Life before the fame kicked in: Blur drummer Dave Rowntree brings exclusive look at early days of band to Wolverhampton Literature Festival
He’s a member of one of the biggest British bands of the 1990s, a chart-topper and someone who has played to thousands of people at Wembley Stadium and on the hallowed grounds of Worthy Farm.
Dave Rowntree has been the steady rhythm behind the drums of Blur since the band formed in December 1988, playing on hits such as “Girls and Boys”, “Country House”, “The Universal”, “Beetlebum” and “Song 2”, a song best known for the thumping drum intro in two minutes of music chaos.
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.
