‘It’s the right thing to do’

‘He lives in a house, a very big house in the country’. That may have been the refrain for which drummer Dave Rowntree and his band mates in Blur are best known, but these days you are more likely to find the softly-spoken 45-year-old pounding the streets in search of votes than hammering his snare drum on stage before thousands of fans.

Mr Rowntree is fresh from a triumphant summer of reunion gigs with Blur (including a headline slot at Glastonbury as well as two sell-out shows in London’s Hyde Park), but his mind is firmly on the upcoming general election. As the ‘vote Dave’ t-shirt he wore on stage this summer attests, the one-time Brit Pop kid has turned Labour Party prospective candidate for Westminster.

Sitting in the editor’s chair at Inside Housing’s Canary Wharf office, Mr Rowntree reveals why he was so keen to take charge of our special music issue. ‘Social housing is at the top of a pyramid of other issues,’ he says, slipping slightly hesitantly into politician mode.

‘If you don’t get it right a whole lot of other things don’t go right either. Bad housing leads to all kinds of illness, drug addiction, crime, disease, misery. Housing is a central issue in people’s quality of life. In my constituency…’ He laughs as he catches his mistake. ‘In my patch housing it is the number one issue when you talk to people - it is the number one thing they have problems with. Really, that’s why.’

This is not just the empty rhetoric of the pop star experiencing an attack of conscience - there is more. Much more. ‘There are three big issues with housing in Westminster,’ he says, getting into his stride.

‘Firstly, there is nowhere near enough social and affordable housing, full stop. Second, what we have is the wrong type. We have a lot of smallish one-bedroom accommodation and nowhere near enough two, three-bedroom plus accommodation. The third thing is that there is not enough priority given to local people when it comes to allocating housing.’

Echoing progressive left-wing Labour MP (and Inside Housing columnist) Jon Cruddas he adds that, although Labour has invested in housing, ‘…we could always do more… we have a lot further to go’.

On the night shift

If the fact that Mr Rowntree - a keen contract Bridge player as well as light aircraft pilot - is a housing anorak is surprising, his day job is more so. He has just begun his second year training as a solicitor - surely the antithesis of all things rock and roll.

‘I started working with a friend of mine in east London at a solicitor’s firm [two years ago] and was completely gob-smacked by what I found. There is an underclass that simply isn’t talked about at the moment. It’s the kind of people who the papers would talk about as feral or animals - and they’re our clients… You think when they were born their card was marked and it shouldn’t be that way.’

Mr Rowntree adds that he is on call with the firm one night a week, representing clients who have been arrested. ‘You never know what’s going to happen… Night shifts start at 5.30pm so sometimes you’ll get a call at 4pm saying “your first client’s at 5.30pm at Bishopsgate” and you stay at Bishopsgate police station for the whole night. Then you crawl into bed at 9 o’clock when the shift ends.’

Apparently he has been recognised ‘a couple of times by some Essex police officers’, but ‘gets by fairly anonymously as I don’t have a famous face’. In what seems to be characteristic understatement he adds: ‘I’m in a famous band - that’s all.’

All this is a far cry from the cosseted life of luxury that might be expected of a plane-flying Essex boy made good as a multi-millionaire by the time he was 40. He may retain an Estuary English twang, but Mr Rowntree - who describes himself as ‘a plodder’ and ‘a grunt’ - grew up in very different circumstances. He and his family lived in a private house on a mixed-tenure estate in 1970s Colchester.

‘Three of us [in Blur] grew up in Essex and [bassist] Alex [James] is from Bournemouth,’ he says. ‘There was a bleak side to Essex in the 70s that did inform what we did [as Blur]. Especially in somewhere like Chelmsford and the bigger towns where there hadn’t been any investment or regeneration for a generation - the place was just falling to bits. Punk music was nurtured in those types of environments as was dance music a generation later.’

It may well have been this sense of hopelessness that prompted the teenage Mr Rowntree to adopt rather radical political views. ‘As many Labour Party members do I started out a Communist and my views moderated over the years really,’ he says nonchalantly.

Mr Rowntree seems genuinely disappointed that college will prevent him attending the Labour Party conference this week. But he does have a few ideas for what prime minister Gordon Brown should do in Brighton to help shake-off the expenses scandal hangover and stand any chance of turning the polls around in his favour.

‘We need to reinvigorate the party and bring out those people once more who are doing it in order to give something back to their community. People are absolutely fed up to the back teeth of politicians - especially politicians telling them what to do. But if you go out and knock on the door and ask “what can I do for you?” it’s transformational,’ he enthuses. ‘I do what I do in the Labour Party because I believe it is the right thing to do.’

It sounds as though, unlike some politicians, that big house in the country is the last thing on Mr Rowntree’s mind.

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