Blur's Dave Rowntree on capturing the band's early years on camera: 'nobody's posing'
When Blur drummer Dave Rowntree started taking pictures of his bandmates in the early 1990s, they were still a ‘tiny little band’ playing ‘quite unfashionable music’, he tells Paul Whitelaw, ahead of an appearance at the Fringe by the Sea
When Blur drummer Dave Rowntree decided to take some photos while on tour in the early 1990s, he had no idea they were about to become one of the biggest British bands of the decade. Their first album, Leisure, had just been released to mixed reviews, and although they'd scored a top ten hit with Baggy anthem There's No Other Way, they were generally regarded as Just Another Indie Band. Not that Blur cared less about that, as they were finally living their pop star dreams.
This is where we find them in No One You Know, Rowntree's charming compendium of candid photographs starring four young men - Rowntree, Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon and Alex James - having the absolute time of their lives.
“I didn't use the pictures where people were miserable," he smiles, "it's a little bit self-edited. But I think it captures the joy, the excitement, the enthusiasm and the fun of it all. It's easy to get caught up in the later period of the band's history when we were - after the Brits and Oasis and all of that - far more into the limelight. In those days we were a tiny little band playing quite unfashionable music and it wasn't at all clear that we were going to be successful."
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Rowntree's photographs also capture the distinct personalities of his bandmates.
“The photos I took were of people in the downtime, nobody's posing, they're just being themselves," he says. "We're goofing around and trying to cope with the boredom of sitting around between soundcheck and gig or travelling. When you're doing a photo shoot or on stage, everybody's playing a role to some extent, but that's not what I've got – I've got pictures of people when the TV cameras and interview tape recorders are all turned off. I've captured the people - not Damon from Blur but Damon Albarn.”
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The book follows the band on eye-opening tours of Japan and South America, where they were treated as far bigger stars than they actually were at the time.
As Rowntree explains, “The UK weekly music press had in those days a cache outside the UK, so that if you were on the cover of Melody Maker you could still be playing in a tiny little club in London to about 50 people, but people outside the UK had no idea, they thought if you were on the front cover of a paper you must be this great big band."
And how does he feel when he pores over these old photos of the friends he's known for almost 40 years?
"It's odd because when I look at Damon, Alex and Graham today, I still see the young people in those pictures. Very occasionally I get flashes of them as the middle-aged men that we all are now, but by and large when I look at Alex I still see the Alex with the floppy fringe and chiselled cheekbones. It's weird really.”
Dave Rowntree will be in conversation at Fringe By the Sea on 8 August at 1pm, see www.fringebythesea.com. No One You Know: Early Blur Photos is published by Hero Press on 9 September.
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