For 21 years, Sean played Martin Platt, a character in the long running, popular TV soap Coronation Street. But Sean has given all that up to indulge in another passion – a passion to make artisan cheese.
He will soon be opening The Saddleworth Cheese Company, hand-making creamy, crumbly Lancashire cheese. Not only is he a celebrity patron of the Nantwich Show, he will also be a judge.
This year’s Glastonbury Music Festival, held (appropriately enough) on a Somerset dairy farm, was a great success and featured some legendary stars and bands: Bruce Springsteen, Crosby Stills & Nash, Neil Young, Tom Jones, Madness and Status Quo among the many. The music festival also featured a performance by the Britpop band Blur, who have reformed this year, and took to the stage for the first time since their Royal Festival Hall performance in London in 2000.
Since the band’s break-up, bassist Alex James has been pursuing a different career as a cheesemaker. James had something of a reputation as a hell-raiser, with a reported lifestyle that encapsulated all the ‘rock and roll’ ingredients: drink, drugs and women. In 2003, he stopped all that, got married and bought a 200-acre farm in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds.
He turned to cheesemaking after the release of Blur’s last album, Think Tank, in 2003. Last year, his first matured cheese – Little Wallop – was awarded a silver medal at the British Cheese Awards. Another of his cheeses is Blue Monday, said to be inspired by a song recorded by New Order in 1982.
And now the pop star has signed a deal to make cheese for the Prince of Wales. James will create the cheese from organic milk supplied from a herd of pedigree Ayrshire cows at Duchy Home Farm on the Prince of Wales’ Duchy of Cornwall estate.
Another ‘bad boy’ – this time from the world of motor racing – has become a cheesemaker. Packaging and machinery company Tetra Pak CPS has just installed a fully bespoke dairy plant at former Formula One racing champion Jody Scheckter’s award-winning Laverstoke Park Farm, for processing a range of buffalo milk products, including mozzarella cheese.
Described as ‘the former wild man of Formula One’, the F1 website says he was ‘infamous for causing one of the biggest accidents in Formula One history’, after which there were demands that he should be banned from the sport. But he wasn’t banned and eventually went to drive for the Italian Ferrari team and became the 1979 World Champion.
After his retirement, the South African sports star eventually embarked on an organic farming enterprise in England and now has the largest herd of water buffalo in Europe.
Perhaps, with his success driving for an Italian, it’s not surprising that when he chose to make cheese, he chose mozzarella.
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