GRAHAM COXON

Probably Britpop’s smartest guitarist, Graham Coxon picked up the Tele thanks to producer Stephen Street. The Tele was Blur’s core guitar from There’s No Other Way onwards. Coxon gigged with ’52 reissues but is best known for using an original ’68 Tele with a Gibson humbucker in the neck position. “It’s called the Shed, because it had been creosoted when I bought it, and had a hole in the back like it had been hammered, but the neck was so lovely,” he tells TG. Some guitarists find a neck humbucker in a Tele unbalanced, with too much contrast from the bridge pickup. Coxon, though, leans into that versatility, sometimes rolling off the tone control for an even fatter sound: “It had that Tele sound for the treble, but if I wanted a thick, bluesy, Abbey Road sound, I’d just put it on the Gibson humbucker.” In 2011, Fender recreated the Shed as a Coxon signature axe, which earned Graham some stick for not being a Tele purist. Oddly, Keith Richards and Albert Collins got no such flak for their be-humbuckered Telecasters. “A lot of people in America are like [redneck voice], ‘Who the f*ck is this Graham Coxon, man?’” he laughs.