Life before the fame kicked in: Blur drummer Dave Rowntree brings exclusive look at early days of band to Wolverhampton Literature Festival

Alongside Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon and Alex James, the 61-year-old also been part of memorable shows played at Wembley, Glastonbury and Hyde Park and been able to tour the world with the band, as well as being the recipient of multiple Brit Awards.

However, as he prepares to appear at the Wolverhampton Literature Festival, the topic of the band for Dave goes back to the early days when they were struggling to make a name for themselves through his book “No One You Know”.

His appearance at the Wolverhampton Arts Centre on February 6 will see Dave talk about the book, which is full of exclusive, intimate and never-seen-before photographs of Blur early in their career, which he said had come from wanting to take photos of the early existence of the band.

He said: “In the first few years of the band, probably from just before we were signed until we started going out on proper tours, I had a camera with me and just took pictures of everything that was going on.

“It wasn’t so much of when we were on stage or when we were working because then I was working too, but all the other stuff, from the travelling, the hotel rooms, the dressing rooms and all that kind of backstage stuff.

“Thing is, I promptly lost all the photos for decades, but then I found them again just before lockdown and I was very relieved to find them.

“I still didn’t look through them until lockdown started, but then Tim Burgess from the Charlatans did something called Tim’s Twitter listening parties, where everyone on Twitter would listen to the same album at the same time, press play at the same time and then someone from the band would narrate the album and tell the stories behind them.

“I was lucky enough to be asked to do three of them and I was desperate for things to tweet, so that’s when I started looking at the pictures and I was quite surprised that they were actually very different from what they had been in my memory.

“They were much better and captured a time in Blur’s life when nobody was taking photos of us and nobody was interested as we just a tiny little band playing what was very unfashionable music.

“It became fashionable later in the first few years and the band couldn’t get arrested, so it documents an era of the band that nobody had documented.”

Dave said it did hark back to a more anonymous time for the band, saying that the title of the book had come from a saying by a bus driver they had used when touring America for the first time.

He said: “We were definitely more anonymous then, hence the title of the book, as ‘No One You Know’ is what the bus driver on our first American tour put on the front of the tour bus after a question about who was on the bus.

“He used to get that question at every truck stop and so wrote that down as he was a very funny guy, but with a very acerbic sense of humour, and he’d written various things  on the rubber strip you hand cranked down to describe the band.

“Thing is, he was right to put that down as we were a tiny band on a massive North American tour playing tiny venues to tiny crowds and nobody knew who we were.

“That was the bit of Blur that I captured, the bit of Blur that was before we were famous, before anyone outside the confines of the music press in the UK had really discovered us.”

In the time following the period detailed in the book, life blew up for Blur, with albums “Modern Life is Rubbish” and “Parklife” propelling the band into the spotlight, including a legendary battle with Oasis for the UK Number One slot, with “Country House” outselling “Roll with it” to take the top spot in the charts.

In the last 30 years, the band have experienced Graham Coxon leaving, then coming back when the band reformed in 2009, with Dave saying it was nice to be able to come back to as when they wanted to, allowing them to continue their own projects which, for Dave, involves composing for film and TV shows, as well as studying for an Open University degree in astronomy, flying airplanes and even standing in the 2024 General Election.

Coming back to Wolverhampton is also something Dave said he was looking forward to, with the band having a history of shows in and around the city, as well as being the first band to play at the new Civic Hall when it reopened in May 2023.

He said: “Wolverhampton is the first place we were successful really, certainly the first place we earned more than our road crew earned.

“It was also the first part of the country to take us to their hearts and, as a result, most of our road crew who we picked up are from Wolverhampton, with most of them still working for us now.

“The Civic is somewhere we’ve played a lot in the past, so when the idea was put to us, we were very keen to do so and when they asked me to do the literature festival, I thought ‘Absolutely, you can’t keep me away!’”

After nearly 40 years in the music industry, Dave Rowntree said it had a good life and writing the book had, to some extent, helped to put it all in context.

He said: “It’s been quite interesting going back to the start of our career as we don’t really remember it that well, so going over the photos and putting the book together took a fair time.

“I think it took me close to a year because it was picking out the photos from the hundreds I had and figuring out some way to tell a story, which was a hard thing to do, whereas writing the introduction was actually the easiest part when I thought it would be really hard.

“It’s allowed me to ruminate over where we came from and where we are now and kind of made me more appreciative of where we’ve got to in our careers and take it a lot less for granted.

“The interesting feature of the early days is that we were doing all these things for the first time, so our first American tour, our first Japanese or Mexican tour, going to Europe and everything was brand new.

“Every experience was something we were doing for the first time and there was no guarantee at the time as we were a very unfashionable band in the early years, so there’s a real energy and enthusiasm and excitement and kind of undertone of terror about it as well.

“So, yeah, it’s been an interesting experience.”

Dave Rowntree: No One You Know takes place at Wolverhampton Arts Centre, Dunkley Street, Wolverhampton on Friday, February 6 at 7.30pm.