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From Blur: 3862 Days, the official history © 1999 Blur and Stuart Maconie.

Dave Rowntree was born in Colchester on 8 May 1964. His father worked as a sound engineer at Broadcasting House, Portland Place, London, home of BBC radio. His mother had been an orchestral viola player before becoming disillusioned with the lot of the professional classical musician. None the less, it was a very musical household and Dave was given a set of bagpipes along with his Janet and John books, surely the act of parents whose love of music and desire to instill the same in their son could brook any agonies. The bagpipes were, frankly, too taxing for Dave, requiring the lung power of a grown man who thinks nothing of inflating a hot water bottle and the technical dexterity of a milkmaid who can do it standing up. A musical child, though, Dave quickly settled upon the instrument that was to prove the making of him.

DAVE ROWNTREE: I was a pretty musical kid. I could read music and stuff and after a couple of false starts me and the drums just clicked. I immediately understood the mechanics of it and how it relates to your body. I was taught by this old military drummer who taped a sixpence to the middle of the skin and if you didn't hit it bang on, he would hit you over the head. That's the way they teach you in the army. Assault-course style. It put the fear of God in you. I don't think it would work with an adult but it was bloody effective on a child.

Immediately, Dave was working with other musicians. Buddy Hassler, an American boy with a fabulous name for a jazz great of the 40s, lived round the corner - his family had come over with the US air force but stayed on as civilians. Buddy was taking piano lessons so it seemed only logical that the two should form a curious piano/drums duo, augmented by Dave's sister Sara on tambourine, for a performance of 'Yellow Submarine', his public debut, at a street party to celebrate the Queen's Silver Jubilee of 1977.

Dave was catholic, promiscuous even, in the musical company he kept. His father enrolled him in Saturday morning jazz classes at Landermere music school. He played in wind bands, which forged a formidable technique. He played in brass bands, a style of music often scorned in England for its associations with pigeons, flat caps and the northern working-class, but for which he still had enormous affection. 'In some ways it dominated my life till going to polytechnic. Two rehearsals a week every week. There's nothing like brass band music; it can still make me want to cry. The way the instruments are related to each other, the ratios and shapes, create these perfect overtones and harmonies like a choir. The drum music for brass bands is bollocks but to sit there in the middle is an amazing feeling.'

As anyone from a provincial town who has ever tried to start a teenage rock group will know, drummers are the most frustratingly elusive piece of the jigsaw. The rock axiom that declares all drummers are nutters is a gross slur but carries some weight. The gear is unwieldy and expensive, it's a lot more difficult than it looks, quiet solo practice is murder, and the pouting kid spouting bad poetry stands directly between you and the nice girls. For these reasons and others, good drummers are thin on the ground, as Dave Rowntree was finding out.

DAVE ROWNTREE: Drummers are always in short supply. You'll never go hungry like violinists do. Especially if word gets round you can actually play. So I was always getting asked to be in bands. One of the first was the Strategic Arms Quartet. It was the cold war, you see, and there were three of us. That was the hilarious joke. It was all very avant-garde for twelve year olds. We were young kids but we could really play. The keyboard player was called Andrew Butler. Very talented. God knows why he hasn't gone on to anything. The local paper said we were the thinking man's Barron Knights.

Next came Idle Vice, a mostly instrumental jazz-punk combo formed in the last few months before Dave left Colchester. It was at this time that he came across the teenage Graham Coxon. 'Actually we ran across each other through a shared love of drinking really rather than bands. But the band scene was very fertile. There were loads of places to play - the Oliver Twist, the Hole In The Hall - and when you got past the pub phase you could get supports at the uni.'

It was an incestuous scene where competition and cohabitation was fervid. Idle Vice guitarist Robin Anderson also played in Hazel Dean And The Carp Enters From Hell (be lenient - they were young) in which Graham was playing sax. Idle Vice were looking to augment a brass section and thus Dave and Graham played together for the first time. 'Within a couple of weeks, we were mates,' remembers Dave.

Before long, though, Dave left Colchester for Thames Polytechnic and an HND in computer science. Maths, science and computing had been among the few academic subjects Dave had taken any real interest in. The complex but scrupulously logical world of programming held no fears for him. Indeed, he showed a natural aptitude for it.

DAVE ROWNTREE: It was something that came very easily to me. I first got interested in computers when I was a kid and the first personal computers were emerging. My dad took me to an electronic show and I wrote a little program on a machine called a PET and I was hooked immediately. I taught myself until I was about twenty. Robin Anderson from the band was also into it. We'd lock ourselves away with the school computer which no teachers understood and hang around there till seven or eight at night. So by twenty, I knew enough to get through the poly course without doing any work. It was fantastic - two years of easy living, just going in often enough to get your ticks in the register and having a nice time living in Woolwich.

Dave's facility with sub-routines, bugs and bytes meant that there was plenty of room left in life for music. He set up the music society, which exists to this day, and became its first president. Like-minded musicians would pair or form quartets or do whatever trios do and experiment with all manner of musical forms. Once a year, a gala concert was staged. Add a lake of subsidised beer and soon Colchester was all but forgotten for a congenial two years. Then, like many a student before him, Dave found himself clutching a qualification and abruptly and unwillingly thrust into a cold and forbidding job market presided over by the ice maiden herself, Mrs Thatcher. Nine to five held little allure, so together with Robin Anderson and a bassist, Dave relocated to a squat in King's Cross and tried to find regular gigs. 'We were good for a bunch of funny people from Colchester,' he states, 'but we couldn't get gigs and I desperately wanted to be a musician because I thought it wasn't like working. How wrong I was!'

It was a shabby bohemian existence which entailed moving from squat to squat. The best of these was a palatial affair in Crouch End, once used by Eddie Grant, complete with a rehearsal suite, male and female toilets and a floor for each of the three of them. Here, Dave - who had acquired the pseudonym Shady Dave - would lock himself away and hone his game-programming skills in isolation, working on his own version of 80s arcade fave, Asteroids. 'I had this blinding flash of realisation that these skills that came easy to me, drumming and computing, didn't come easy to others, and I could get paid for them. These things I almost dismissed as valueless, people were willing to pay sometimes extraordinary amounts of money for.'

Life was enlivened by the recruitment of a singer named, remarkably, Charles Windsor. 'Extrovert, drama-school type, a complete knob... everything you want in a front man.' Though the odd pub and college gig were forthcoming, the outlook was generally bleak. Drumming up an audience via leafleting on the street was much harder on the hard, anonymous streets of London than it was in Colchester. Eviction from the squat was forthcoming. Then the guitarist got arrested by the drug squad in a bungled surveillance operation. The judge later dismissed him with a twenty quid fine but his arrest did lead to the excellent local paper headline - SORRY! THE GIG'S CANCELLED. THE BAND'S DOING THE JAILHOUSE ROCK! They were cold, skint and underemployed when inspiration struck.

DAVE ROWNTREE: We'd go abroad, that was it! So we bought a van and went and it was fantastic. It was just as we'd fantasised. Baguettes and cheap wine and local cheese and turning up in little tourist villages and plugging our extension cable into the bar and playing. It's extraordinary how cheaply you can live if you exist on bread, cheese and wine. We lived on a couple of quid a day. We bought a manual for the van and we all became mechanical engineers overnight, which was great too. We'd earn enough to keep us and pay for the trip to the next town, sometimes sleeping in tents and the van and sometimes having the luxury of a hotel. It was impoverished but fun. But it got to November and it just started to get too bloody cold. We thought about renting and setting up base there but it seemed more attractive to come home and sign on for winter and have a bath.

Nevertheless, the band returned and spent most of the following year in France. They were particularly warmly welcomed in the northern coastal town of Berck-sur-Mer, where the mayor would throw open his windows to hear them during council meetings as the band played by the fountain in the town square. 'If things went wrong elsewhere we knew we could always come home there.' But things didn't often go wrong any more. They now had a sophisticated system of backing tapes and were existing well above the baguette line. A crucial decision loomed. 'We thought hard about settling in France. It was a real toughie. But in the end we looked at the cost of renting and stuff, realised it was a serious decision and I suppose bottled it.' So Dave returned to Colchester complete with lustrous Mohican and vague dreams of making it as a musician. The latter were short-lived.

DAVE ROWNTREE: I pretty soon realised that my chances of making it as a working musician in England in the same way I'd done in France were virtually nil. On top of that, the dole were starting to get strict. They were starting to demand you attended interviews and took jobs. This didn't square with my Marxist principles at all. So I went along to the job centre and literally took the first job I could find with computers in the title. It was working for Colchester Council as a computer programmer. The level of the work meant that there was an utter lack of challenge, but it was a steady job and quite good money. It was like they were paying me to breathe.