Alex James, Corn Exchange, Brighton, May 21

12:29pm Thursday 22nd May 2008

"Please, not another question about cheese..." said a voice behind me in the closing question and answer session with former Blur bassist Alex James.

The flop-haired musician with arguably Britpop's biggest band has followed the rock and roll cliche of giving it all up and buying a big farmhouse in the country.

He was ostensibly in Brighton to push A Bit Of A Blur, his memoirs about being one of the 1990's biggest pop bands, but with music journalist Miranda Sawyer acting as his conversational foil, he seemed much more interested in talking about his new life in a country house.

It was only in the closing question and answer session that he expanded on life in the eye of the hurricane when the Blur vs Oasis battle was going on in summer 1995, and Blur began to break through in the early 1990s.

An intelligent and enter-taining speaker, he did point out how much has changed in the music industry over the past ten years, with the destruction of the two bastions of pop music: Smash Hits and Top Of The Pops.

And his reading of his role in the band, as basically a passenger travelling alongside the musical geniuses Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon, was surprisingly self-effacing.

But perhaps it was because of that role he didn't really expand on the music too much, referring mainly to the people he had met at the various parties. These ranged from meeting the Queen to a picturesque description of Wayne Sleep pirouetting on the bar at the Groucho Club as Moby played piano.

He did refer to the fact a Blur reunion wasn't likely to happen any day soon, although he didn't discount it ever happening.

And there was a dissection of the reasons why the band had broken up, pointing out the role of his own marriage and the ongoing antagonism between Graham and "left-handed oddbod" Damon.

But I suppose the story of the music is in the book. Instead, the audience was given an insight into where the former Britpop hell-raiser's head is at now - out in the fields with his sheep.

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