Blur drummer Dave Rowntree on photographing the rollercoaster ride of the band pre-fame

Before their 1994 album Parklife shot them to stardom, the band Blur were much like many other bands teetering on the cusp of making it big; incessantly touring; barely sleeping; and exhilarated by days spent doing nothing but pouring over new hooks, lyrics and beats.

What so few of these bands have is extensive, first-hand documentation of their early days, but for Blur this is something that drummer Dave Rowntree has had sitting in boxes for decades. Now, his off-the-cuff shots of unexpected nap times, rollercoaster rides and aimless wanderings around new countries and continents (all exclusively taken on his trusty Olympus OM-10) have been published for the first time in a new photobook, No One You Know.

It was only over the Covid lockdowns that Dave realised – after having dismissed the images as mere ‘snapshots’ for his own enjoyment – that he had something really special: an unfiltered portrait of four musicians (and friends), that wasn’t styled, planned or directed, as so much mainstream visual media connected to the music industry tends to be. In conversation with It’s Nice That, Dave details the experience of taking these photographs, all fuelled by the excitement he felt as a young man in his twenties who left a job in the computer department of Colchester borough council to pursue his dreams in (soon to be) one of the biggest bands of the Britpop era.

INT: It’s a nice insight, because it’s not really the side of bands you get to see that much.

DR: Yes, nobody’s posing, nobody’s trying to make sure they look good. Nobody’s fiddling with their hair to make sure that it’s just floppy enough. It’s just friends hanging out. And what I think that it does capture is the excitement that we we’re feeling. It definitely felt like the start of something, even though it wasn’t clear what that something was going to be, because the music we were making was incredibly unfashionable at the time. During the very early days of the band, American music was king in the UK, and we were playing these tiny clubs, to tiny audiences, we weren’t charting and nobody knew who we were. That’s why I used what the bus driver put on the front of his bus as the title for the book [No One You Know] because that was absolutely true, nobody did. The only people writing about us were the UK weekly music press.

INT: So the core of the book is divided into locations, Japan, Canada, USA and Mexico. Why did this feel like the right way to format it?

DR: Actually, that was the hardest part – putting the photos in some kind of order. I tried lots of different ways of doing it, and it just never felt particularly satisfying, never felt like it was telling any kind of story. In the end, I had to stop looking at the photos and I just put them in folders and gave the folders descriptive names. Then I started shuffling the folders around, and seeing what that meant, seeing what the order of the photos ended up looking like. When I started doing it that way, I didn’t make any progress at all, and then I discovered the folder names don’t really describe what the photo, or what four or five photos in it are actually saying.

So basically, the order of the photos evolved quite naturally out of that process. I think because these were our first tours of these various places, really. The first few years of the band was the first time we’d been to North America, the first time we’d been to Japan, the first time we’d been to, well, everywhere, really, outside of the European holiday destinations. None of us had traveled extensively, and we were just dazzled and overwhelmed by these places. Taking note of the view out of the hotel window was a recurring theme of mine, because I’d been to hotels and looked at the view out of the window in seaside towns in England. But looking out the hotel window and seeing a Tokyo skyline, it was, wow.

INT: We’re currently seeing a resurgence in interest in Britpop right now with the return of Oasis this year. A lot of younger people who weren’t alive during the era, are really enamoured by its visual culture. Why do you think it appeals to younger generations of today, this Britpop vibe and energy?

DR: I think there’s two answers to that. The first answer is that the 90s were long enough ago that a generation has grown up and can rediscover it, and it feels like theirs. Every generation gets that. I wasn’t old enough really to remember The Beatles playing, but my generation kind of rediscovered them.

Also, music has changed to some extent with new technology. It feels a bit more throwaway now, and I think people are yearning for music to mean something a bit, for it all to be a bit more tangible, a bit less ephemeral. In the 90s, if somebody asked you what you did in your spare time, and you said, “I listen to music”, they would know what you meant. It wouldn’t just mean you have some music on in the background. You would go around to friends’ houses and play records you just bought. You’d read the sleeves, you’d talk about them, you’d be reading the music press. It would be this kind of vibrant, alive thing, full of personalities, full of meaning, full of manifestos.

Music is no longer a thing that people ‘do’ – it’s an accompaniment to stuff. It’s something that’s sort of given away when you buy something else you know, I think for people consuming it’s all a bit valueless. In a very positive way, I think people now want something else out of the music. They want it to be about real people, flawed characters, not these kind of whitewashed, varnished Instagram musicians. I think things are starting again to move in a slightly more positive direction.

INT: Yes, I constantly feel that when I start liking a band I’m in a constant battle to work out whether I do actually like it, or have I been sold it by my algorithm…

I read in another interview that as things got bigger and you started getting more traction, you stopped taking photographs. Why was that?

DR: I told myself at the time that it was because I wanted to actually experience life in a band and not just look through a camera viewfinder at other people living life in a band. It wasn’t true – I was getting less and less happy, actually. I was getting less and less thrilled by all the things that were going on around me. So, yeah – I’m happy again now! But it did take its toll. It was a hell of a grind. You know, they say when the Gods wish to punish you, they answer your prayers. I wanted nothing more than to be a pop star, so it turned out that I would, but I wasn’t particularly well equipped to handle it. So it took me a few years to figure out what it was that I needed to do to change my life in order to be able to deal with that. There’s another book in that – how to cope with being a pop star. I’m sure it would do very well, honestly.