Alex James got kicked out of a church Christmas party after stubbing out his cigarette on an “antique figurine of the naked baby Jesus”.
The 56-year-old Blur bassist shared the hilarious antidote from a festive gathering last year in his ‘Over The Rainbow: Tales from an Unexpected Year’ tome.
He recalled: “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’.
“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.
“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.”
To make matters worse, he broke the figurine and attempted to put it back together.
Alex went on: “When I was alerted to what I’d done by the person who’d asked me to stop smoking, I tried to put a positive spin on it.
“I 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.
“I managed to wedge it back on.”
The cheese-making musician swapped out his wild partying lifestyle – which peaked during the ‘90s Britpop era – to reside on a farm in the Cotswolds in South West England with his large family.
The ‘Parklife hitmaker met his wife, Claire Neates – the mother of his five children – after ditching alcohol in 2002, and Alex previously admitted the adjustment between his two very different lifestyles can be tricky.
The festival owner – who runs The Big Feastival on his farm – told Red magazine: “The last time I went away, I dropped the kids at school and flew to Mexico City, where there were thousands of people waiting for us at the airport and hotel.
“When we got to the venue – a stadium – it was huge.
“But afterwards, you get home and you have to wash up and the kids are like, ‘Dad, stop being a [redacted].’”