Alex James promises 'special airing' of one particular Scarborough song for his Open Air Theatre concert

The Blur bassist is visiting Scarborough's Open Air Theatre on Friday, July 17 as part of a nationwide tour of his Britpop Classical show, featuring a band and full orchestra.

The biggest hits of the era from artists including Oasis, Blur, Pulp and Supergrass will be given a new dimension with classical arrangements, turning them into sweeping, cinematic performances.

"Like many of the best things that have ever happened, it was more of an accident, if not a complete catastrophe that was behind it!," says James.

"My day job now is organising Feastival, which I absolutely love doing.

"My wife and I bought a farm on our honeymoon.

"We started making cheese and then sparkling wine.

"Food is very close to our heart, and we have five kids, so filling the farm up with this brilliant food, music and family festival every summer is all-consuming.

"I love doing it, it's the most fun I've ever had, but every year there's a challenge in securing decent headliners for the weekend.

"The year before last, our headliner dropped out, so everybody was going 'aaaargh, what do we do?' and the booker was saying 'Alex, trust me, Ministry of Sound Classical, you're going to love it, it's 90 minutes of hits' and I didn't trust him at all because nothing's 90 minutes of hits.

"But I watched it and it was 90 minutes of hits, it was amazing, best headliner we've ever had. Brilliant songs, the whole production was brilliant.

"I went running backstage afterwards saying 'we have to do a Britpop version of this next year'.

"So I had a few meetings with the core team from Ministry and we got it down to four-and-a-half hours of stuff you absolutely have to do.

"Normally, your artists are looking for 90 minutes of material to build a headline show but this was the opposite problem.

"We got one rehearsal with the orchestra before we played Feastival last year.

"And it's two very different schools - pop music rarely gets written down, it's all by ear, whereas orchestras stick to what's on the page otherwise it's chaos.

"So it's a bit like putting Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall in a Michelen star kitchen, or trying to do street food at Claridge's.

"It was terrifying at the rehearsal, I opened to the doors at this huge production hangar, tripped over some tubular bells, fell into a harp and there was a symphony orchestra there, it was daunting!

"But we fired into Creep by Radiohead, we got halfway through and everybody was crying, it was so emotive.

"And at Feastival, it exceeded all expectations, it went way better than anyone imagined, and the next day the phone was ringing saying 'do you want to take it on the road?'"

James' excitement and enthusiasm for the project spill out with every word; three decades on from the height of Britpop, the passion and power of that era still shines brightly.

"There's definitely a nostalgia element to it," he says.

"I think the music of your teenage years never leaves you.

"The food of your childhood, the music of your teenage years, it's baked in forever on your hard drive.

"What I noticed when Blur got back together in 2023 was it was kids buying the tickets, it was 18 to 32-year-olds.

"So all this music has found a whole new audience and the people who loved it still love it.

"And they're just not making bands anymore, it's gone back to more of a pre rock 'n' roll model where there was a small handful of huge, global megastars.

"Bands don't really work as a business proposition.

"But there's something really special and fun (about that time), it was just kids expressing themselves, letting rip and that still resonates all these years later.

"There's so many people on stage with Britpop Classical and the energy you get from that is really infectious.

"That and the familiarity of the material. When you have a big crowd of people and you present them with stuff they're familiar with and they love, it can't go wrong."

If the following description of the show doesn't make you want to stop reading this article and see if there are any tickets left, then you've either already looked or Britpop wasn't your thing.

"They're all great songs which will give you goosebumps if you sing them in the shower," James says of the show's setlist.

"The songs are good enough that if you just play them with an acoustic guitar, they make you cry.

"We've just added orchestra juice. A lot of them have string parts on already, and some of them really benefit from the dynamics and nuance you get (from an orchestra).

"It starts with a heritage suite, which is just the band ripping into The Beatles, The Kinks, T-Rex, Bowie and The Two, blam, blam, blam for two-and-a-half minutes, wake everybody up.

"Then the lights come on the orchestra, who go into this huge crescendo of Riverboat Song by Ocean Colour Scene, Simon from Ocean Colour Scene comes out and smashes that one, everyone's like 'wow'.

"Then Saffron from Republica comes out with Ready To Go.

"There was an embarrassment of riches in terms of what songs to pick.

"It's all about how well they knit together and go with the orchestra, but it's totally exhilirating.

"It's a brilliant thing to be part of."

James' top three priorities in life might now be his five children, cheese and sparkling wine, but music remains in his bones.

"That's how I remember what I was doing when, by what Blur record was out!," he says.

"It's very closely linked to memory is music.

"If I hear a song I liked when I was young, that's always a nice moment but when you get to my age, if you hear a song you didn't like at the time; I was in the car the other day and The Sun Always Shines On TV by A-Ha came on the radio and I didn't like them at the time but by the end I knew every word and was singing my head off.

"There's some weird, mystic quality that music has that makes you come over all nostalgic.

"The nineties was a time of profound peace and prosperity, London was exciting, rents were relatively cheap.

"There were lots of record labels. It was possible to eke out a living, living in a transit van, playing in pubs every night, selling a few hundred copies of your EP.

"But music doesn't work on a smaller scale now. All those pubs Blur used to play at have gone.

"I guess they've been replaced by festivals, but that whole infrastructure has collapsed and it's gone back to a pre-rock 'n' roll model.

"You can have absolutely massive stars like Taylor Swift but you can't really do anything on a medium scale and you definitely can't do anything on a small scale anymore.

"There's less risks being taken because finances are really tight in record labels.

"Big artists can't afford to fail and bands are like running a stately home, they're really impractical, costly. They seem like an anachronistic luxury.

"I watched Charli xcx at Glastonbury, great show, but there was no evidence of any other musicians on stage at all.

"It's all about focusing on the singer, and that's a much easier show to run.

"This is the complete opposite, there's a million people on the stage!

"But that's the way I like it."

And maybe there'll even be a special airing of one particular song for the Scarborough show.

"Talking of classical music - or music as it used to be called - Scarborough Fair, the folk song, is one of the oldest known songs," Alex says.

"We know what ancient architecture was like, we've got ancient artworks, there are ancient manuscripts, we know what ancient literature and ancient mathematics look like.

"But ancient music, we're not certain, because it wasn't really written down, but Scarborough Fair is one of the oldest known tunes.

"That was reset on Simon and Garfunkel's greatest hits, which was the best selling album of all time when I was a kid.

"It's always been one of my favourites. What a wonderful song, it's always made me cry that song.

"So sad, so beautiful."