|
Graham Coxon - Love Travels At Illegal Speeds
Reviewed
by
The Guardian, 10 March 2006
 The
casual observer might well have thought they had seen the
last of Graham Coxon when he left Blur in 2002. For all
his undoubted talent, the guitarist did not seem like solo
star material. Throughout Blur's golden period, Coxon kept
sending out subtle signals that the truly perceptive
observer could have interpreted as implying a slight
discomfort with celebrity, such as punching his record
label boss, becoming an alcoholic and threatening to
commit suicide at the party celebrating Country House's
accession to number one.
Nor did the three solo albums he had
recorded while with Blur do much to suggest a continued high profile was
guaranteed. Scrappy and lo-fi, they seemed, despite Coxon's frequent
protestations to the contrary, to exist primarily in order for him to
moan about the other members of Blur. "Rock stars are not cool, they're
full of this guy called Satan," he sang on the first, 1998's The Sky Is
Too High. "You stabbed me in the back, you're lower than a snake," he
offered on The Kiss of Morning, released a month after he left the band.
However, his next album, Happiness in Magazines (2004), defied
expectations by being both listenable and apparently unconcerned with
the ghastliness of Damon Albarn. It made the top 20 and spawned three
charming hit singles: not enough to stop people asking when he was going
to rejoin Blur - you rather suspect Coxon is still going to be asked if
he's thinking of rejoining Blur on his deathbed - but more than most
people would have expected.
In its own funny little way, the
follow-up to Happiness shares a certain ambitiousness with the work of
Coxon's former collaborator. Admittedly, there are no guest musicians
from Africa, Dennis Hopper is noticeable by his absence and the chances
of Madonna asking to collaborate on a multi-media extravaganza for the
MTV Europe awards seem slim, but it does attempt to recast public
perceptions of Coxon in a most improbable way. His specs, fourth-form
haircut and wounded adolescent vocal style have never really suggested a
whirlwind of bedhopping lubricity. And yet, here he is, his sleeve
booklet decorated with drawings of nude women, variously depicting
himself glistening with lustful sweat, lurking in a bathroom to tickle a
lady's fancy behind her partner's back, and - if you interpret the
second verse of Gimme Some Love in a certain light - on the receiving
end of some vigorous manual relief. Odder still is the music he has
chosen to convey his inner Priapus. For the most part, Love Travels at
Illegal Speeds deals in old-fashioned, spirit of '77 punk rock: not the
first music that springs to mind when thoughts turn to the boudoir.
Perhaps understandably, this results in
the odd uncomfortable moment. It occasionally strays too close to the
work of Jilted John, the cuckolded mock-punk who thought Gordon was a
moron, while for all its cocksure lyrical brio, Don't Let Your Man Know
brings to mind the slightly disturbing image of Tucker Jenkins trying to
arrange an infidelity. But the fusion of spittle-flecked guitars and
sexual longing isn't entirely incongruous or without precedent, most
notably in the genderless lust songs penned by the Buzzcocks' Pete
Shelley. At their best, that's who the uptempo tracks most obviously
recall. There's a guileless, gleeful charm about I Can't Look at Your
Skin and Gimme Some Love that blinds you to the troubling fact that
you're listening to a man nearing his 40s singing about someone pulling
him off in a schoolboy voice. They should, by rights, sound ridiculous,
but instead they end up nagging away at you.
Something similarly compulsive is in
evidence when Coxon tears himself away from the punk-rock blueprint.
With its echoing slide guitar and disturbingly blank-eyed vocal, Just a
State of Mind is audibly under the spell of Syd Barrett, while the
closing See a Better Day has an air of White Album-period Lennon about
it. Both seem understated, but their atmosphere of eerie, small-hours
melancholy is gently pervasive. "I don't believe genre-hopping is any
way a musical development," Coxon recently and rather pointedly
remarked. That's a moot point, particularly if the person the comment is
aimed at seems capable not just of genre-hopping, but of effortlessly
mastering whatever genre he chooses to turn his hand to.
There's a nose-thumbing snottiness
about the deliberately constrictive musical boundaries within which most
of the album operates, but there's thankfully more to Love Travels at
Illegal Speeds than defiantly blowing raspberries at you-know-who.
Unpromising and unassuming at first glance, its highlights burrow under
your skin and stay there. The most unlikely of solo careers keeps
rolling idiosyncratically along.
(4/5) Alexis
Petridis
|
