SELECT (july 2000 issue)

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 initially, but think back to the Blur images of the past 10 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 healthy. But Graham Coxon smiling ?

"I was sick of everything. It was getting too jolly and too 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 music that i liked." Graham Coxon, Select, 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 ! Jaaaaaaamieeee Thomaaaaas !". Over the next 45 minutes it gets weirder, skirting Thurston Moore-type guitarscapes, death metal, discordant punky bursts and a cute jazz-hop excursion, with two cover versions of numbers by obscure early '80s US art-punk 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, healthier-looking than of late, tousled hair ("too short", apparently), nails bitten down to the quick, horn-rimmed Micheal 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 intermittendly of late, but still takes to the 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, except for one vital piece of info : "I just remember really wanting to know what brand of cigarettes Paul Weller smoked."

Graham smokes Malboro Lights, twisting the packet aorund his fingers as he tries to talk about anything that isn't his new LP. Beck ? He'd pay 2000 for one of his albums. Smog ? He thinks Bill Callahan's a genius. Sonic Youth ? Inspirational. Aged well. "The Golden D" ? Errr, well, y'know...

The album's centrepiece is "The Lake". Bookended by abrupt, vicious trashes of noise, it's a sumptuous, seven-micute psychedelic intrumental, variously reliniscent of Yo La Tengo, Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth and ambient dub types Labradford. It's also quite lovely, showcasing Coxon's most beguiling guitar texture since "This is a low". And yet it came with an unconscious ease that'd make most guitarists weep.

"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 is just a vessel for the sounds his instrument makes. Tellingly, it's also one of the least guarded comments 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, bizarrey 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 thinks. "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 acounts being a member of Blur at the height of their fame was not a 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 his 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-bands ructions and a near-breakdown. The nadir for Graham came when he was photographed leaving a Dolce & Gabbana party dressed in a fetching bright blue ski jacket. Nothing unusual, except he was snapped lying prine in the street after having been run over by a black cab. The photo made the tabloids. Some people even tried to claim that the incident was a publicity stunt to fuel interest in the chart stand-off with Oasis.

"There was a 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 comfront all the things that i'd put away in the back of my head."

The problem is, as Graham sees it now, lay in a clash od ideas about exactly what kind of monster the Blur ebast wanted to be.

"I think it's taken a long time to realize what the people in the group's ambitions were, personally. Alex always wanted the glamous 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 increasinlgy 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 witht he 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 while strumming his guitar. His motivations were simple -bored and pissed off, he started wiritng tunes like he was keeping a diary.

Most of the song that came out of this period of self-enforced sobriety went on to make his first solo album, 1998's folky, melancholic "The Sky's too high". Far from being the abrasive work everyone expected, it was 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 had 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 healthy 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 shithot at animation and becoming a pilot as well." Everyone was keeping busy with things, while Graham busied himslef 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'll be really easy to just sit back and watch Montell every day, but i've started to get really 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... It would have 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 life change. On 7 March this year Graham Coxon became a father to a baby girl : Pepper Bck Troy Coxon. Although he doesn't think it's too responsible to talk about this 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 realize 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 do like it. But if i have the occasionnal night at home watching TV and drinking coffee i just sort of forget about booze," he claims.

Before he boards off over these 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 bandsmates' reactions to the LP. However much he may put them down, he's still fiercely close to the rest of Blur, and their opinion 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 definitely 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