Blur’s Alex James was definitely on the naughty list one year.
In his new book Over the Rainbow: Tales from an Unexpected Year, per Metro UK, the “Song 2” musician, 56, revealed that was once kicked out of a church Christmas party for desecrating an “antique figurine of the naked baby Jesus.”
“I had been smoking in the room with the art and the objects, as usual,” he writes. “Someone I didn’t know had said, ‘I’m not sure if you’re allowed to smoke in here.’ I’d dutifully picked up a little ashtray on the sideboard where I was leaning and extinguished my cigarette.”
However, what James picked up was not in fact an ashtray. Instead, it was a statue of Jesus.
“Sadly, unlike some staterooms, not everything in this one was actually an ashtray,” he writes. “I’d happened upon an antique figurine of the naked baby Jesus and stubbed my [cigarette]-end out by rubbing it around in his crotch, quite obliviously.”
The incident got worse when he broke the figurine and tried to repair it.
“When I was alerted to what I’d done by the person who’d asked me to stop smoking, I tried to put a positive spin on it,” James writes. “I picked baby Jesus back up to demonstrate his robustness by tugging one of his little arms.”
He adds: “The arm came off along with a plume of impossibly fine, glittering, powdery dust.”
Luckily, James “managed to wedge it back on.”
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James gave up drinking alcohol in 2002 before he met his wife Claire Neates – the mother of his five children — and married her in April 2003.
In an interview with Red Magazine via Virgin Radio, the Blur bassist opened up about the differences between his life as an artist and at home parenting.
“The last time I went away, I dropped the kids at school and flew to Mexico City, where there were thousands of people waiting for us at the airport and hotel. When we got to the venue – a stadium – it was huge,” he said. “But afterward, you get home and you have to wash up and the kids are like, ‘Dad, stop being a w—–.'”
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