Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World.

I'm Christian Guri Murthy and this is the podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people

about the big ideas and their lives and the events that have helped shape them.

My guest this week is the bass player from Blur.

Alex James is actually probably best known these days

as a famous farmer. In fact, he was writing about being a famous farmer and all the disasters

of being one of those long before Jeremy Clarks never did the farm. But he is also a sort of

intermittent pop star and he's written a book called Over the Rainbow about blur

getting back together and going back out on tour and it's a lot of fun well it was it was it was a hell

of year i had no intention of writing a book until about three quarters of the way through when i suddenly

realized actually this has got a really nice shape to it i didn't even know how it was going to end at that point, but it was it was it was an enchanted year actually.

And how did it actually begin? Because you say it kind of began with a phone call out of the blue. All stories begin with a stranger comes to town. I think that's the basic premise of all stories.

And yeah, the first time Blur split up was shortly, is exactly exactly the time that I got married.

But Claire and I, in fact, bought the farm on our honeymoon, at which point Blur suddenly stopped without

me knowing that was going to happen. Did you actually break up? Or was it just, it never,

it just never, well, it was sort of went into hiatus, you know, I think great Graham left.

I just, I think whatever you do, however brilliant it is, like after 15 years of doing it, it

happens with all bands.

Everybody just wanted to go off and do something else.

I think unfortunately, you know, we were doing it day in, day out for 15 years.

Fortunately, we were still young enough, I think, to have enough energy to kind of...

Everybody did go off in different

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