Caitlin Moran Meets Blur’s Alex James – Over the Rainbow | How To Academy

Wed, 4 December 2024

7:00 pm - 8:15 pm GMT

Caitlin Moran Meets Blur’s Alex James – Over the Rainbow

In Conversation in London

Caitlin Moran joins Blur’s legendary bassist Alex James for a heartfelt and hilarious account of what it feels like to be catapulted back into the limelight with one of the world’s biggest bands.

‘There is nothing that can touch the sound made by a close-knit group of people who have been playing together for years and years and years, playing as though their lives depended on it. For many years, all our lives did, and actually, I’d suddenly realised, they did still’ – Alex James

One winter’s night, Alex James received an unexpected call. Blur had been invited to play their biggest gig ever: Wembley Stadium. The only trouble was, he and his bandmates hadn’t spoken to – or even shouted at – each other for years. And he now had five children, an out-of-control menagerie of cats, and a sprawling farm to run. This is the story of what happened next. 

Taking us behind the scenes of a raucous, rollercoaster year, Alex will tell Times journalist and bestselling author Caitlin Moran how the band made a surprise – and emotional – return, recording an acclaimed album and playing sold-out shows around the world, from Colchester to Colombia and beyond. Plus: how he went on a crash diet to fit back into his ‘Britpop Trousers,’ somehow organised an entire festival of his own, and tried to perfect the recipe for a giant Frazzle. 

Don’t miss this love letter to Blur, to friendship and to music. Alex is here to show us all that, however old – or hungover – we might feel, nothing’s ever truly over: it’s always just the start of the next thing.

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Alex James

Bass Player, Blur

Alex James is a writer, farmer, and the bass player with Blur. He lives in Oxfordshire with his wife and five children.



Caitlin Moran

Times columnist, screenwriter and author

Caitlin Moran has worked for The Times since she was eighteen as an interviewer, TV critic and columnist including, in the most-read part of the paper, the satirical celebrity column ‘Celebrity Watch’. She has won the British Press Awards’ Columnist of The Year, Interviewer of the Year, and Critic of the Year. She is the multi-award-winning, million-selling author of How to Be a Woman, which has been named as one of The Sunday Times’ ‘Most Influential Books of the 2000s’. The 2020 sequel, More than a Woman, was also a number one bestseller. Caitlin Moran’s novels How to Build a Girl and How to Be Famous were bestsellers, and she adapted How to Build a Girl into a 2020 movie starring Beanie Feldstein and Emma Thompson. With her sister, she co-wrote the Channel 4 sitcom Raised by Wolves. She has published two bestselling collections of her journalism, Moranthology and Moranifesto.  Her most recent number-one bestselling book, What About Men?, was published in 2023.