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Music

This Video of Alex James Eating Churros Suggests He's a Tory Now

Come on mate, you've been dancing around the subject for years.
Lauren O'Neill
London, GB

Alex James from Blur famously refuses to talk about his political leanings. Alex James, of Blur fame, was photographed on his own farm with David Cameron and Jeremy Clarkson in 2011, and ever since just won't say whether he votes Conservative or Labour or Green because "if there's one thing I've learned," he told The Guardian, "it's that, for anyone with a media profile, party politics is just completely toxic." But Alex James out of Blur has been a cheese farmer for a good few years now, which is basically code for "Alex James out of Blur is a big old Tory now." Potentially Alex James was always a Tory but because he was the bassist, nobody was really that arsed about what he thought, and he went undetected for years, before all but announcing his Tory-hood by becoming a cheese farmer.

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One of the things that Alex James does in his capacity as a cheese farmer is that every summer, he throws a music festival on his cheese farm, which is in, you've guessed it, the actual Cotswolds. It is called "The Big Feastival" and it is kind of like Glastonbury for people who own rowing blazers, and its sell is that it is supposedly where "music meets food". This year "The Big Feastival" will feature Olly Murs for the mums and Madness for the dads, and they'll all boogie on down while chomping away on the barbecued legs of the organic, grass-fed, free-range-reared cousins of the pig that David Cameron ('allegedly') put his flaccid dick inside, along with other delicacies that cost upwards of ten pounds a whack.

In the run-up to the event, James and co. are really going in on this "music meets food" idea, and they've even shared a promotional video called "Top Chewns" (because another way to say that something is a good song is to say that it is a 'top tune' and you 'chew' food and 'chew' sounds the first sound in 'tune' do you understand) to get everyone excited. The clip, which you can see above, features James with a scientist called Dr Ophelia Deroy. In it he seems to essentially try to move his body in time to music without looking like an alien being played music for the first time after being shown a video of human beings dancing, to see if the taste of food changes depending on what you're listening to.

I, of course, have got some questions about this. First of all: as if, as if, millionaire Alex James has the gall to use not the music of the artists playing his event in this video (and surely that would be more useful to attendees – maybe they would like to know if a pulled beef slider tastes different when you munch on it to Louisa Johnson rather than to something else on the bill called 'Gentleman's Dub Club,' for example), instead of using the kind of free shit you get in the YouTub music library. Secondly: churros should be protected at all costs and they still look perfect here, even in this video's bizarre context. And thirdly: isn't it weird to think that Alex James, a man who here, is wearing an unbuttoned shirt under a jumper like yer ever-loving da, was once in one of the two most talked-about bands in the UK? Isn't it hard to remember that this man, who moves to music like he is being pushed about by an arhythmic, invisible force and raises his voice when he's got headphones on, was ever Cool? It's actually sort of poignant: everything changes, nothing lasts forever. Which means that it's inevitable that your man out of Blur would become painfully uncool and transform before our very eyes into a Tory cheese farmer, really. The world turns on its axis, man.

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