Those drummer jokes, about cavemen clubbing their kits with sticks? They don’t apply to Dave Rowntree.
He’s many things, best known for his prowess behind the drumkit with the legendary Britpop band Blur. He’s also a member of the Labour Party who was selected as the UK political party’s candidate for the Mid Sussex constituency in the 2024 general election, and has previously stood as candidate in the Cities of London and Westminster. And, with his advocacy hat on, he launched a class action lawsuit again PRS over the collecting society’s black box distribution rules (a UK court dismissed the suit last week).
The caveman gene skipped Rowntree, clearly.
As the ‘Oasis Live ’25’ tour works its way across US stadiums, a reunion most of us thought had a snowball’s chance in peak summer Darwin, some credit is due to Rowntree, the timekeeper and champion.
“I’ve been nagging them for years to do it. Saying, ‘If we can do it, you can do it,’” he tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ. “So, I was very pleased.”
Blur and Oasis were once the bitterest of rivals in indie music, a class war, a north vs south battle stoked by the British music press. At its most fiery, the beef was top tabloid fodder, a mainstream story in the broadsheets, and its lines were marked on the sales charts.
Who knows where it started. Perhaps it was Liam Gallagher’s abrasive comments about Alex James, or the retort. “Everything was mended fairly soon afterwards. It was out of a genuine argument on a drunken night out with Damon and Liam,” Rowntree tells us in a late afternoon chat at Summa House in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley, on the fringes of BIGSOUND 2025, where he had just delivered a keynote interview with Richard Kingsmill.
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“But it grew organically to a kind of cartoonish, buffoonish size, egged on by the music press. It was fashionable in those days to slag off other bands, in a way that it isn’t now. But it was expected that you would hate all the other bands and think they were rubbish and the more comically outrageous you could be about them, the more column inches you could have.”
These wars of words never came to blows. “There was no way anybody from Oasis was going to shoot anybody from Blur,” he admits.
It’s no surprise that Rowntree, now 61, played a gentle hand in keeping the flame alive for both bands. For all their successes (and rare failures) Blur’s members have enjoyed in and outside of the band, the advances in styles, the changes in music, Blur’s classic lineup has never changed. The foursome of Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, James, and Rowntree came together in the late ‘80s, and have done so at irregular intervals ever since.
From the early Noughties, Blur’s album releases have been spread out, and each has been a welcome surprise. Fans had to wait a dozen years between Think Tank, which dropped in 2003, and The Magic Whip, which cracked in 2015. Another eight years would pass before The Ballad of Darren, which arrived in 2023. All of them opened at No. 1 on the Official UK Albums Chart, on which Blur have accumulated seven leaders.
Will there be more where those collections came from?
“Are there any plans? No, but there never are any plans. I wouldn’t read too much into that,” Rowntree admits. “We finished the last tour, we all sat down at the end of it and said, ‘That was good. Do that again.’ Of course, the months then roll on and everyone starts going, ‘But it’s so much of work, it was so hard having all these girls screaming at us. It was tough. I was conflicted,’” he says with a smile.
“You have to work your way through that, really. It takes a few years, and it takes somebody coming up with an interesting idea, always. Because the last thing we want to do is just churn out the hits over and over again for the rest of our careers. We’d rather just split up than do that. So it takes somebody to come out with an interesting idea that we can all get in around, and that’s what’s always happened.”
When the magic last happened, Blur played their first-ever shows at Wembley Stadium in July 2023, performing to over 150,000 fans across two nights, documented in a live album and film released the following year.
“You can’t say no to that,” Rowntree says. And the band couldn’t say “no” in 2009 when, after being apart for five years, they were asked to headline the British Summer Time (BST) series of concerts at London’s Hyde Park. In 2012, when the Olympic Games came to London, “we got the phone call, ‘Would you like to headline the party at the end of the Olympics?’ What hard-hearted bastard could say ‘no’ to that. The only possible answer is ‘yes.’ That was a wonderful time. It transformed London. It’ll do the same here [in Brisbane].”
The transformation in the fortunes of grassroots venues, under pressures from every angle, can’t come soon enough.
“COVID did for a lot of them,” Rowntree continues, “and the ones that haven’t, they’re being done for by the fact that young people have got so much other stuff, perhaps more engaging stuff, to spend their money on. And Britain’s in such dire economic circumstances, as are many countries of the world. So yeah, it’s a real problem.” The same issues, of course, apply to Australia, a place where Rowntree spent three months on honeymoon back in 1994, peak-era Britpop.
“I think that live music is one of the few things that’s going to survive relatively unscathed from the AI behemoth,” he insists. “There are two things we need to be concentrating on. Music makers have got to get out of their bedrooms, and they’ve got to get onto stages. And we’ve got to find a way of tempting people back into small gigs.
“We’ve got to make it more interesting for them. People don’t just want to stand on a sticky floor in a smelly sweatbox, holding an expensive beer. And it’s up to that artists to come up with a solution. It’s not up to the audience, not up to the venue. It’s up to the artists. We’re supposed to be the creative people.”
Now that Blur vs. Oasis is the enlarged, creative English family we never expected to see, did Rowntree catch the rockers on their UK run?
“No, I bought tickets but unfortunately then I wasn’t able to go, so I gave them to somebody else,” he tells us. “But I hear on the grapevine that it might not be the last tour ever.”
