Verse, Chorus, Monster!
Graham Coxon Faber & Faber, £20
As a founder member of Blur, guitarist Graham Coxon spent the 90s in the eye of the Britpop storm. But, bedevilled by anxiety and low selfesteem, he wasn’t best placed to weather it.
While bassist Alex James made life in Blur sound like one long party in his memoir A Bit Of A Blur, Graham found the experience an endless “conveyor belt” of touring and recording: “It felt like business, it wasn’t fun.”
He’s scathing about Blur’s videos and the manufactured rivalry with Oasis, and prefers Blur’s musical “back streets and alleyways” to mainstream “high-street Blur”.
While he describes the band as a “brotherhood”, they never looked to each other for emotional support. He oscillated between thinking he didn’t deserve any of his huge success, and feeling underappreciated.
He attributes his low selfesteem to suffering a degree of emotional neglect as a child. When this fed into stage fright in Blur, alcohol afforded him some respite from his troubles, but he then found himself on a slippery slope of addiction.
You sense that routine selfmedication made it difficult for him to remember band life in detail so, fittingly for a former art school student, there’s a slightly sketchy, broad brush quality to Graham’s story.
It’s poignant that life in one of the biggest bands of the 90s brought him so little fulfilment. But he’s an intriguing, endearing character who vividly conveys the misery of anxiety.
And, with nine solo albums to his name, music has been the truest constant in his life, bringing a measure of peace and contentment to a troubled soul.