Title: Bit of a Blur
Author: Alex James
Type:Non– Fiction
Page Count: 278
Rating: 4/5
This book is essentially the non-fiction memoir of Alex James, the bassist from Blur, and so as such it takes us behind the scenes of the Britpop revolution and shows just what it was like to be a part of one of the biggest bands of the turn of the century. For someone born right at the end of the 80s, all of that delicious 1990s pop culture stuff made me nostalgic.
But what I most liked here was the honesty with which he wrote about his life, as well as some of the stories about how nuts Graham Coxon is. James was studying French at university and has always had a bit of thing for the French and French culture, and that was pretty cool as well because I’ve been working on my own French. I’ve been practicing my bass guitar skills, too.
As rock ‘n’ roll memoirs go, it’s perhaps pretty tame, but that’s okay. I wasn’t too bothered with that side of things, and indeed I’m not really the biggest Blur fan and so half the time they were talking about songs that I’d not heard of. But despite that, it was an engaging enough memoir to carry it through, and I learned quite a lot of stuff that I didn’t know before, such as that the band was friends with Damien Hurst and that two of the members, James included, are able to fly aeroplanes. That’s pretty cool.
All in all, I’d probably recommend it, especially to Blur fans.
