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 Back to: Archive · 2006
The new village people

From the Sunday Times 'Culture' magazine, 19 February 2006.
Words: Dan Cairns. Photo: Tony McGee.


"Less of the German gay-boy bass," commands Alex James. The Blur bassist is standing in an outbuilding - one of dozens - on his Cotswolds farm. This particular one has been converted into a recording studio, where James and Alison Clarkson, better known as the early-1990s chart-topper Betty Boo, are putting the finishing touches to a joint project, Wigwam.


James addresses his remarks to the Beatmasters, two men of now fairly advanced years, with whom Clarkson scored her first hit, 1989's Hey DJ, I Can't Dance (To that music you're playing). Wigwam's debut single, blasting out of the speakers situated beneath a large and scary painting by James's erstwhile Blur colleague Graham Coxon, should provoke no such complaints. The bass, German gay-boy or not, punches the song forward, as Clarkson scats her pop-rap vocal. The lyrics are as batty as you'd expect: "Checking out my wigwam," she sings, "checking out my boo."


It's a sugar rush of a song, as all great pop is. You emerge after its four minutes in a state of hyperactivity. And the accompanying video, directed by the duo's close friend (and neighbour) Dom Joly, and featuring men dressed as cats dancing on a Soho rooftop, rams the point home. The point being what, exactly? Cheesy, I suggest. James and Clarkson exchange a look. "There are definite cheese qualities to it," James concedes, after a pause. "But it's quite conventional." "It reminds me of Video Killed the Radio Star," suggests Clarkson.


If this slightly awkward moment implies that Wigwam are self-important about what they do, that would be unfair. They're both appealingly self-aware of pop's limitations; and, indeed, of their own, as old-timers in a teen-orientated genre. "We've got to do something to get young people interested," James admits. "People said, 'What are you going to do for a video? You can't be in it because you're too old. You know, you' re going to have to invent a cartoon band or something.'"


Ah, Gorillaz. Conversations with Damon Albarn's band mates invariably get round to his multi-platinum side project. Its huge success casts a long shadow and highlights an abiding impression of imbalance about Blur. Of all of them, Albarn comes across as the least dogged by demons, and the most gimlet-eyed in pursuit of success. Coxon, on the other hand, has spent the time since jumping - or being pushed - from the good ship Blur conquering his drink problem and releasing a succession of increasingly well-received solo albums. (Of the guitarist's departure, James sighs: "It's nothing but a shame. He should be part of Blur.") The drummer, Dave Rowntree, is reinventing himself as a man with most of his fingers in the modern multimedia pie.


Until Wigwam, James seemed the band member with the least amount of individual purpose. In the weekly column about country living he writes for a national newspaper, his tangential whimsical musings will allude occasionally to Blur, but more often he ponders on the satisfaction he gains from bulldozing concrete; or kicking the drink habit that earned him and his Groucho club pals, Keith Allen and Damien Hirst, their lubricious 1990s reputation; or parenthood (he and his wife, Claire, have a two-year-old son, and twins on the way); or planning to convert yet another barn for the production of cheese. Quite simply, he has come across, artistically at least, as semi-detached.


He has a habit of answering difficult questions with an arch one-liner. And his appearance - he roams his 200 acres in, of all things, a suit, tie and undone trainers, a ciggy trailing limply from his fingers, and gestures vaguely towards sheep, workmen and distant fields - further tempts you to have him down as pop's ultimate fop. Yet you sense that an ability to be taken seriously, while it frustrates him, also suits James quite well; that the egghead who appeared on University Challenge, aware as he is of the absurdity of pop being engaged with high-mindedness, is happy with a little ironic distancing.


"I think I've moved on to the sort of trout-farm phase of being a rock star," he laughs. "But it's like running a small country here. I'm fully occupied. I don't know exactly what I do, but it's not like I wake up going, 'My God, what am I going to do?' It's, 'God, I've got to do this, this and this.'"


For the past two years, one "this" has been Wigwam, which came about after James bumped into Clarkson's husband in his pre-Cotswolds, Covent Garden days. The move to the country, coinciding as it did with the birth of his first child, gave James the space he says he now realises he needed. Ask him how bad he was in the old days and he says: "Oh, terrible. Do not feed this dog success, it makes him bad." Or, adds Clarkson: "Do not give him a million quid; he'll drink the lot," which is, rumour has it, only just an exaggeration. "I can do none, and I can do all of it," James says about his boozing days. "But I don't know that I can do the in-between."


Of his partnership with Clarkson, James says: "We both want the same thing, which is to make dirty but shiny and naughty records that everybody thinks are brilliant. And we're both up for mischief." "But you're a bigger bitch than I am," chides Clarkson. "I thought I was a bitch, but he'll be like, 'Ooh, look at her.' He takes it to the next level." "Well," James replies, "when you've made a record, you listen to the radio and go, 'Crap; crap; not as good as mine; rubbish; crap.'"


Listening to them discuss the proposed visit to the farm by a camera crew to film an episode of MTV Cribs ("We're going to keep it all tractors and bicycles," says James, "rather than Bentleys and Rolexes"), it's easy to view the whole project as an expensive adult plaything. Clarkson, after retiring Boo to look after her mother, parlayed her songwriting savvy into a career as a backroom hit-maker, which included winning an Ivor Novello award for Pure and Simple, the song that, briefly, put the luckless Hear'Say at the top of the charts. So Wigwam is not, from a purely financial viewpoint, a desperate last throw of the dice. "The more records Damon sells," James counters, "the less I get to say in Blur sessions." "And the more you're in it," Clarkson adds, "the more you want."


The album, which they play back later in James's knick-knack-filled studio, is a bubbling cauldron of Blur and Boo - knowing but artless, bubblegum and bitters. "A great, unselfconscious pop record is a precious thing," shouts James over the din, as a quintessential Boo rap fills the room. "Where are you, baby?" Clarkson's biggest hit asked in 1990. The answer is: down on the farm, making hay. Albarn, with his master plan; Wigwam in their barn. Cheese production? More like pure pop magic.