Blur's Alex James told Soccer AM why he has temporarily hung up his bass to invent new types of cheese!
Rock star chooses 'foodio' over studio
Once upon a time when a footballer hung up his boots he would go and open a nice quiet pub in the country somewhere.
Nowadays our mega-rich stars head to Hollywood, start record or film companies, become pundits or simply sit back and watch their millions grow in the bank.
But what do our favourite rock 'n' roll stars do? Well, if you're Blur's Alex James you start a successful career inventing and making cheese!
Blur might not have officially disbanded, and James has by no means hung up his bass for good. However, it's clear that right now his heart lies firmly, as he puts it, in his 'foodio' rather than the studio!
"I always have loved cheese. Some musicians get knickers thrown at them, I got cheese thrown at me!" he told
Soccer AM.
"When I say I'm a cheese maker people wonder what it means - am I milking cows or wobbling blamange? But I'm just inventing recipes and it's really good fun.
"In a world where everything is getting more and more the same, cheese is kind of getting more and more different, isn't!?
"Every time you turn your back there's like three new ones. We're making like 916 different types of cheeses in Britain.
"There's more happening foodwise in Britain than anywhere else in the world. Our chefs are more famous than our rock stars now, and we've sort of discovered our taste buds as a nation.
"We used to be the laughing stock of Europe foodwise. Everyone used to snigger about our food.
"A lot of people are (still) eating bumper packs of Turkey Twizzlers, but if you want to get good food in this country now, you can."
Farm
A food columnist for The Sun, James does most of his inventing and making at his burgeoning cheese farm in the Cotswolds.
And the 42-year-old's cheeses are so good he's even won awards for them. That said, his kids haven't always been as impressed with his new skills in the kitchen as the judges!
"I was making some sort of posh goat's cheese and I told the kids we were going to have some daddy's special goat's cheese for dinner and they all started crying and said they wanted cheese on toast!" he added.
"So I went back to the drawing board and tried to conceive some more everyday bloketastic cheeses.
"I've spent a long time making the perfect shaped cheese on toast slice. So it's the same shape as a slice of bread and exactly the right thickness, because cheese on toast is like... well, it doesn't get any better!"
