Graham Coxon turned 40 on March 12. How did the guitarist spend this landmark
birthday? Preparing for the beginning, the next day, of a tour with Peter
Doherty — who, coincidentally, turned 30 on the same day — and finalising
plans for a visit, the following week, to the SXSW festival in Austin,
Texas, where he was to promote his seventh solo album, the beautiful,
English folk-flecked The Spinning Top. “Was I competing against the
young bands there?” he ponders. “Not really. What I was doing was so
different. It’s not haircut music. It’s roots music.” He pauses. “It’s a bit
crap to say that. But I’ve always felt very rooted through tradition.” And
Coxon spent his birthday preparing for another of the “fun” weekly rehearsal
stints for this summer’s reunion shows with Blur, the band he left under
something of a cloud in 2002.
“We were playing Charmless Man the other day,” Coxon says of the
latest Blur jam before their first big booking, headlining at Glastonbury
next month. “And it was hilarious — we haven’t played it for ages and I
thought, ‘God, this is such a good laugh to play . . .’ And when I used to
play it I’d be like [gritted teeth], ‘F***ing stupid song with its la la la
la’s . . .’ ”
This focused, productive time is all a far cry from his own 30th birthday. At
the tail end of the Nineties Coxon — and Blur — were spiralling out of
control. Since forming while students at Goldsmiths College in London in
1989, the band had enjoyed a heady decade as one of the twin titans of
Britpop. But as hit album followed hit album, from Modern Life is Rubbish
to Parklife to The Great Escape, their tussle with their
arch-rivals Oasis was twisted into a faintly ludicrous PR battle. It
famously made The Nine O’Clock News in 1995, when both released
singles in the same week: Country House by the “clever-clever
Southerners” beat Roll With It by the “bluff Northerners” to No
1.
Such giddy overachieving and mainstream idolatry discomfited Coxon. As
evidenced by the solo albums he started releasing while still in Blur, he
was always more of a lo-fi/indie kid than the more populist-minded Albarn.
By the turn of the millennium all four members were feeling the pressure of
huge success — the guitarist was an alcoholic and depressive. During the
2002 recording sessions for Think Tank, Coxon and Albarn, friends
since their schooldays in Colchester, barely spoke.
“I’d just got out of the Priory and although I wasn’t drinking any more and I
felt pretty good, I was still brimful of bristling resentments about all
sorts of things.” Before recording on that seventh album was completed,
Coxon was asked to leave by Albarn, the bass player Alex James and the
drummer Dave Rowntree.
“All of us really just turned mental,” Coxon admits. “Damon went a bit funny,
we all went a bit funny. Even when people are not telling you to write a hit
single or showing you a schedule for a tour, you feel it — the weight.
You’re carrying it about, to quote the Beatles. And it just doesn’t help.
And the propensity for dipsomania among us all as well, that didn’t help.”
These days Coxon is as fidgety, occasionally schoolboy-awkward and boyish as
he always was (I suspect he’ll wear badges on his denim jacket well into his
pensionable years), but he’s clean, dry and perky. His sobriety is one of
the reasons that the producer Stephen Street, with whom the guitarist has
made several records, asked him to help out on Doherty’s recent solo album.
Due in no small part to the writing and performance input of Coxon, Grace/
Wastelands is Doherty’s best work since the Libertines. “Graham’s a
great, great player,” Street says, “and he can take someone’s basic chord
structure for a song and enhance it in so many different ways.” And because
of his battles with his own demons, “Graham’s the kind of positive influence
Peter needed around him”.
Coxon confesses that, previously, “Pete did annoy me sometimes when it seemed
like he wasn’t really fulfilling his potential. No one would get a hold of
him. People were quite happy to let him . . . wobble along. Stephen and I
just wanted him to be happy with something, so we could all get some sense
of fulfilment out of it.”
The poetic, semi-acoustic simplicity of Grace/Wastelands is something
that Coxon has himself embraced on The Spinning Top. Or, as he puts
it: “I was getting depressed thinking that I was wasting half my brain or
half my talent — that I was just this indie-ish guitar player fuzz-pedal
boy. For a long time I thought acoustic guitars were a chore that you
strummed to give a pop song some swing.”
We’re talking over early-morning coffees in a Café Nero in Camden, the North
London borough that Coxon has long called home. But to write his latest
album he decided to remove himself from his urban comfort zone. “I didn’t
think there were enough distractions in the country for me to write, that
you were stuck with yourself. But actually that worked out for the better.”
He went to Kent where (he reveals reluctantly) he has a little place. He
wrote the sun-dappled In the Morning over three days at his kitchen
table, absorbing the atmosphere. “I sat there plucking my guitar with these
metal finger ends on, rattling away and rattling away, and noting things
down. I had to get rid of some of the birdsong from the demo version, ’cause
it drowned everything else out.”
The skiffley skip of Feel Alright was another early song. It features
the renowned double-bass player Danny Thompson. Coxon, who had recently run
into him at the BBC Folk Awards, called him up “because it seemed that a lot
of the great records I was digging had Danny on them, from [Talk Talk’s] Spirit
of Eden to Davy Graham, Nick Drake and John Martyn. And he was very
enthusiastic.”
Fastidious to the last, Coxon wanted to record the songs in the order in which
they would appear on the album — not least because he had a concept in mind,
a birth-to-death narrative running through the 15 compositions. “I knew I
wanted to make something where I didn’t have to think about any
commerciality. Not think about ‘the kids’, think about the grown-ups, think
about the record label, not think about anything really. So I thought,
‘Well, why not a story?’ I really liked the old concept albums, like [The
Who’s] Tommy and [The Zombies’] Odessey and Oracle.
I’d just written Sorrow’s Army and I thought, ‘Gosh, this
is about war. And there’s a war now . . . And all my old favourite concept
albums had war . . .’ ”
Was he perhaps interested in the life cycle because he was approaching his
40th birthday?
“Um, no, I don’t think so,” he says, his face wrinkling into a familiar
quizzical expression. “I just thought that’d be the easiest way of doing it.
And I have been interested in writing about my own experiences in the past
with alcohol and depression — it’s a good way of letting people know that
they’re not alone.”
Coxon, his issues seemingly behind him — or at least under control — is
clearly buoyed by the warmth of the music on The Spinning Top. The
sleeve, like all his solo albums, bears his own artwork. It’s of a naked
woman dancer, his representation of Medea, the enchantress from Greek
mythology. “I was quite interested in her and all her bad press. I wanted to
draw a lovely picture of her, and it took me quite a while. I’m not
particularly interested in scaring people away before they’ve even opened my
sleeve, which I have done in the past,” he says with a smile. “And I didn’t
want to call it anything that was gonna be frightening either. I wanted it
to be quite a welcoming album rather than a spiky, contrary kind of thing.”
Coxon is similarly relaxed and enthused as he discusses Blur. James began the
reunion discussions and, over the past couple of years, Coxon has “warmed to
the idea quite a lot”. Then he and Rowntree “made our peace about things”.
When Albarn was at the Camden venue Koko in October last year for one of his
Afrika Express shows, Coxon popped along for a chat during the soundcheck.
“It was like Super Mario. You’ve fought two monsters and now you’ve got the
big monster at the end.” They hadn’t spoken for more than six years but
straight away “we just enjoyed each other’s company”.
How would he say Albarn has changed?
“I think he’s a lot less ferocious. I think he feels he’s proved all he has to
prove commercially. And he’s mellowed down — he’s much less insecure maybe.
But what hasn’t changed about him is that he flies into these uncontrollable
comedic rages about other people, artists, things. He still thrashes around
like a hive of bees is attacking him. Which is excellent.”
Does Noel Gallagher still annoy him?
“I don’t think so.” A small smile. “I think Bono does.”
And how would Albarn say that Coxon has changed?
“He’ll probably think I’m still as childish as I always was. But he’s probably
glad that I’m not having them hideous hangovers where I’m just a very grumpy
sod.”
As yet rehearsals have not produced any new songs (“We haven’t had time”) and
they are not putting any pressure on themselves to do so. “But if all goes
well this year, I’m up for it,” Coxon says of a new Blur album. “Why not? I
think it’ll be interesting.”
For now they’re concentrating on the matter at hand: wrestling down a peerless
back catalogue into a workable set that will appeal to the festival crowds,
Blur obsessives (“perverts” as Coxon cheerfully calls them) and the merely
curious. “We just started with some slow and easy ones — She’s
So High. I don’t really wanna tweak the songs too much. Not like when
late Seventies groups come back and they look like architects and they’re
doing all sorts of weird things to their old songs.”
Each member has nominated five songs from each album, a selection that’s been
whittled into a longlist of 70. Coxon’s own choices include the title track
from Parklife (1994), Badhead from that album and Death of
a Party and Look Inside America from Blur (1997). What
about that latter album’s biggest, most “rifftastic” song, Song
2?
“I’m always just trying to play it better,” Coxon says. “I don’t think I ever
quite got the dynamic leap in sound between verse and chorus. I’m gonna work
on that. But not like an architect. Like a drongo still.”
Coxon’s daughter, now 9, has never really known her dad as a member of one of
the biggest British bands of the past 20 years. She is, he reports “ever so
excited about the summer. I think I’m gonna take her to the Hyde Park show
rather than Glastonbury or T in the Park. It’s easier to escape from there
if she gets freaked. I mean, I’m getting freaked and I’m not even 9.”
The Spinning Top is out on Monday (Transgressive). Coxon tours to May
18, full dates at www.grahamcoxon.co.uk
