The great escape

Success in the music business usually comes quickly and at a young age, and it often seems to mess people up more than failure does. The standard tragedy of rock'n'roll renown is that being in a band - especially a really good one - is an almost impossible thing to ever let go of, and the rest of the band's lifetimes are spent trying to recapture some remote heyday with diminishing returns. Shaking your skinny ass every night and saying "Bollocks!" all day is a very different thing when you're 23 and when you're 38. Look at Mick Jagger. Look at Ozzy Osbourne. Gawd bless 'em but they both appear to me like small boys trapped in roles of grotesque caricature, like modern-day castrati.

In the case of Blur, though, the usual rock'n'roll trajectory has not happened. Quite the reverse. Since 2003's Think Tank, the most recent Blur record, one way or another and to our mutual astonishment, all four of us seem to have found ourselves as individuals. I have become a writer; Graham Cox-on has become, in every sense, an artist (an award-winning solo performer, fted painter and designer); Dave Rowntree, the quiet one, is a prospective politician; and Damon Albarn, the "mouthpiece of a generation", has sold yet another 10 million records and, as he launches his maiden opera, established himself as the significant composer of the past 20 years.

At the height of Blur's success, I remember wondering whether there would be life after rock'n'roll for any of us. I have since discovered that there is. So much else. A band is very much like a family, and we all eventually needed to leave the nest and start our own families. The most surprising thing is that we are all in better shape now than when we were getting mobbed in Sweden and driven everywhere from Narssasuaq to New South Wales under police escort. Don't get me wrong, though. It was all brilliant and I wouldn't change a damn thing. In fact, when the band first got together, it was something we all desperately needed. And somehow, I think all four of our lives might have been fairly disastrous without it.

When I moved to London in 1988, I told my mum I was going to do a French degree, but all I really wanted to do was join a band and make music so arresting that people forgot themselves when they heard it. Rather incredibly, as I was unloading my French books from my parents' car, the first person I laid eyes on was Graham Coxon. He was very pale and skinny, covered in paint and holding a guitar, which he had just retrieved from his parents' car.

I went to Goldsmiths by accident. I didn't know anything about it, other than that they taught French and that they'd have me despite my disastrous A-level results. I'd floundered into the most remarkable place in the world at that time. The 1990s actually began in 1988 in the students' union bar at Goldsmiths. Somehow or other, the drunkest people in that bar: various members of Blur - Graham Coxon, Damon Albarn and myself - and the active nucleus of the burgeoning British Art brigade - Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Sam Taylor Wood and others - went on to instigate a cultural revolution that reverberated throughout the worlds of art, music, rocket science and politics, filling the football terraces with song and the larger houses of the Hamptons and the world's great museums with contemporary art.

There was an ongoing sarcastic joke about how many geniuses there were in college that turns out not to have been that funny after all.

Graham and I became friends pretty much straight way. I liked his records and he liked mine. Highly artistic, stylish and quite fragile, he was already lead guitarist and backing vocalist in a band with Damon and Dave. I threw my lot in with theirs when Dave sacked the existing bass player and the rhythm guitarist. As characters we were all quite easy to sketch out: Ginger (Rowntree), scary (Albarn), posh (James) and Graham (Coxon), as Q magazine had it.

While Graham and I may have been friends from the start, my initial reaction to the other band members (who all came from Colchester) was less straightforward. Damon and I did-n't hit it off instantly. The fearless frontman, singer and keyboard player is a very strong character: charismatic, ambitious and determined. He likes to wrestle; it's how he gets to know people. I argued with him until we'd played music together - at which point, he and I became staunch allies. As for Dave the drummer - then a computer programmer for Colchester council - I didn't know what to make of him. Over the years I've flown to Africa with him in a light aircraft that the two of us have shared ownership of, been his bridge partner, made records with him, produced records with him, been to Iceland, Greenland, New York City and watched the spaceship, Beagle 2 - which we composed the call-sign for - crash land on Mars. But 20 years after he first made me a cup of tea at the Beat Factory, the recording studio where we met, he remains a pragmatic yet inscrutable, silent karate presence. I still never know what he is thinking about.