Bit of a Blur, Reviewed

In the Guardian:

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.

t 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.

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