The Drinks Are On You Now, Alex

In Bit of a Blur, Alex James has written the definitive guide to Britpop, which for him included booze, cocaine and making passes at Marianne Faithfull, says Caspar LLewellyn Smith

Bit of a Blur
by Alex James
Little, Brown £16.99, pp288

In this tenth anniversary year of the New Labour government, the mid-1990s present themselves as a time when the champagne flute was always half-full. In Cool Britannia, London was swinging and, on the evening after Blur mimed their breakthrough hit 'Boys and Girls' on Top of the Pops, Vic Reeves and Jonathan Ross led their bass player to the Groucho Club for the first time. No one personifies that period quite like Alex James and it was in the Soho club that he did some of his best work as part of a different triumvirate leading the never-ending party.

It was supposed to be the brothers Gallagher rather than their ostensibly more fey rivals who ramped up the decadence; while it skirts around the Britpop wars, this effervescent memoir proves otherwise and also emerges as the most fascinating, as well as hilarious, document to date of those times. James cites Jeffrey Bernard as one of his idols, when des Esseintes might be more appropriate; either Huysmans's 19th-century decadent creation or, failing that, a member of Motley Crue. Put bluntly, there is an awful lot of shagging in Bit of a Blur.

On the band's first North American tour he strays from his childhood sweetheart for the third time when a journalist from Canadian Elle proffers a handjob by way of an interview; in New York he is led to bed by a model whose face he then recognises on the cover of Vogue. Later he will make a pass at Marianne Faithfull (rebuffed) and sleep with Courtney Love (recommended, apparently). 'I was an outlaw, a rebel,' he reflects. 'If I rationalised my decadence, I'd tell myself it was the duty of rock stars to indulge themselves beyond reasonable limits. If I couldn't be reckless and extreme, I wasn't doing my job properly.'

His 29th birthday ends with him soused in a balthazar of champagne, naked on his hotel bed in Sao Paulo, Brazil, with the five prettiest fans he has picked up in the lobby. 'You need five girlfriends when your bottle is that big,' he notes.

In many ways, James's story follows the paradigm - the provincial, middle-class upbringing, the art school influence. His father ran a business that supplied waste-disposal equipment to supermarkets but otherwise occupied himself searching for shipwrecks off the Bournemouth coast, which inspired a sense of adventure as well as a lasting interest in science that would later lead James to involvement in the project to land a spaceship on Mars. His father was also socially adept. 'An ability to join in is the most important thing you can have if you want to play bass,' James writes, 'and I guess that comes from my dad.'

Studying French at Goldsmiths, he moved in the same circles as Damien Hirst and Keith Allen. It was at that time that he met the other members of the band who would become Blur and they lurched into early success. Blur embraced the attention. Like the character in the Blur song, James knew his claret from his beaujolais, as well as his Krug from his Dom Perignon.

It's easy to overlook his contribution to the band - Graham Coxon could well have been the best guitar player of his generation and Damon Albarn was always more than just a pretty face - but the bassist was the social glue that kept them together. He was the band's ambassador, flitting between different worlds with ease. In Monaco once, he is talking to royalty when Hirst's brother approaches, dripping wet from the sea, asking: 'Fuckin' 'ell, did you see them bazongers? Them were beauty.'

'Ah, Bradley, this is Prince Albert of Monaco.'

'Fuckin' 'ell, all right, mate. Did you see them tits?'

Prince Albert of Monaco was smiling.

For a generation that had grown up never knowing a Labour government and that had seen bands such as the Smiths falter outside the top five in the singles charts, the rise of Blair and the Britpop bands was exhilarating. Never mind that the scene never amounted to more than a couple of bands finding success, James contends; as for Oasis: 'I didn't really have any strong feelings about them. The singer had a good voice, but the music was honky.' Never mind that no one wanted to ask any hard questions.

The most telling moment in Bit of a Blur comes once James has sobered up - he estimates to have spent £1m on cocaine and booze - and Blur's first flush of success is behind them. Returning from passing his first set of flying exams to the Groucho, he finds Moby playing 'London Calling' on the piano and Wayne Sleep turning pirouettes on the bar. It all seems as ever, but things have changed. 'I was introduced to the bass player from Coldplay, who was a very serious man,' he recalls. 'He was observing the chaos with some hauteur. He explained that his band's reinvigorated North American promotional strategies would boost sales in key secondary markets, coast to coast, album on album. Fair to say it did.'

Damon Albarn ridiculed Noel Gallagher for meeting the PM at a No 10 drinks party in 1997. Fast-forward a decade and Blur's bass player visits Buckingham Palace for a music industry reception and finds himself awestruck by the Queen. 'It's tiring being anti-royal,' he writes. 'I've felt much better about everything since I had a chat with the boss.'

'I think all rock stars start by wanting to destroy the world,' he continues. 'Then their dreams come true and they end up trying to keep it like it was before they started.' The bass player lives now in a very big house in the country with his wife and three children - Geronimo and twins Artemis and Galileo - and writes a column for the Observer Food Monthly about cheese. James was never a rebel, but he remains a man of impeccable taste.

· Alex James will be in conversation with Miranda Sawyer at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London WC2 on Thu 7, 7pm. For tickets, call 0845 456 9876

Source: www.guardian.co.uk