The great escape: Blur's Alex James on the (quiet sober) afterlife of the drunkest band in pop

Success in the music business usually comes quickly and at a young age, and it often seems to mess people up more than failure does. The standard tragedy of rock'n'roll renown is that being in a band - especially a really good one - is an almost impossible thing to ever let go of, and the rest of the band's lifetimes are spent trying to recapture some remote heyday with diminishing returns. Shaking your skinny ass every night and saying "Bollocks!" all day is a very different thing when you're 23 and when you're 38. Look at Mick Jagger. Look at Ozzy Osbourne. Gawd bless 'em but they both appear to me like small boys trapped in roles of grotesque caricature, like modern-day castrati.

In the case of Blur, though, the usual rock'n'roll trajectory has not happened. Quite the reverse. Since 2003's Think Tank, the most recent Blur record, one way or another and to our mutual astonishment, all four of us seem to have found ourselves as individuals. I have become a writer; Graham Coxon has become, in every sense, an artist (an award-winning solo performer, fêted painter and designer); Dave Rowntree, the quiet one, is a prospective politician; and Damon Albarn, the "mouthpiece of a generation", has sold yet another 10 million records and, as he launches his maiden opera, established himself as the significant composer of the past 20 years.

At the height of Blur's success, I remember wondering whether there would be life after rock'n'roll for any of us. I have since discovered that there is. So much else. A band is very much like a family, and we all eventually needed to leave the nest and start our own families. The most surprising thing is that we are all in better shape now than when we were getting mobbed in Sweden and driven everywhere from Narssasuaq to New South Wales under police escort. Don't get me wrong, though. It was all brilliant and I wouldn't change a damn thing. In fact, when the band first got together, it was something we all desperately needed. And somehow, I think all four of our lives might have been fairly disastrous without it.

When I moved to London in 1988, I told my mum I was going to do a French degree, but all I really wanted to do was join a band and make music so arresting that people forgot themselves when they heard it. Rather incredibly, as I was unloading my French books from my parents' car, the first person I laid eyes on was Graham Coxon. He was very pale and skinny, covered in paint and holding a guitar, which he had just retrieved from his parents' car.

I went to Goldsmiths by accident. I didn't know anything about it, other than that they taught French and that they'd have me despite my disastrous A-level results. I'd floundered into the most remarkable place in the world at that time. The 1990s actually began in 1988 in the students' union bar at Goldsmiths. Somehow or other, the drunkest people in that bar: various members of Blur - Graham Coxon, Damon Albarn and myself - and the active nucleus of the burgeoning British Art brigade - Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Sam Taylor Wood and others - went on to instigate a cultural revolution that reverberated throughout the worlds of art, music, rocket science and politics, filling the football terraces with song and the larger houses of the Hamptons and the world's great museums with contemporary art.

There was an ongoing sarcastic joke about how many geniuses there were in college that turns out not to have been that funny after all.

Graham and I became friends pretty much straight way. I liked his records and he liked mine. Highly artistic, stylish and quite fragile, he was already lead guitarist and backing vocalist in a band with Damon and Dave. I threw my lot in with theirs when Dave sacked the existing bass player and the rhythm guitarist. As characters we were all quite easy to sketch out: Ginger (Rowntree), scary (Albarn), posh (James) and Graham (Coxon), as Q magazine had it.

While Graham and I may have been friends from the start, my initial reaction to the other band members (who all came from Colchester) was less straightforward. Damon and I didn't hit it off instantly. The fearless frontman, singer and keyboard player is a very strong character: charismatic, ambitious and determined. He likes to wrestle; it's how he gets to know people. I argued with him until we'd played music together - at which point, he and I became staunch allies.

As for Dave the drummer - then a computer programmer for Colchester council - I didn't know what to make of him. Over the years I've flown to Africa with him in a light aircraft that the two of us have shared ownership of, been his bridge partner, made records with him, produced records with him, been to Iceland, Greenland, New York City and watched the spaceship, Beagle 2 - which we composed the call-sign for - crash land on Mars. But 20 years after he first made me a cup of tea at the Beat Factory, the recording studio where we met, he (omega) remains a pragmatic yet inscrutable, silent karate presence. I still never know what he is thinking about.

From the moment I arrived in London, life seemed to be happening at the gallop. We wrote "She's So High" (our first single) at our very first rehearsal in December 1988, the last day of the first term of college. The band signed to Food records after a small handful of gigs for an even smaller handful of money.

Filling our mothers with apprehension, Graham and I left Goldsmiths at the end of our second year, and got on a tour bus. Maybe it was a gamble. None of us ever saw it that way - and we've been proved right. Graham has since been made an honorary fellow of the college, a distinguished position and one to which he was elected over Damien Hirst.

I'm Artist in Residence in Astrophysics at Oxford, which is where I wanted to go in the first place. Damo has become a self-styled statesman for British culture and as for Rounders: he's joined the Labour Party. Think Arnold Schwarzenegger, only tougher.

The band's first really conquering performance was in Dudley, in the West Midlands on a rainy Friday night in Autumn 1990. That was probably the most magical moment of all; the very first time we raised the roof. We knew we could do it and we knew from that moment that we'd always be able to do it. We were suddenly swamped by people asking for our autographs and offering us whatever we wanted. One minute I was living in squalor in a condemned building in New Cross next to college, the next I was in a limousine full of cognac in Manhattan. It was the start of a giddy spiral that included a record war with Oasis that somehow fascinated the entire nation, Damon telling Tony Blair to leave him alone (he refused to go to the "Cool Britannia" party at Downing Street in 1997), and that spaceship on its way to Mars.

Success is never something that is absolute except when you're dreaming about it. I suppose the illustration of success doesn't come more neatly packaged than a rock band with 10,000 people screaming at them every night, but it's curiously unsatisfying. It's definitely good, but it's silly really, and certainly not enough to make you happy, any more than lots of money is. Fame and success are just currencies, different kinds of money. They help you get you what you want, to set your own agenda - but that's where the big problems usually start.

So many bands that have been together for as long as we have seem to end up despising each other. I've just finished writing my autobiography and it occurred to me as I drew my conclusions that we all still really like each other. But I think we all had to leave the band to discover ourselves.

Maybe what we have become is what we were all along: an artist, a composer, a politician and a writer. At first we were all quite reluctant to praise each other's extra-curricular achievements, but now they are what define us most clearly - and, in fact, I'm very proud of us all.

I have no doubt that Dave will make an excellent politician. In the way that Damon is biologically a singer, Dave is a born socialist: rational, tenacious and persuasive. When I met Dave he had a Mohican and mainly wore pyjamas. He drove a horrible brown car and, as I mentioned, worked for Colchester Council, programming computers. He seems to have pulled off a strange reverse double: instead of getting fucked by rock (which is the almost inevitable fate of the drummer), he has - in a sustained campaign of self-improvement - pulled himself up by his bootstraps and transformed himself into a black-belt brainbox. Aside from tae kwon do, he's published scientific papers, runs a successful animation business and is, I believe, studying law, as well as campaigning to implement the correct intellectual superstructure for a fair and just society. But in my opinion, he still has a crap car. He's the only one of us who hasn't fathered a child, but he is the eldest by a few years and we are all, in a sense, Dave's children.

Damon's progress is another story. I think the most impressive thing I ever saw him do was to pick up a guitar and write a complete song for Marianne Faithfull right off the top of his head without pausing for breath, as she stood there, open-mouthed.

Damon always seems to have had a plan and his cleverest trick has been to never waver from going to the studio every day and writing songs. Along with Damien Hirst, I think he is the most ambitious and buoyant creative force of his generation. Damon has never been distracted by the any of the garish trappings of success in showbiz. He is on his own mission, a constant boundary breaker. As with Damien, there is an unstoppable vigour in his originality, a robust torrent of creativity as bright and bold as thistles. Where the rest of us have all diversified he's become a highly accomplished musician and singer. He has always had a genius for a melody, but perhaps his ability to learn and then apply what he's learned is his greatest gift. There has never been a point when he has stopped learning and growing.

He's always worked hard and juggles promoting one thing with creating another. Being a manufacturer of pop culture is a lot like flying an aeroplane, in that the most important thing to think about is not what's happening now, but what's about to happen next.

I think Monkey King, his new opera about a famous figure from Chinese literature, is a bold, unparalleled and enlightening move as East meets West. Most rock stars tend to count success in pounds sterling, but I realise now that Damon has long seen music as a cultural force. Britpop was indisputably and solely Damon Albarn's idea. I also think he's devised a uniquely progressive approach to Africa. The most effective way that a musician can help in Africa is to actually go there and make music with African musicians. America has always been the priority market for record companies, simply because it's the biggest. The Beatles were amazing because they conquered America. Damon is amazing because he went to Africa, not to conquer, but to learn and trade hot licks. I think Africa probably appeals to him culturally more than America does.

Still, Gorillaz sold a few records there. That band was a very cute concept. If you look at being in a band from an artist's point of view, once you've got over the initial excitement of being on an aeroplane and going somewhere else every day, which takes about 10 years, most of the hard work and all of the drudgery of being a musician is in promoting records.

I'm not normally one for crawling up his arse, but Gorillaz was a band that required Damon do no promotion whatsoever, and for that I take my hat off to him. He's also campaigned relentlessly against the war in Iraq and against Trident. I hadn't seen him for a while (we do live a hundred miles apart), but his girlfriend cooked the three of us a wonderful breakfast (sardine pancakes) a couple of weeks ago when I was in town. It's always good to see him. It's always good to see all of them.

After pancakes, Damon took me to his record shop Honest Jon's in Notting Hill; he also runs a label of the same name. There is no record shop quite like Honest Jon's. It's (omega) massively eclectic and immaculately tasteful. Damon picked out records from Africa, Bombay and the Middle East for me. He's still broadening his horizons, still learning. He's on a journey and it's a journey no one else has been bold enough to travel.

Graham was never motivated by commercial success either. He has built a new career as an artist, songwriter and solo performer. In the last year he has joined Pete Doherty on stage and been commissioned by Tate Modern to compose a track in response to a piece of art displayed there. He's made several albums since he left Blur; had an exhibition of his paintings at the ICA; and recently designed guitars for Fender and Gibson. I was also intrigued to note that he has also written the introduction to a new edition of Narcissus and Goldmund by Herman Hesse. I suspect that is something Damon would quite liked to have done.

As for me, well, when Rossini finished the opera William Tell, despite still being young, he took a bow and said, "That's me, this is what I'll be remembered for" and retired. He devoted the rest of his life to being a gourmet and to his wife. That was about what I had in mind. I spend my life trying to do nothing and failing miserably. I'm making cheese, writing songs, having babies and embracing the classic "rural rock gentleman" lifestyle. I live in a very big house in the country, but you know all about that if you read this newspaper.

I speak to Dave on the phone occasionally. We stay in touch. Damon is often out of the country, but we still manage to see each other every two or three months. If any of them are performing or touring I usually go along once, but we don't need to see each other to know each other. We all still know each other very well.

The last time he came to my house, on my last birthday, Graham was hugging a Martin guitar that he'd just had customised. He played it while I cooked lunch. Actually, it was just like when we were at college, with a comfortable intimacy and suggestions of possibilities that aren't brought to mind in anyone's company except Graham's. Well, it was just like college, except it was a nicer guitar and a nicer lunch. I guess that's a happy ending if ever there was one. We've certainly all gone our separate ways, but we still give each other strength, usually by underestimating each other.

I think we've all managed to escape the gravity of the supermassive spinning black hole at the centre of every great rock'n'roll band. Ironically, now that we no longer seem to need each other, perhaps we can face each other again. It would be a shame to think there would never be another Blur record, and I'm conceited enough to believe that if there should be, it might just be the best one yet. s

'Bit of a Blur' by Alex James is published by Little, Brown, £16.99. He will be talking about his book at Bloomsbury Theatre, London on Thursday. For tickets, call 0845 456 9876

Alex James: The Farmer

The lanky, floppy-haired one was also the only member of Blur not to come from Essex. Despite this disadvantage, Alex James became the band's bassist, and, "the second-drunkest member of the drunkest band in Britain". These were heady days: "Once, I came home after a three-day bender, wearing a gold suit I'd just bought," he says. "Another time I arrived home in a taxi that Keith Allen had just bought."

James, who was born in Boscombe in Dorset, met Graham Coxon at Goldsmith's, and joined the band - at that stage called Seymour - in 1989. At the height of Britpop, he enjoyed himself by drinking in the Groucho Club, and collaborating on Fat Les's 1998 World Cup song, "Vindaloo". Unlike his three bandmates, James has never sought to carve out a solo career - although he has also collaborated with Stephen Duffy on a project called Me Me Me, and has co-written songs with Sophie Ellis-Bextor. More recently he joined Betty Boo in a band called Wigwam.

James has proved himself the band's most cerebral member. 'The Independent', 'The Observer', 'The Sunday Times', and 'The Idler' have all played host to his languid prose, and he has displayed his impressive trivia skills on 'University Challenge: The Professionals'.

Meanwhile, he has abandoned his urbane lifestyle and holed up with his wife, the video producer, Claire Neate, on a Cotswolds farm. The couple have three sons: Geronimo and twins Artemis and Galileo, born in 2006.

The bassist's new rural experiences have led him to forge a career as a cheese-maker. Otherwise, he has been writing his autobiography, and appearing on the occasional TV programme, including the mock rape trial, 'The Verdict'.

Damon Albarn: The Renaissance Man

Damon Albarn has always needed a stage. Having spent his school years in Leytonstone and Essex, where he met Graham Coxon at Stanway Comprehensive, Blur's future frontman signed up for the East 15 Acting School in London. He lasted only a year.

Coxon and Albarn met again at Goldsmiths College, where they formed a band called Circus. With the introduction of Dave Rowntree and James on drums and bass, Circus gave way to Seymour, before Seymour became Blur.

After Albarn and Coxon had a fistfight in February 1996, the band decided to call a brief time-out. A year later, they released the album 'Blur', which helped them break America. Soon after, all four members started to work on side projects. Albarn travelled to Mali to create an album for Oxfam, 'Mali Music' (2002). It began an interest in African music that would flourish with Blur's next album, 'Think Tank', which was recorded in Marrakesh.

Coxon, it seemed, did not care much for this new direction and was sent home. Albarn, meanwhile, was increasingly interested in his new projects, specifically the successful "cartoon band", Gorillaz. He also found a political voice - decrying Britain's decision to go to war in Iraq, and verbally whipping Bob Geldof for not including enough African acts at Live8.

Earlier this year, Albarn released the critically acclaimed album 'The Good, The Bad and the Queen', a collaboration with Simon Tong, Paul Simonon and Tony Allen.

Graham Coxon: The Indie Hero

Before falling out with his bandmates in 2002, Coxon had played an increasingly strong hand in Blur. On the albums 'Blur' and '13', the guitarist featured prominently - providing the main vocals on "You're So Great" and "Coffee & TV", and designing the album cover for '13'.

Reports differ on the reasons for Coxon's departure, but the man himself stated: "I had a breakthrough. I think my life just became calmer, I gave up drinking. My priorities changed as I had a young daughter. The group didn't want me to record for the 'Think Tank' album, so I took it as a sign to leave."

Since 1997, when he first started writing songs for his debut solo album, 'The Sky is Too High', Coxon has forged a successful and prolific solo career. While he was still involved with Blur, two further solo albums followed in 2000 and 2001, and since his departure, Coxon has released three records: 'The Kiss of Morning', 'Happiness in Magazines' and 'Love Travels at Illegal Speeds'. In 2005, he was named Best Solo Artist at the NME Awards.

In recent years, Coxon has also had a chance to foster his skill as an artist and writer. He has designed all the album sleeves for his solo work, and, in 2006, wrote the foreword for a new edition of 'Narcissus and Goldmund' by Herman Hesse.

As for Blur, it seems Coxon may be warming to talk of a reunion. Alex James has said, "we're all heading into the studio this summer - Graham's coming too. We're going to see if we've still got it. If not, I think we'll just call it a day."

Dave Rowntree: The Politician

Having enjoyed a musical education at the hands of Colchester brass bands, Dave Rowntree moved to London, where he studied for a HND in Computer Science. He soon found work as a computer programmer and as a drummer, and lived in a series of squats.

Rowntree joined Seymour in 1989. Now 42, his memories of his time in the band are both fond and a little vague, as he told 'The Guardian' in a recent interview.

"Do you know that Talking Heads song, 'Once in a Lifetime'?" he asked. "That happened to me. I just woke up and thought, 'Bloody hell, where am I?' I was living in a big house in Hampstead with two cars and an aeroplane. I was married to this woman I hardly knew because I married her, went on tour and never really came home. I didn't know what I believed, other than I liked cats."

Rowntree soon found a cause he believed in, and stood as a Labour Party candidate in the Marylebone High Street by-election early this year. As expected, he lost, but he enjoyed the experience.

Rowntree has fought hard to oppose any ban on file- sharing and is a member of the Advisory Council of the Open Rights Group. Indeed, when asked how he felt about new songs being leaked on the internet before their official release, he said, "I'd rather it gushed."

Rowntree's other interests include an animation company called Nanomation, which makes a series called 'Empire Sq'. He has also started a band called The Ailerons, whose EP "Left, Right" has proved popular on iTunes.

Ed Caesar

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