The Blur Switch Project
No
more teen adulation for Blur's guitarist. On his new solo
LP, Graham Coxon is going underground
"No!
I'm not doing that!" Oh dear. It all
started so well. A couple of beers, an interview
adjourned for a few snaps in a nearby carpark. He seemed
happy - until Select's photographer asked him to
translate the feeling into a picture. "I hate
pictures of myself smiling," he splutters,
horrified. "I'm not doing it." It seems strange
initally, but think back to Blur images from the last ten
years. The fresh-faced bowl-head pouting in shades?
Check. El Coxo as Fred Perry-sporting sulky Grange
Hill extra? Yup. Looking lost, confused, about to
vomit? Indeed, more often than can be strictly healty.
But Graham Coxon smiling?
"I
was sick of everything. It was getting too jolly and too
much into this music hall thing which I don't feel any
connection to at all. I'd bottle it up and have mad
outbursts on tour. I was getting into hip hop and getting
scruffy and baggy clothes-wise. I brought in some
Pavement records and they were instantly dismissed by
everyone else in the band. I'd have some drinks and just
fly off the handle and say that I wanted to be in a death
metal hardcore hip hop group. I wanted to know why I
couldn't play this music that I liked." Graham
Coxon, Select, August 1999.
It
starts almost without warning - a sound like
sheet metal being sculpted with a clawhammer as someone
screams over the top "Jamie Thomas! Jamie
Thomas! Jaaaaaaaaamieeee Thomaaaaaaaas!" Over
the next 45 minutes its gets weirder, skirting Thurston
Moore-type guitarscapes, death metal, discordant punky
bursts and a cute jazz-hop exursion, with two cover
versions of numbers by obscure early '90s US art-punk act
Mission Of Burma thrown in for good measure
The record's called
'The Golden D'. It's the startling second solo offering
from Graham Coxon. If Blur were the Monkees, then this
record registers Graham as Charles Manson. The question
needs to be asked: what's going on?
You've doubtless already met him, but to recap: by repute
the jazz- and lo-fi-loving art-school wing of Blur,
healtier-looking than of late, tousled hair ["too
short", apparently], nails bitten down to the quick,
horn-rimmed Michael Caine specs, regulation baggy jeans
held up by friction, DC trainers, wallet chain, Discman
swinging from hip and vintage skate deck in hand. He's
only been drinking intermittently of late, but still
takes to Stellas with evident relish ["don't have
them very often, so this is nice"], in between
moaning about the difficulty of skateboarding over Camden
Council's cracked pavements and the desecration of the
Cenotaph in the Mayday disturbances.
Base camp for the afternoon is his
local, a bright, spacious Camden gastropub. Graham has
steadfastly refused to migrate west like the rest of the
former Britpop aristocracy. In a sort of Evening
Session equivalent of the West Coast playa, Graham
Coxon is very much Keeping It Real.
"I haven't moved out of Camden
because I wouldn't know what to do anywhere else,"
he half-apologises. "I know where to go to buy nice
cheese and things round here."
Softly spoken to the point that he
often lapses into mumbling, Graham is by turns dryly
funny, extremely self-aware and pitifully
self-deprecating. The process of self-analysis that goes
with talking about his new record is not an easy one for
him. He's never understood the interview thing. Even as
an obsessive teenage Jam fan, the music was always
enough. He didn't need to read about them as well, expect
for one vital piece of info. "I just remember really
wanting to know what brand of cigarettes Paul weller
smoked."
Graham smokes Marlboro Lights,
twisting the packet around his fingers as he tries to
talk about anything that isn't his new LP. Beck? He'd pay
£200 for one of his albums. Smog? He thinks Bill
Callahan's a genius. Sonic Youth? Inspirational. Aged
well. 'The Golden D'? Er, well, y'know...
The album's centrepiece is 'The Lake'.
Bookended by abrupt, vicious thrashes of noise, it's a
sumptuous, seven-minute psychedelic instrumental,
variously reminiscent of Yo La Tengo, Butthole Surfers,
Sonic Youth and ambient dub types Labradford. It's also
quite lovely, showcasing Coxon's most beguiling guitar
textures since 'This Is A Low'. And yet it came with an
unconscious ease that'd make most guitarists weeb.
"I just wanted to let the guitar
do what it wanted" Graham explains. "It's kind
of anti-ego in a way. You just sort of let the guitar use
its own voice." He's not being arrogant, but Coxon
talks about his guitar-playing like he's just a vessel
for the sounds his instrument makes. Tellingly, it's also
one of the least guarded comments that he makes all
afternoon. Maybe it's the Stellas.
Even after a
short while in his company, it becomes abundantly clear
that Coxon is a worrier. Continually fidgeting, he tidies
spent glasses compulsively as he frets, "It might
seem that if I'm making solo records I must not be happy
with what I get to express with Blur, so I have to do
things on my own. That's not really true, but it's
something that I'm very aware of."
He's only recently come to terms with
the fact that he can make solo records and still be
content with his day job, bizarrely because he doesn't
feel like he's in Blur at all. At one point he talks
about the band that recorded 1993's 'Modern Life Is
Rubbish'. He stops abruptly and blinks. "Sorry, I
mean I am in the band that made it!" Surely
you'd remember that you were an active member of
one of the biggest bands in the world. Not Graham,
apparently.
"Most of the time I refer to Blur
as Blur and not 'us' or 'we' or 'the group', because they
are a monster in their own right." This distance
"makes it easy to do things for Blur and things as
myself".
It might seem easy
being Graham Coxon amid the relative calm of a
sun-touched pub afternoon, but things emphatically
haven't always been this way. By all accounts being a
member of Blur at height of their fame was not
particularly fun place to be. After the success of 'The
Great Escape' in 1995 the group, on top of the world, had
never felt worse.
The Number One album was followed by a
torturous winter arena tour where the band could barely
hear their music above the screams. By this own
admission, Graham was the band member "least well
equipped to deal with everything". What ensued has
become a well related tale, involving copious drinking,
inter-band ructions and near-breakdown. The nadir for
Graham came when he was photographed leaving a Dolce
& Gabanna party dressed in a fetching bright blue ski
jacket. Nothing unusual, except he was snapped lying
prone in the street after having been run over by a black
cab. The photo made the tabloid. Some people even tried
to calm that the incident was a publicity stunt to fuel
interest in the chart stand-off with Oasis.
"There was a really horrible
atmosphere when 'Country House' got to Number One,"
he sighs, "so even if I'd wanted to enjoy it I
couldn't." Interviews with Stuart Maconie for his
recent Blur biography brought the madness all back.
"There were times when discussing it felt like going
to see a shrink and having to confront all the things
that I'd put away in the back of my head."
The problem, as Graham sees it now,
lay in a clash of ideas about exactly what kind of
monster the Blur beast wanted to be.
"I think it's taken a long time
to realise what the people in the group's ambitions were,
personally. Alex always wanted the glamour and to be
famous and Damon always wanted to be big - he's the most
competitive person that I know."
Blur's guitarist, meanwhile, claims to have held less
meglomaniacal plans at the group's inception. "I had
very low ambitions. I just wanted to be on an indie
label."
This viewpoint may smack of
revisionism, but there's no doubt that Graham's original
ambitions left him feeling uncomfortable with the result.
"When you do get famous, it's difficult to know what
to do with it. It's anti-climactic because you haven't
just achieved your dreams, there's a whole load of other
bullshit that goes with it." It's like only now he's
finally resigned to all the bullshit.
"Fame and
fortune's a stupid game/But fame and fortune's the game
I'm playing" ['Fame And Fortune', Mission Of
Burma, 1981]
Blur's cocksure school-prefect
self-assurance was a veneer that was becoming
increasingly transparent by 1996. The group that had
started the '90s as fresh-faced indie moppets with a
penchant for Brechtian theatrics and My Bloody Valentine,
were beginning to look increasingly tired - musically and
physically. Graham was feeling uncomfortable with the
direction he felt that the band was taking. The result
was messy and very public drunkenness. Something
evidently needed to change - soon - or Blur would
implode.
Each member of the group dealt with
the pressures of chart approbation in their own way, so
while Damon was famously 'discovering' Iceland, Graham
stopped drinking and found an outlet sitting in his flat,
subsisting on TV and coffee whilst strumming his guitar.
His motivations were simple - bored and pissed off, he
started writing tunes like he was keeping a diary.
Most of the songs that came out of
this period of self-enforced sobriety went on to make up
his first album, 1998's folky, melancholic 'The Sky's Too
High'. Far from being the abrasive work everyone
expected, it came at a time when he was feeling maudlin
enough to be dead against making music that was
aggressive. "I was just trying to write pretty
songs," he shrugs, "that were fairly simple and
non-committal lyrics."
The songs were never intended for
general consumption, both due to internal band etiquette
and Graham's own nervousness about their quality.
"We used to have this unspoken thing that Blur came
first", he reminisces. "Now we're much less
territorial about stuff. Like when Fat Les happened,
there was a lot of discomfort. It kind of felt like being
unfaithful."
His sense of loyalty meant that he
dutifully offered his music up for possible inclusion on
the record that was to become '13'. Damon "didn't
really say anything, so it was obvious he didn't want
them. A lot of people liked them, though, and they
persuaded me to put them out."
"There is," Graham will
admit, "a sort of loosening up going on now. Blur
obviously can't come first a lot of a time. We've
realised a thing that can make Blur healty is to each do
things on our own. Otherwise it's fascistic, like you'll
get sent to Blur prison if you do anything outside the
band. Damon had started doing his soundtrack stuff. Alex
had Fat Les and Dave was getting shit-hot at animation
and becoming a pilot as well." Everyone was keeping
busy with things, while Graham busied himself with the
running of his label, Transcopic, and the odd spot of
painting.
'The Sky Is Too High' was originally
supposed to be a one-off, yet, in the dead period after
its completion and that of '13', Graham found that he had
a whole new set of preoccupations to deal with. After the
first solo album, he just felt frustrated that he hadn't
let it all out sooner.
"It'd be really easy to just sit
back and watch Montell every day, but I've
started to get very conscious about how old I am and how
easily life passes by if I don't do anything." He's
only 31.
A burgeoning love for the extreme
fringes of music [he enthuses about doom metal gonks
Mortician] and a growing interest in distortion, meant
this second solo LP marks a diversion from anything
Graham had ever worked on previously.
"All through Blur, I thought I'd
been making big fat statements with guitars, but they
were buried so they sound like mice squeaking. If I was
going to make this record as extreme as I wanted it, I
had to make it on my own... I would've been toned down
with Blur - Blur's always like Alex trying to be funky
and me trying to trip him up," he pauses for effect,
"and Damon's preoccupations are very far
away from metal."
By his own
admission, part of the reason that he felt like he was
"racing against time and age" to make
'The Golden D' was a hefty life change. On 7 March this
year Graham Coxon became father to a baby girl: Pepper
Bäk Troy Coxon. Although he doesn't think it's too
responsible to talk about his domestic life in public, he
will go far enough to say that "fatherhood's
extremely great", eyes gleaming.
His new child-rearing status has
prompted a reining in of Blur's rabid social life.
"I've been rethinking the drinking," he
deadpans. "I do get easily tempted, but I realise
the absolute hideousness of fathers that are drunk all
the time. I don't really think that I have a drinking
problem... I just really don't like it. But if I have the
occasional night at home watching TV and drinking coffee
I just sort of forget about booze," he claims.
Before he boards off over those broken
pavements, is there anything else? "Only that I've
got the bug now. After the first record I thought I'd
never do another one. Now I'm entertaining thoughts of a
third. I've sort of proved that I can do it and be happy
with the results."
He's also pleased with his bandmates'
reactions to the LP. However much he may put them down,
he's still fiercely close to the rest of Blur, and their
opinions count more than anyone's.
"Damon said it was good, which is
strange, because no-one really commented on the last one.
Y'know, I've proved to myself that if I want I can sing
without sounding like I've got a gun to my head. Now I
can do it and I know it's not a fluke, it feels a bit
more permanent. It's definetily something to expect more
of in the future."
Fitter, happier, drier, freed from
Blur prison. It might be the game he's playing, but
Graham Coxon appears to be enjoying the whole thing a lot
more. Not enough to smile in photos, mind.
Pat
Long
© 2000 Select
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