Rock wildman Alex James has divulged an outrageous anecdote where he was ejected from a church during Christmas for desecrating a baby Jesus statue with his cigarette. The audacious Blur bassist recounted how, at a festive gathering last year, he mistakenly used a “antique figurine of the naked baby Jesus” antique figurine as an ashtray.
The 56 year old recalled the scandalous tale: “I had been smoking in the room with the art and the objects, as usual. Someone I didn’t know had said, ‘I’m not sure if you’re allowed to smoke in here’.”
Unwittingly causing a ruckus, he continued, “I’d dutifully picked up a little ashtray on the sideboard where I was leaning and extinguished my cigarette. Sadly, unlike some staterooms, not everything in this one was actually an ashtray.”
Drawing gasps from religious onlookers, James detailed further, “I’d happened upon an antique figurine of the naked baby Jesus and stubbed my fag-end out by rubbing it around in his crotch, quite obliviously.”
Not stopping at the unintentional blasphemous act, he also broke the figurine and bumbled his way through a botched repair. Attempting to lighten the atmosphere with humor, he added, “I tried to put a positive spin on it,” laughing at his own mishap.
“I even picked baby Jesus back up to demonstrate his robustness by tugging one of his little arms. The arm came off along with a plume of impossibly fine, glittering, powdery dust.”
Despite the catastrophe, he somehow managed to reattach the limb. Swapping his raucous lifestyle for the bucolic peace of farm life in the Cotswolds, where he resides with his family, James reflects on his significantly more tranquil present, reports the Daily Star.
The Parklife sensation, who has been sober since 2002, shares his home life with wife Claire Neates and their family of five. Opening up about domestic life post-tour, he confessed, “You get home after a tour otherwise,” alongside “You get home and you have to wash up and the kids are like, ‘Dad, stop being a [redacted].'”.