when Blur reformed . . The rockstar’s voice really shines through – as does his exuberance’ Irish News

‘Who says you can’t relive your youth? Just tell that to Blur, who reformed recently, made a corker of an album and then knocked out a world tour. Alex James, the band’s bassist, has written a book on the experience . . . by turns funny and frightening, Over the Rainbow zips along . It’s rich stuff’ Evening Standard

‘Highly readable . . a concise, droll snapshot of a special band at a particular, unlikely moment’ i

‘James is a man fully aware of the pleasures of a life lived ridiculously’ Guardian

About the Author

Alex James is a writer, farmer and the bass player with Blur. He lives in Oxfordshire with his wife and five children.

Over the Rainbow

Tales from an Unexpected Year

Alex James

PENGUIN BOOK S

PENGUIN BOOKS

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia India | New Zealand | South Africa

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Penguin Random House UK One Embassy Gardens, 8 Viaduct Gardens, London SW 11 7BW penguin.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Particular Books 2024 Published in paperback by Penguin Books 2025 001

Copyright © Alex James, 2024

Penguin Random House values and supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes freedom of expression and supports a vibrant culture. Thank you for purchasing an authorized edition of this book and for respecting intellectual property laws by not reproducing, scanning or distributing any part of it by any means without permission. You are supporting authors and enabling Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for everyone. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. In accordance with Article 4(3) of the DSM Directive 2019/790, Penguin Random House expressly reserves this work from the text and data mining exception.

The moral right of the author has been asserted Typeset by Jouve (UK ), Milton Keynes

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

The authorized representative in the EEA is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D 02 YH 68

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN : 978–1–802–06715–6

Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

For Claire, obviously. With my love.

Last Christmas

December

Day to day, week to week, I’m consumed with the family farm. My wife and I bought it on our honeymoon twenty years ago, and it’s our home and it’s our business. It was then such a rewilded heap that all the local billionaires and grand dynastic families of the parish – who, as a matter of course, seek to extend their preserves and will scrap, tooth and nail, over any farms in the neighbourhood that come on to the market –  uniquely, universally turned their noses up at this one: a giddy sprawl of rambling, crumbling buildings, some that had once, long ago, been beautiful and more that would never be. It was more like buying a village than a house –  an abandoned village at that, or perhaps a tiny, bankrupt principality. (Actually, it’s about half the size of Monaco, which is titchy as farms go, although, unlike Monaco, no one rich had ever lived here.)

But it felt spiritually sound. Sacred, even. From the moment we first rolled up the front track through scattering rabbits, we both wanted to stay.

And the more time I spend here, with Claire, making it whirr, the less I want to leave. It constantly surprises me

the Rainbow

with its bounties and beauties, and it is, perhaps, most beautiful of all in darkest winter, under blankets of snow, carpets of frost, roofless and brilliant blue skies, bonfires blazing. I can go for weeks, months at a time, consumed by this place, with work and with family, with the people who make the farm tick.

But then, each year, Christmas comes, and we officially shut up shop. The office closes the day before Christmas Eve, and everyone has to take a break until the day after New Year’s Day. No meetings, no scheming, no digging, no building, and no travel beyond the parish boundary.

‘Never tell anyone we’re closed for the holiday. Not ever,’ I tell them on the last day in the office: Sian, the bookkeeper and first Lord of the Farm Treasury, Charlotte, the farm manager, and Georgie, who is good at absolutely everything but wants to leave and work somewhere else. ‘Say we’re travelling, say we’re away, say anything but “we’re on holiday” – that just annoys everyone who isn’t.’

Since we’ve lived here, bang in the bullseye of England’s green and pleasant land, I’ve realized that summer is just about the stupidest time to take a holiday, but then there’s never a good time to leave a farm. Except, perhaps, the darkest, coldest couple of weeks.

There are always animals to feed, and the odd email to send, but everything else just stops at Christmas time. Probably always has, in fact, way before baby Jesus arrived –  but nowadays December’s feasting and merrymaking is so well established that it’s impossible to get anything done for about a fortnight, even if you try. Not round here. You can’t fight it.

Christmas

And so it was written that all those who live hereabouts would all be merrily ensconced, en château, en famille et en fête.

I’d been working hard, and had a huge mountain to climb in January. I was much looking forward to some wellearned rest and relaxation. Except, this year, Christmas Eve fell on a Saturday, and the entire week leading up to it was starting to look like one long Christmas party, a slowmotion steeplechase all over the gardens. Invitations had been trickling in for weeks.

The festivities kicked off with a birthday party on the shortest day of the year. Giddy with the anticipation of a week or two’s repose and revelling, I got stuck right into the Armagnac during the canapés on arrival. (I’m normally a cider brandy man, but I switch to Armagnac at Christmas. Try it – but maybe not with the canapés.)

It was a small gathering: a sit-down dinner in a bebaubled orangery – although we didn’t sit down to dinner until quite late, and after the toasts and the speeches, and the petits fours and the cheese and most of the Armagnac, Jamie Cullum played. With his whole band. There were, I think, almost as many people in the band as there were having dinner.

They were absolutely brilliant. I was dancing on the table before the first song had finished.

And then Jamie passed me the microphone and I sang ‘Uptown Funk’.

Over the Rainbow

Apparently.

Although I only have the faintest dream-like recollection of that part of the evening, I can tell you for certain that the mic would have been a Shure SM 58 unidirectional (cardioid) dynamic model.

It gave me pause to consider that something that I thought might never happen again, something very precious that I had only the faintest, dream-like recollection of, was about to be thrust upon me in a similar fashion.

But there was no time to dwell because the next day we were off – after a spot of family magnet fishing in the River Evenlode – to a candlelit carol service in a contemporized castle, complete with its own immaculately preserved ancient church.

After hitting the descant harmonies in the last verse of ‘Hark the Herald’ with my children in the back row, I found myself in the stateroom with a fathom of cider brandy, smoking a cigar about a foot long and wondering where to knock off the huge faggot of ash that was about to plop.

The stateroom was chock full of paintings by L.S. Lowry and objets and glacé fruits and Etonians. There was a gleaming crystal bowl on the ottoman I was relaxing on but I wasn’t sure what it was.

I spotted the  châtelaine and waved my brandy at the bowl, only spilling a little bit. ‘Is this an ashtray, babe?’

‘Everything in here’s an ashtray, love.’ She winked, waving back a glowing Marlboro Gold, white tip.

It was very relaxed.

The choir had decided to stay, en masse, and began singing round the ottoman, still in their robes and regalia. So I

Christmas

got to do the descant harmonies again. It ended up being quite a late one.

Due to residual cider brandy in the system, I had to take the train into Oxford the next morning in order to stock up on Christmas goodies. Fenton, a ballerina, was arriving shortly, as well as Auntie Maureen, so we needed to take on supplies.

We’re a big family. Me, Claire, five kids and two grannies. It’s a bit like doing Christmas every day, round here. We need two turkeys just for Sunday lunch. We do all our shopping wholesale. Not that we have to do it very often, because we live in a food machine.

A lot of the Christmas haul was already in. We keep pigs, so we had enough hams and bacons. There was a carrier bag full of summer truffles in the freezer, left over from some wild miscalculations at Feastival, the food and music festival we run on the farm each year. Cheese was covered, too, and in the market garden there was celery and celeriac, Jerusalem artichokes, black radishes, leeks and brassicas all up the yin yang. Plus, we’d already made a shedload of sugar plums for Fenton the ballerina.

But what the kids really wanted was Pot Noodles and Frazzles and Coca-Cola and stroopwafels.

Beatrix, our youngest, had been carefully planning the spree for some time. She’s the quartermaster, in charge of the stores. She led me around the aisles at Booker Wholesale ticking items off her long, loving meticulously compiled list: 25-kilo sack of sugar for baking, sack of

Over the Rainbow

plain flour for baking, sack of 00 flour for the boys (for pizza), self-raising flour (for her sister), cases of various ice creams, jar of Parma Violets, box of KitKats, ‘and Baileys for the grannies,’ she sang.

Some people spend their time and money on boats; some people spend their money on cars. I’ve always spent my money on food. Even when I didn’t have any.

That’s what money is for. Food –  and drivers. A driver met us and took us home, fully loaded. Beatrix repaired to the present-wrapping department: the old pig shed. I went to the office to check my emails, but it was full of dancing teenagers, mostly my own. They were going loud and hard.

Fenton arrived then and was called upon immediately to judge the ‘Rasputin’ competition and then she started dancing and then Claire joined in and everyone started trying to do the splits and I had to go to bed because there was a shoot lunch the next day.

A shoot is a big-budget, big-footprint production, and it needs to be approached with caution. There are beaters and there are dogs and there’s always all these lovely sausage rolls. There’s inevitably a fair sprinkling of toffs and grandees among the guns, and a gratuitous famous person, probably James Blunt or Roger Waters, if you’re really unlucky. But not me, because I don’t really like it any more. I do love stomping around in wellies in the fresh air, though. Even in sluicing rain and sideways snow, it’s exhilarating. I like the chat and the bonfires. And I love the strict dress code –  I always wear a brightly coloured

Last Christmas

tracksuit. And if there’s a good reason to go along beyond any of those, it’s that the birds are delicious.

The Christmas shoot was within walking distance, but a shooting party normally involves driving the night before for hours to a vast demesne somewhere you’ve never ever been or even ever heard of, where there is a maid with a teetering salver of liquid temptations waiting just inside the strap-hinged, double oak doors. Then there’s cocktails and then there’s white with the fish and red with the meat and a vase of port flying around in circles and hot brandy with the cigars and then they all want a sing-song round the Steinway and you’ve got off lightly if you’re in bed by two.

I’d arranged for Geronimo, our eldest, to come and fire the gun for me. The previous day had technically been a designated  spa day, but there were still the remains of the day-prior-to-that’s hangover and a cumulative lack of sleep to contend with.

These were well met by an exceptionally pretty day. Air so cold you had to sip at it gently. A landscape frozen still, bottomless silences cracked by footsteps on frost, ricocheting laughter and Geronimo and I singing Beatles songs on our peg. Four by fours got stuck on hillsides, bonfires burned in icy glades and four generations of family all warmed their hands together.

And once the guns were locked away again, we stayed quite late.

The next day, there was another party.

Over the Rainbow

I was starting to flag a little at this point –  we all were. But everyone dug deep. Claire had tweaked a muscle doing the splits to Reef’s ‘Place Your Hands’ and Geronimo had mangled his toenail trying to put on the wrong welly when we left the shoot lunch at 2.00 a.m. I wasn’t carrying any physical injuries, but the cumulative effects of chronic merriment were starting to tell.

Fortunately, there were footmen assembled at the gatehouses with Bloody Marys, which were passed through the car windows and had perked us all up by the time we’d got to the other end of the drive about ten minutes later.

There were carol singers in the rotunda as we entered, and my family scattered in all directions in a flurry of high fives and hugs.

I was, briefly, alone.

‘Isn’t this wonderful,’ I said to the guy I found myself standing next to. He looked at me quizzically. ‘This house. I do really love this house,’ I said, adding a bit of detail.

‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘Wonderful. And you know what the really clever thing about this house is?’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s not ack-tew-wer-lee a very big house.’

He was stone-cold sober and completely serious. To be clear, it’s a Grade 1 listed stately home. It’s even got one of those rooms full of heads on plinths and a quince lawn, laid out by Repton.

‘Have you had a poke around?’ I said. ‘Seen the heads?’

‘Yes, of course. That’s the clever thing, because you see it’s really not  all that  big. Not  all that. It’s really clever. Deceptive. Really very manageable.’

Geronimo, nineteen, and his seventeen-year-old twin

Last Christmas

brothers had found the walk-in humidor by the time I caught up with them and were smoking large cigars with the host. They were full of gusto, particularly excited about the DJ they’d clocked back in the rotunda, who was performing later in the nightclub downstairs.

It was a delicious, glittering blur of a day. There was hot roast partridge with bread sauce, and coronation chicken, and Armagnac of several vintages inside, and it was bright on the South Terrace where cocktails were served, beef roasting on a rotisserie over an open fire.

The DJ was not only brilliant, but also kind enough to play ‘Rasputin’ when asked. ~

By the time I came up the next day, I was really struggling.

But it was Francie’s party, and I really like Francie. We stayed late. Stayed very late, up with her talking about kippers, I think. ~

And then, at last, it was Christmas Eve. We were due to head to a carol service at Dom’s house in Adlestrop.

Adlestrop is one of the most beautiful villages in the world. There’s a poem about a train stopping there ‘unwontedly’ in the height of summer, which perfectly evokes the magic of the English countryside.

It’s sacrosanct, actually, Adlestrop. It hasn’t really changed since that poem was written a hundred years ago.

Over the Rainbow

The railway station has gone, the branch line – which ran from what was Chipping Norton Junction, cross-country to Cheltenham –  has been torn up, but the ‘Adlestrop’ station sign is still there where the platform was, which only adds to the feeling of it being a place of absolute rest.

These places are hard to find in the English countryside. Especially somewhere so close to London. Even our farm has a railway station, the old branch-line terminus at one end and a busy road at the other. The richest people live in the quietest corners, like big friendly spiders with Armagnac webs and butler tentacles.

I really like Dom. He’s one of the cleverest people I’ve ever met. He has a job that he never, ever discusses, employing thousands of people, which he seems to perform effortlessly. I’ve never seen him so much as look at a phone. His dad, a vicar, started a whole new branch of the Christian Church, and although I’ve never seen Dom in a church apart from his own, at Christmas he has lots of spiritual gravity and is very much at ease with himself.

I like him for many reasons. And he likes me, too.

‘You know, what I like about you, Alex?’ he said once.

‘I’ve got absolutely no idea,’ I said. ‘But you never really do know why people like you, do you?’

I mean, I know why I get invited to all these parties – it’s because I used to be in this massive band. But it’s true that, as I said to Dom, you never really know why people actually like you.

‘Cos you’re happy,’ he said. ‘I can’t be dealing with sad people.’

I’m not sure if  happy would have been the way I’d have