So Alex James is in the Groucho one night, enjoying the spectacle of Moby playing ‘London Calling’ on the piano accompanied by Joe Strummer and (of course) Keith Allen, while Wayne Sleep turns pirouettes on the bar. Also observing this activity, albeit ‘with some hauteur’, is the bass player from Coldplay. ‘He was a very serious young man,’ writes James. ‘He explained carefully 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.’
It’s clear that James – also a bass player, but in a band who became successful by ignoring marketing cant, specifically the recommendation that they ‘go grunge’ – regards himself as the antithesis of Coldplay Bloke. And generally speaking, he is. But while ‘A Bit of a Blur’ is mostly the story of a hedonistic rock star who thinks everything is a big joke and blows around a million quid on champagne and cocaine, it’s also the story of a bright, passionate autodidact with a range of intriguing enthusiasms (writing, flying planes, space exploration, farming) which, despite appearances, he takes very seriously indeed. You could argue, in fact, that James’s rangy charisma inheres in the tension between shallowness and depth, indolence and application.
‘A Bit of a Blur’ employs the ironic high style currently favoured by David Bowie in dispatches to his fanbase: droll, jaunty, a bit evasive. James’s mastery of it is total – he’s a natural writer – but it can make him sound glib and unreflective. This is a shame as his judgements are usually astute: ‘Britpop was never a scene. It was a lot of not very brilliant bands copying two or three good ones, and the good bands never really saw eye to eye.’
Historians of Britpop may feel short-changed – James has more to say about Fat Les than Blur v Oasis – and there’s a point around page 200 where the effort of bearing witness to someone else’s debauched fun almost becomes too much. For the most part, though, James writes with wit and flair, and the chapter dealing with the birth of his premature twins is extremely moving.
