Blurring The Boundaries

Spare a thought for Graham Coxon. It’s four weeks since Blur’s Adele-discommoding Brits controversy, five months until their Hyde Park show brings the curtain down on the London Olympics. In the midst of all this the guitarist is trying make the world care about his new solo album.

Recorded in the acrid aftermath of the London riots, A+E is a taut, paranoia-slathered affair, perhaps the finest of the nine long-players Coxon has put out. Still, with so much afoot on Planet Blur, he’ll surely forgive Hot Press if we politely ignore his record company’s request that we focus on his post-Britpop career and dive straight in: when are the band, who debuted a new song in January, going to get around to making that long-awaited new LP?
“We have answered that question so many times,” he sighs. “And people still ask it. Any frustration we feel is not really our fault. People don’t to want to believe our answer. What I can say is this: I think Blur are in a healthy place. Anything is possible, nothing is planned.”
He is equally vague about a possible Dublin show over the summer, intimating that if he spills any info to Hot Press he’ll have Damon on the blower giving out yards.
“I always seem to say the wrong thing,” he adds. “However there are no plans for an extensive tour.”
If Blur had anything in common with their cartoon rivals Oasis it’s that they were always easy to caricature. There was Albarn, the lippy middle-class kid playing at being a track-suited chav, Alex, the punchable fop with a groupie on each arm and a bottle of Krug down his pants, Dave, the bloke-next-door who’d somehow stumbled into drumming for Britain’s most important quartet since The Smiths. And Coxon, the angst-ridden, chunkily bespectacled moocher who hated himself – and his bandmates even more, you suspected – for daring to be so successful.
Put this to him and he laughs out loud and then sort of agrees with you.
“Compared to other guys in groups perhaps I’ve always been a bit of a weirdo,” he says. “I don’t feel strange. A lot of my close acquaintances and friends are similar to me. I think it comes through in my music. I can’t take situations too seriously. There’s a lot of sarcasm in my music. I understand that you can write songs that take things seriously and that they become anthemic to a lot of people. Oasis are good at that. And Blur too. I don’t have that in my songs.”
The last time he sat down for a chat with HP, Coxon did not appear especially well-disposed towards Blur and their legacy. He and Albarn had not yet reconciled and the memory of his abrupt departure – during the making of their final LP Think Tank in 2000 – was visibly raw. He was particularly vitriolic about the group’s primacy to Britpop and the knowing songwriting style Albarn had honed circa The Great Escape.
“I wasn’t happy with any of that Britpop stuff. It was awful,” he told the magazine in 2004. “No-one was playing the guitar any good in those bands, it was perfunctorily strumming away to some mid-tempo, anthemic bollocks. I guess Pulp had some humour and a nice sense of kitchen sink dramatics, but after a while it wears thin. And a lot of that sort of vapid, half-arsed jingle-jangle indie stuff that was around, it was fuckin’ rubbish, it got on my nerves.”
A full five years after that confession, he and Albarn had a ‘clear the air’ meeting. The trigger was, of all things, a documentary about Pink Floyd Coxon had stumbled upon channel-surfing one night. Seeing the way bad blood between Roger Waters and the rest of the Floyd had festered over the decades, Coxon was determined the same wouldn’t happen with Blur. Ultimately, what went down between them was no-one’s fault he had come to believe. When he looks back at the period leading up to departing the band he believes there was an inevitability about it. The group were exhausted, something had to give.
“Creative tension?” he muses. “I don’t think there was creative tension really. There was just tension. You had four pretty tired people. The communication had broken down for quite a few years. We’d been working so hard, we’d lost the thread a little bit. I suppose we had lost sight of who we were in relation to each other and where we were from. I think that’s the music business. It does that to everybody to a certain extent. We desperately needed a break. Unfortunately it took me leaving the band for us to get that.
“You can’t simply tell your record company you need five, six years off. They’ll go, ‘Er, why?’ You almost had to split up to have a break. I suppose that’s what it looks like now, in hindsight. At the time there was a lot of different stuff going on. I had a one-year-old baby daughter... I was struggling with tiredness and fatigue. The band was over-worked. A lot was happening.”
Conceptually A+E addresses the condition of modern Britain and the searching questions society has to ask itself post-London riots. In some ways, Coxon suggests, it’s almost a sequel to Blur’s biggest hit ‘Girls & Boys’, which, it’s easy to forget, was a rumination on the hooligan-isation of English lad culture.
“We were writing a song that was a loose commentary on that whole British abroad kind of thing. The new album touches on the same themes. I guess they were on holiday in ‘Girls & Boys’. Now they’re just up the road. It was fine when they were in Greece – that was fair enough. Today they’re around the corner from you.”
Before Hyde Park, Coxon will tour the UK toilet circuit – he says he’ll probably be announcing a Dublin date for later in the year. After performing to tens of thousands as a member of Blur, schlepping around the clubs of Britain must be a comedown.
“Well, they are different. In the big enormo-dome thing you have to play better. There is more pressure. You know, it’s a great job, though. There are lots of happy faces out there. You can turn your amp up loud and concentrate on the guitar and watch your singer do his thing. It’s a nice feeling. I enjoy my role in Blur as an interpreter of Damon and, you know, a side-man with a guitar.
“The small, sweaty grubby club is great too. It’s more a sense of chaos and mayhem, a closeness with the audience. It feels like you are playing to friends. You can screw up and it’s a laugh. I’m lucky in that I have the freedom to do both.”

A+E is out now.