THE INDIE GUY
The Blur guitarist Graham Coxon has written a memoir of his surprisingly fraught time in one of Britpop’s biggest bands. He talks to Will Hodgkinson about finding happiness at 53.
When Blur became the very essence of mid-90s Britain’s celebration of itself, one band member did not look very happy about it all. While the singer Damon Albarn squared up against Liam Gallagher in celebrity football matches, the bassist Alex James swanned about with Keith Allen and Damien Hirst at the Groucho Club, and drummer Dave Rowntree quietly got on with it, the band’s guitarist, Graham Coxon, seemed as if he would rather not be at the Britpop party at all.
Coxon was the indie guy, the sensitive soul. It was as if he had joined a stadium-filling band by mistake. “What was I so uptight about? Why was I so moody? I should have just enjoyed it,” Coxon says, looking back on an era when Blur and Oasis made News at Ten – a rare time when guitar music became a national interest – after the former’s Country House beat the latter’s Roll With It to No1 in 1995. “I had the indie outlook of not selling out, but then I loved the Jam, the Who and the Kinks. I think I was just exhausted, having signed up for a world we knew nothing about.”
We’re at the cosy, rather rustic, surprisingly modest house in Muswell Hill, north London, that Coxon, 53, bought at the end of 2020. He doesn’t look much different from how he did in the 90s: older, but otherwise the same scruffy-fringed, wideeyed innocent he came across as back then. Coxon has released a series of solo albums that cover the distance from angry punk to acoustic folk, has worked on television and film soundtracks, and formed an experimental pop duo called the Waeve with his partner, the pure-voiced singer Rose Elinor Dougall. Yet he will be enshrined in history for his part in Britpop, something his refreshingly modest memoir, Verse, Chorus, Monster!, acknowledges.
“There was a personal thing about where I was in the Blur pack,” says Coxon, who until the early 2000s dealt with his inability to enjoy success with prolonged bouts of heavy drinking. “I knew my importance within the music, but on stage I’d be not wanting attention, not getting attention, and then snarling about it. Alex knew exactly what to do. His attitude was, this won’t last more than two or three years so I may as well have a nice time. I would feel I had something to say, but it would come out mumbled so I’d get resentful, have a drink, get angry, have a hangover the following day, and be in a terrible black mood. Before you know it you’re crying in the bath, going, ‘Why?’”
The Blur/Oasis chart was an amusing diversion for most of us, but an existential crisis for Coxon. “Of course I felt a little competitive about it. I thought our song was better, more of a laugh, but it would have been nice to have a No1 without all that crap surrounding it. I had got what I wanted, but it wasn’t how I wanted it to be and I kept thinking, ‘This would have been so much better in the 60s.’ I wanted it to be like the Beatles and the Stones. But who knows what it was actually like for them?”
Coxon got letters from Blur’s most disturbed fans. “I’ve since realised that putting yourself out there, heart-on-sleeve, isn’t the best thing to do,” he says. “You’re doing these songs about feeling glum, thinking you’re telling people they’re not alone, but the reality is that it opens a portal for people who don’t necessarily want the best for you. It shows them how easily manipulated you can be.”
Coxon has undertaken a lot of therapy and one of the things it brought up is his tendency to take a subservient role. Going by Verse, Chorus, Monster!, Coxon’s anxiousness appears to go back to childhood. The son of an army bandsman, he lived in Germany before the family moved to Derbyshire and then Colchester, where he channelled his nervous energy into painting and playing guitar.
Colchester was where, aged 13, he met Albarn, an unusually confident son of art school lecturers with a very clear idea of his destiny. “Damon was a goodlooking lad who seemed like he knew it, so he wasn’t the most popular boy at school,” Coxon says. “But he was tough. I would meet him at a Tube station and he’d go: ‘Right, we’re gonna bunk this.’ ‘Can’t I pay?’ ‘No, nobody pays.’ He was the guy who made us go to rehearsals, who got us on to the bill even when we weren’t meant to be on the bill.”
Blur came together at Goldsmiths university in southeast London as the future generation of YBAs were finding ways of replacing old-fashioned craft with headline-grabbing conceptual art.
“That really made me go down the rung,” he says. “I had been learning to paint, taking it seriously, but Goldsmiths was full of self-professed geniuses who were using imagery from advertising and things like that. I thought artists were messy people like Chagall
and Soutine, struggling along, and this breed of artists in suits and Doc Martens who were analysing the artistic significance of a Silk Cut advert was a new thing for me.”
Blur got going when indie music was a niche interest, when black-clad characters such as Pixies and My Bloody Valentine played to 1000 or so students up and down the country. “I just wanted to be as big as My Bloody Valentine,” Coxon says.
“I left home at 19 and by 21 we were playing the Marquee, so it was pretty quick and, looking back, it was too much. You think it’s going to be like the Who in The Kids Are Alright when actually it’s a lot of boredom, travel and jangling nerves. You do a gig when you’re absolutely knackered and if you don’t have a good time in that hour and a half the whole thing seems like a total waste of time.”
Coxon’s answer to all this was alcohol. “Alcoholism means having zero peace of mind,” he says. “Alcoholics feel like they’re living behind glass, like they don’t connect with people. Alcohol medicates that – temporarily. My brain would be going at 100 miles an hour, worrying about everything, and a swig of red wine would make those voices disappear. I think I was an alcoholic from day one.”
Eventually Coxon bailed, going into rehab in 2001 and leaving Blur before the release of the 2003 album Think Tank to go solo. It led to some quiet, thoughtful albums, but there have been various reunions since then, with the realisation that there will never be anything on the scale of Blur again.
“By the time of the solo albums, I was sober,” he says. “It was a quiet time. I would take my daughter Pepper to school, write some lyrics or draw some artwork for a single, [then] Pepper would come home, go to bed, and I’d sit on the sofa learning to play fingerstyle folk guitar. I was quite lonely, but I look back on that period, between my first solo shows in 2004 and the Blur reunion in 2009, as a happy time of life. I was trying other things.”
Verse, Chorus, Monster! hints at dark times in LA as Coxon’s marriage to his wife Essy Syed broke down and he returned to England at the height of lockdown, leaving Syed and his second daughter, Dory, behind. All are back in north London, but it was clearly upsetting. “Oh, it was extremely traumatic. That’s when I knew I needed therapy.”
These days Coxon and Dougall, who he describes as “my amazing new partner in crime”, have settled into what sounds like a pretty good relationship, professionally and romantically. Blur have never officially split up, so more reunions may well happen, starting with their recently announced 35th anniversary show in Wembley in July 2023.
Coxon has cut himself a bit of slack. It all leads to Verse, Chorus, Monster! being that rare thing: a memoir by a rock star who doesn’t have too much of an ego, but, rather, not enough of one.
So, what is life like now? “Life is tiring, it’s beautiful, it is not without its challenges … but it’s wonderful.”