Blur‘s Alex James has revealed that he once got kicked out of a church party for using a “naked baby Jesus” figurine as an ashtray.
READ MORE: Graham Coxon on the return of Blur: “We can’t leave it too long because we’re knocking on!”
In his recent autobiography Over The Rainbow: Tales from an Unexpected Year, released on December 5, James shared the anecdote, via the Metro, which had apparently happened at a Christmas church party in 2023.
“I had been smoking in the room with the art and the objects, as usual,” James wrote. “Someone I didn’t know had said, ‘I’m not sure if you’re allowed to smoke in here’. I’d dutifully picked up a little ashtray on the sideboard where I was leaning and extinguished my cigarette.”
He continued: “Sadly, unlike some staterooms, not everything in this one was actually an ashtray.”
“I’d happened upon an antique figurine of the naked baby Jesus and stubbed my fag-end out by rubbing it around in his crotch, quite obliviously.” Unfortunately, James then accidentally broke the figurine.
Alex James. CREDIT: Lorne Thomson/Redferns
“When I was alerted to what I’d done by the person who’d asked me to stop smoking, I tried to put a positive spin on it,” James wrote. “I picked baby Jesus back up to demonstrate his robustness by tugging one of his little arms. The arm came off along with a plume of impossibly fine, glittering, powdery dust.”
“I managed to wedge it back on,” he clarified.
Elsewhere in the book, James shared that he turned to farming during the Britpop band’s hiatus in the 2000s. In a recent interview, he weighed in on Labour’s planned changes to the inheritance tax policy for farms. James also said in the interview that he “burst into tears” when he saw his teenage daughter in the crowd at a recent Blur show.
It’s been a big year for Blur, following the release of To The End – a documentary directed by Transgressive Records founder Toby L – in July.
The film traced the reunion of James with Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon and Dave Rowntree on their return to record 2023 comeback album ‘The Ballad Of Darren’ ahead of a tour culminating in a pair of shows at London’s Wembley Stadium last summer.
Reviewing To The End, NME concluded: “They bicker, they hug, they call each other c**ts, they get the job done. While Blur’s last doc and accompanying live movie No Distance Left To Run was a portrait of a band celebrating their legacy and giving a nostalgia-hungry world exactly what they craved, this spiritual sequel shows a band simply supporting each other.”
“Whether they return again or not remains to be seen. But even if they don’t, this was one hell of a final fling.”
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