Blur’s Dave Rowntree: ‘I still wake at 3am thinking I’ve frittered my life away’

Drummer, lawyer, composer, politician… Blur’s busiest member on the troubled childhood that influenced his new solo album, Radio Songs, and the band’s summer time reunion gigs

A couple of weeks before Christmas, and the planning conferences have just finished for two of 2023’s most anticipated gigs, by a British band who first rehearsed collectively 35 years ago. In July, Blur are as a result of play two nights at the 90,000-capacity Wembley Stadium (only one concert was originally scheduled, nevertheless it bought out in two minutes). Their blend of concepts from British popular culture’s past, combined with the peculiar optimism on the finish of the final century, made them one of many largest bands of the 1990s; they’ve solely made two albums since, each of them tentative, tender however pretty: 2003’s Think Tank and 2015’s The Magic Whip.

The day earlier than I meet the band’s drummer, Dave Rowntree, he was with singer Albarn, guitarist Graham Coxon and bassist Alex James in an undisclosed location in London, plotting the tough form of the Wembley gigs, with instruments on their laps. “It was good! That is the fun bit before we’re enjoying the set over and time and again, staring sullenly at our telephones between songs,” Rowntree tells me. On this brilliant winter morning he's at Tate Trendy in London’s Bankside sporting a hoodie and carrying luggage of the garments he has simply worn for the Observer’s photoshoot. He had his portrait taken in the gallery subsequent to Cildo Meireles’s Babel, a murmuring, ominous tower of a sculpture that he’s all the time beloved, made up of tons of of analogue radios. Oblivious ageing hipsters and midlifers, who will definitely have danced to his drumbeats, cross him by.