Dave Rowntree

David Alexander De Horne Rowntree (born 8 May 1964) is an English musician, politician, solicitor, composer and animator.

David Alexander De Horne Rowntree was born in Colchester, Essex, at Colchester Maternity Hospital on 8 May 1964, to musical parents – Susan, a viola player, and John, a sound engineer at the BBC.

He has an older sister named Sara.

He attended the Gilberd School in Colchester during the week, and the Landermere Music School, Thorpe-le-Soken, at weekends, where he studied percussion.

He played percussion with his father in the Colchester Silver Band, a brass band.

After leaving school he studied for a Higher National Diploma (HND) in Computer Science at Thames Polytechnic, and started his career as a computer programmer for Colchester Borough Council.

Rowntree played in bands with Graham Coxon while they were growing up in Colchester.

He also knew Coxon's father, who taught jazz classes at Landermere.

In 1989, Coxon introduced Rowntree to Damon Albarn, who was forming a band around Goldsmiths, University of London.

Rowntree was asked to join and left his job to move to London.

With the addition of Alex James, and after two name changes, the band settled on Blur and were signed to Food Records, which was distributed through EMI.

EMI later acquired Food Records and Blur were absorbed into EMI.

In 1998 Rowntree's life-long fascination with space led him to get involved in the Beagle 2 Mars mission.

The previous year the European Space Agency (ESA) had announced its first planetary mission, an orbiter named the Mars Express.

The Open University's Prof Colin Pillinger proposed it should carry a lander dedicated to looking for life and conducting scientific analyses.

Rowntree and fellow band member Alex James became involved after taking a behind the scenes tour at Houston's NASA space centre.

They were struck by how many of the people they met there were British and wondered why they had to go to America to do space research and work in the industry.

When they got back to the UK, they came across Beagle 2 while looking for UK space projects and pledged to support it.

At that time, the cost of the lander project was estimated at £25 million and did not have wide support.

Rowntree and James joined the Beagle 2 team in 1998 to help with PR.

They used their platform to help promote the project.

Their support attracted high-profile support from the artist Damien Hirst and industry and financial backers.

And after years of lobbying, the UK Government and ESA agreed to help finance the project.

The Mars Express mission, carrying Beagle 2, was launched in June 2003.

It carried a signature tune written by Blur to be beamed back from Mars to announce the lander's arrival and one of Hirst's trademark spot paintings to be used for the calibration of Beagle 2's cameras.

The Beagle 2 lost contact with earth but was spotted on Mars' surface ten years later by the UK Space Agency in images taken by a NASA orbiter.

Rowntree says: "In the same way that Damien Hirst got the first artwork on Mars, we got the first music on Mars."

He also directed two series of the South Park-esque animated show Empire Square, which made its TV debut on Channel 4 on 18 February 2005.

In 2014 Rowntree started as a presenter for Global Radio's alternative rock radio station XFM (now Radio X) with a regular show on Sunday nights.

On his first show he played songs by John Lennon, Elbow and The Polyphonic Spree, interspersed with discussions with his studio friend, "researcher George", on "nerdy" topics like Mars.

He is the drummer for the rock band Blur and was a Labour Party councillor for Norfolk County Council from 2017 until 2021.

On 31 July 2018, Rowntree appeared in the video for Slaves' released single, "Chokehold", as a drummer auditioning for a part in the band.

Rowntree hosts The Dave Rowntree Podcast Show on Spotify with "researcher George".

The first series was six episodes long, starting with an episode of Rowntree's "go to" music for challenging times released in November 2020.

In November 2021, Rowntree signed a deal with Cooking Vinyl for his first solo record.

In a statement, Rowntree said, "As a kid I used to spend hours spinning the dial on my radio, dreaming of escape to all the places whose exotic stations I heard. I've tried to make an album like that – tuning through the spectrum, stopping at each song telling a story about a turning point in my life, then spinning the dial and moving on."

His first solo single, "London Bridge", was released on 5 July 2022.

Rowntree's first solo album, Radio Songs, was released on 20 January 2023.

Rowntree is a computer animator and owned an animation company called Nanomation for eleven years.

Clients included advertising agencies and The 11 O'Clock Show.