Blur’s Dave Rowntree: ‘I still wake at 3am thinking I’ve frittered my life away’

Drummer, lawyer, composer, politician… Blur’s busiest member on the troubled childhood that influenced his new solo album, Radio Songs, and the band’s summer time reunion gigs

A few weeks before Christmas, and the planning meetings have just finished for two of 2023’s most anticipated gigs, by a British band who first rehearsed together 35 years ago. In July, Blur are as a result of play two nights at the 90,000-capacity Wembley Stadium (only one concert was originally scheduled, however it bought out in two minutes). Their blend of ideas from British popular culture’s previous, combined with the peculiar optimism at the end of the last century, made them one of many largest bands of the 1990s; they’ve solely made two albums since, both of them tentative, tender however pretty: 2003’s Think Tank and 2015’s The Magic Whip.

The day before I meet the band’s drummer, Dave Rowntree, he was with singer Albarn, guitarist Graham Coxon and bassist Alex James in an undisclosed location in London, plotting the rough form of the Wembley gigs, with devices on their laps. “It was good! That is the enjoyable bit before we’re enjoying the set over and again and again, staring sullenly at our telephones between songs,” Rowntree tells me. On this vibrant winter morning he is at Tate Trendy in London’s Bankside sporting a hoodie and carrying luggage of the garments he has just worn for the Observer’s photoshoot. He had his portrait taken in the gallery subsequent to Cildo Meireles’s Babel, a murmuring, ominous tower of a sculpture that he’s all the time liked, made up of lots of of analogue radios. Oblivious ageing hipsters and midlifers, who will definitely have danced to his drumbeats, cross him by.