"That sums up Alex really... a glass of champagne, sitting down." Damon Albarn
"Do I scare people? Perhaps a bit. Alex does, too, although in a different way...he's just so laidback." Graham Coxon
"Despite how groggy he is feeling, Alex is one of those sort of people who manages to put in the effort when they have to do something." Damon Albarn
"Alex's idea of glamour is my idea of death, really." Graham Coxon
"That puts Alex at a bit of a disadvantage, as we have that experience of sitting in orchestras and being shouted at and Alex doesn't." Damon Albarn on the rest of Blur having been musically trained
"Alex is still Alex, the same as he was when they first started, being so intellectual, he finds that people are wary of that and he will play up to it, teasing them." some guy named Biffo
"A tummy-baring pussycat by nature, he turns into a vicious, giggling hyena when provoked." Barbara Ellen from the NME
"Alex writes a song every two years and they're all about planets." Damon Albarn
"Alex James is so bloody cool, he'd freeze his ass off if he got any cooler. Ever seen a bass player saunter on stage, light the first of an endless stream of fags, hang - a tall thin streak of white and black - on the edge of the stage staring at the audience? Nah, see James. The man makes bass playing look so easy we should all take it up tomorrow." On the Street
"He loves Groucho's. He likes yachts. He's in love with Damien Hirst. Poor Alex - he came of age in the wrong decade." Damon Albarn
"Alex James (who, by the way, has always been the rock 'n roll element of the band)" Addict
"Alex has probably got the most pure pop taste of all of us. He likes everything from ABBA downwards. Perhaps because he's the one in the band who didn't have any classical music education, he's the one who likes more sugary things, in general. All the other three of us have some classical training." Dave Rowntree
"Snake-like bassist Alex James" Simon Williams, NME
"Alex on bass, too, plays lines way too adventurous for the blissed-out, beaming crowd to work out. But it sounds cool and mad and tuneful, so just get into it." David Cavanaugh, Select
"Elongated art school louche Alex. Not only was Alex cool, but better still, he was annoying as hell; he once actually said, 'The best this about being famous is never having to raise your voice.' Yeuch!" Paul Moody, NME
"Blur were back and the annoying one on bass was as smug as ever!" Paul Moody, NME
"Alex (bassist and cocktail king)" VOX
"A massive, sexist lump of brown-haired floppy c*nt" Graham Coxon
"He's in a band, he's classically better looking than the other three, he could make a decent living as a model if he ever had the urge, he's got a bone structure good enough to make a convincing woman for Blur's Parklife video (and had enough balls to walk into the pub afterwards still wearing lipstick, mini skirt and long brunette wig). Attention, in a variety of forms, has never escaped him." Elle Magazine
"I saw Alex, and I knew he was a musician — he looked a bit like a musician — and I can’t describe it, but I just wanted to write with him. I just sort of knew. I had this feeling the minute I saw him." Marianne Faithfull
"He’s a very, very confident man. I haven’t seen [Blur] onstage yet, and apparently he's amazing." Marianne Faithfull
"Though he was born in a small English seaside town, since he attended Goldsmith's College in South East London, Alex's bubbly voice hints of adopted cockneyed London tones. And his irony-laden, sarcasm splattered sense of humour is pure, traditional Brit." Linda Labon, Wall Of Sound
"Alex is a dickhead of such magnitude that next to him even Gazza seems bearable." anonymous Scottish journalist
"Arch-epicurean Alex is like a character from Brideshead Revisited." Paul Lester, journalist
"He is vagueness reincarnate, the antithesis of Reconstructed New Puritan Blur. The constant that illustrates how much his bandmates have changed. And, to be honest, a massive incongruity. Here is a man, after all, ostensibly promoting a record preoccupied with insecurity, the constricting pressure of fame, the shallowness of glamour... Attacking all the things he likes, in effect." NME, 1997
"People who call Blur middle-class dilettantes and think this is a bad thing have a field day with the faddish Alex James. This, after all, is the man behind the horrible Fat Les; the man who spent a month on the floor of a friend's brother's Cambridge student bedsit, insensible on vodka and lime cordial and writing a musical; someone, moreover, who gets his mother to OK his press photographs." Danny Eccleston, Q Magazine, 1999
"Alex James is one of life's genius swearers." Danny Eccleston, Q Magazine, 1999
"Gawd bless ‘im. He's not sure where he plays on the album." Damon
"He is science guru, cheese buff, pioneering spirit, pilot, Fat Les person, all-round flight commander for the journey into oblivion, and the sort of person who opens up his bar tab and doesn't give a hoot who uses it." Sylvia Patterson, The Face, 1999
"He's a mess, but it's a beautiful mess. His brown eyes still sparkle under a wayward fringe, his fine features still mark him out as uncommonly handsome beneath a two-day beard and a few extra pounds." Andrew Male, Select Magazine, September 1999
Read what the man himself has to say
Back to Alex
