Blurry photos: Blur drummer Dave Rowntree talks his brand new photography book

Tell me about the book. What inspired you to put it out after all these years?

It was finding the photos again. I lost them for probably 25 years and didn't find them again until the country went into lockdown. Tim Burgess from The Charlatans did these Twitter listening parties, where they’d get people across the world to listen to an album and someone from the band would narrate it on Twitter. I was lucky enough to do three of those for Blur, and so by the third, I was kind of desperate for images to tweet. When I found them I was blown away by what was there. They were very different from the pictures I remember taking. They cover the first three or four years of the band, so right up to the release of our first album Leisure.

Why is it called No One You Know? I can’t trace that as a reference to a song lyric or anything…

It's from our first American tour. The bus had a hand-cranked roller that used to have the destinations on, and the driver had customised this to describe the band that he had on the bus. He took one look at us and put that up there and that became our tagline for the whole of the first American tour. He was a very acerbically witty guy, but he was right. At that time, nobody knew who we were. We were a tiny band playing relatively unfashionable music, traveling around the world together for the first time. It was a weird juxtaposition of a jet-set life, yet still getting home without a penny to rub together. It was in the days before digital cameras became popular and no-one else was documenting it apart from me. 

Do you feel you learned anything new about yourself or your bandmates from looking back through those old photos three decades later?

Two things, really. Because we know each other so well, and have spent so much time with each other, we're kind of like brothers, really, for better or worse. You don't really notice your family aging, do you? So whenever I look at the band, I still see the kids in those photos. When I look at Damon, I still see the twenty-year-old Damon. It’s only every so often, there's this kind of glitch in the matrix and suddenly the kind of middle-aged us pokes through. 

Secondly, it made me realise how much fun we were having. I remember it being bloody hard work in those early days, but what comes across in the pictures is the joy we were taking in it all. It was what we'd always dreamed of doing and the first time any of us had been to these places and started immersing ourselves in the different cultures. I think it probably allowed us the kind of perspective that travel gives you, allowed us to figure out what it meant to be English too and what we liked about the place. It was after that tour that we really started to focus on Englishness, a theme that ran through at least our next few albums. In some ways it was the beginning of Britpop, really.

I'm told the journalist Miranda Sawyer worked with you on the book. Can you tell us a bit about her role?

She was the editor, and the motivating force behind it. I’d never put a book together before and I was struggling with it on my own for six months, not knowing how to do it. So I sent her a selection of the photos, and she showed me the ropes and helped me come up with techniques for things. This ranged from selecting and ordering the photos, to writing all the captions.

The first time I saw Blur, I was fourteen years old, and you played a gig at the Heineken Beer Festival in Nottingham. It was a free gig with no barriers or anything and was a pretty seminal moment in my teenage life. Do you remember anything about that gig?

Not that specific gig, I’m afraid as there was always a lot of booze involved back then and it was thirty-odd years ago. But we played Nottingham quite a lot. It was one of those early places that kind of took us to their hearts, really. We could be guaranteed a good audience and guaranteed to have a good show. 

Another Blur in Nottingham memory I have is of you playing at Rock City in 1997 in the same week Beetlebum went to number one. What are your memories of that time?

Well, there was a shift and it seemed that mainstream music changed pretty quickly. For most of our early career, people's focus was on something else. First there was Manchester, and then Nirvana and grunge. But suddenly there was us and Oasis, and a few other bands doing something quite different, and the mainstream switched almost overnight. As for Rock City itself, it was always part of what was rather disparagingly called ‘toilet circuit’, wasn't it? Although I'm not sure if Rock City was included in that, because I think it was always quite nice for musicians backstage compared to a lot of the other places we played. 

More recently, outside of Blur, you’ve been making soundtrack music for film and TV. This included the excellent 2018 documentary, Bros: After the Screaming Stops. How did you get involved in that?

Nowadays film scores are my day job really, but that film started it all for me. I knew the director and he rang me at 6pm one day and said, I need this by 9am tomorrow. I managed to do it and after I started to get offered other work too. I've been in the studio this week finishing off a score for the BBC show The Capture and I've currently got another two shows on the go, one for Amazon and one for Channel 5. It keeps me busy and out of trouble. 

Dave Rowntree will be in conversation with BBC Nottingham’s Dean Jackson about No-one You Know at Metronome on Friday 10 April 2026. Tickets are priced at £15 face value. 

metronome.uk.com