Tuesday 20 March 2012
Graham Coxon: Away From the Blur Of Camden & Into The Frantic Urgency Of His New Album
Grotty Camden. Grotty Thursday morning. Graham Coxon sidles out of the cafe, lights up a cigarette and surveys the bit of London that - by default, he insists - has become his 'patch' for the best part of 20 years.
"I don't like places," he says. An awkward smile lets you in on the fact that he knows that what he has said sounds a little absurd.
"I tried Kent for a year, while my house was being done up, but it wasn't any better. So, there it is."
Back in the café, Graham huddles around his coffee and runs a hand through his tousled hair. Guitarists are supposed to be show-offs by nature. If he were so inclined, Graham has more than to show off about thanmost. If truth be told, embarrassment comes far more easily to him.
Almost by stealth, the years since his initial departure from Blur in 2002 have seen him build on a body of work which – with therelease of A+E this year – will extend to eight albums.
Few guitarists of any generation have attracted the sort of peer group acclaim which has gathered around Graham. Noel Gallagher has described Graham as the most gifted guitarist of his generation, whilst Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood augured, “Anything that has more of Graham’s playing, I’m bound to like.” Last year, Fender even named a guitar – the Fender Graham Coxon Telecaster, to be precise – after him.
All of which is worth mentioning, because the milk in his coffee would curdle before he ever got around to mentioning any of this stuff himself.
Nevertheless, evidence of Graham’s singular vision abounds on his latest set of songs. Lurching away from the dewy folk-guitar reveries of 2009’s The Spinning Top, A+E is aptly named if only for the sense of scratchy, frantic urgency that suffuses its ten songs.
“I wanted the hue and saturation to be on full,” explains Graham, “A lot of the demos that ultimately resulted in the songs were improvised.”
The more songs rose to the surface, the more Graham realised that certain lyrical themes were preoccupying him.
Meet and Drink and Pollinate and Running For Your Life shine a light on the human zoo after the last orders bell rings and people succumb to their physical instincts - be those instincts to fight or f***.
Here and elsewhere, it’s impossible to escape the sense that you’re listening to a voice in wired isolation.
An extraordinary case in point is the motorised migraine funk of City Hall, in which Graham repeats little more than one line in the over caffeinated manner of someone who has long forgotten where their off switch is located.
For all of that, however, the genesis of A+E lay in what Graham knew he didn’t want.
“I didn’t want to get caught up in my usual struggle with trying to make things sound really posh, you know? I didn’t want lovely 60s-sounding drums and valve amps.”
The quest to achieve “that cheap headachey thing” wasn’t quite as easy to achieve as one might first think.
The choice of Ben Hillier as producer may seem surprising to some, given that Ben oversaw Think Tank – the 2002 Blur album on which Graham famously only completed two songs. But in Ben’s South-East London studio, the two hit a rapport which quickly yielded the kernel of A+E.
“I think we were both excited by the abuse of technology,” says Graham,“There was no control room, no pane of glass separating people. We put everything through this beautiful early 80s German sound desk.
"Monitoring and recording at the same time kept us in the moment. We didn’t turn any of the mics off, so everything bled into everything else.
"What I like about that old technology is that it has a personality. Sometimes it doesn’t do what it did yesterday. The drum machines don’t always keep time."
With the songs recorded, force of habit propelled Graham and Ben to another studio “with a posh desk” to complete the final mix of therecord. But it wasn’t to be. “It was a bit like My Fair Lady,” recalls Graham, “It was being forced into being posh, when it really wasn’t that sort of record. So we went back to the little German desk.”
If some songs are fated to wear the equivalent of highcouture, others sound best in the sonic equivalent of a hair shirt.
On Bah Singer, police sirens vie with manic accelerating guitar down strokes tothrillingly unsettling effect. Distant echoes of Wire and Can are perhaps discernible on the arpeggiating “loser groove”of What’ll It Take.
“I don’t really know what’s wrong with me”, sings Graham, over and over again until the very meaning seems to drain from the words and his voice erodes into the surrounding noise.
“You know when you see people in movies and they’re being sectioned? They’re being dragged down through a corridor, shouting - And the voice gets more echo-y, and then you hear the slam of a cell door - I love that! It makes me laugh. I mean, anything that goes wrong in your brain is terrifying, but I also find it funny."
If Graham feels able to smile at the fragility of the human psyche, it’s an amusement born of his own well-documented battles. On Advice he even takes a gentle dig at the inability of his younger self to enjoy the huge success that came with being a member of Blur.
The routine that comes with sobriety and responsibility is a blessing. But Camden affords no shortage of opportunities to be reminded how easily it could all unravel. It’s perhaps no accident that the woozy, febrile Ohh, Yeh Yeh sounds like a blues, given that it relates a tale that isn’t to dissimilar from a crossroads encounter with the devil:
“It was written about somebody I bumped into at 6am while I was going to get some milk – an old mate. He was absolutely f***ed, and I was absolutely terrified seeing him there. It was frightening how seductive he was, in a way. So, yes, it really did seem like he was the devil at that point. He was in a place where I wanted to be so much. A place outside of being human.”
And now? What kind of a place does Graham find himself in now? “Well, I think that if you listened to A&E, you might well wonder,” helaughs. “But then, I can count on one hand the amount of straight forwardly happy songs I really like.”
He tries nonetheless, and stalls at two. For all of that, A+E is a life-affirming ride, a snapshot of one of our most treasured artists mainlining his raw creativity with a breathless zeal.
“I can’t help noticing that no-one else my age is making music that sounds like this.” Slipping back into self-deprecation mode, he adds, “Perhaps that means I shouldn’t be, either.” You want to tell him that’s precisely the reason why he should but, of course, you’d only risk embarrassing him further.
Graham Coxon plays Concode 2, Brighton,on 23rd April. For tickets call 01273 673 311 or visit www.concorde2.co.uk – Coxon’s new album, ‘A+E’, will be released on 2nd April.
by: Mike Cobley
|
|
It really should be ridiculous, but it isn't. Somehow concocting a seemingly obnoxious stew that includes such tasty ingredients as incest, violence, mutilation, and nudity - at Theatre Royal Brighton, no less - all comes together in the mix to serve up one of the tastiest treats of Brighton Festival.
With tongues firmly in cheeks, Spymonkey brought Oedipussy onto the hallowed Brighton stage and unravelled the tale o...
more >>
|
 The Temper Trap pic by Andy Sturmey
With the Festival and Festival Fringe already packing the streets, bars and venues of Brighton, it got pretty wild on the streets of the city when the annual Great Escape Festival was added to the throng over the weekend.
It was difficult to get a foot in many-a venue, let alone an eye on the performers, as vast queues snaked the...
more >>
|
Mariella Frostrup is both the intellectual kingpin and host of The Book Show, on Sky Arts. Featuring an array of A-list authors and other big-name guests, it was great to see the channel's flagship programme leave its studio setting and head to the Brighton Festival for two special recordings.
|
One of the hidden themes of Brighton Festival 2012 so far seems to be of a kind of theatre that is not theatre, at least not as you might expect it to be.
I have seen work enacted well out of any theatrical context in warehouses, theatre in a theatre but with a gla...
more >>
|
I fell under the spell of poet Lemn Sissay at the Pavilion Theatre, on Tuesday night. I fell for his enthusiasm, warmth and unwavering passion for the topic in hand. Hell, when I pass on I reckon Sissay will even make me sound interesting!
With every seat taken, the house lights dipped and a screen came to life with the image of the recently depart...
more >>
|
I have always had a curious fascination about what goes on other people's houses, have you? Are they like me, my family, or not? What do they think? How do they cope with things? How do they live?
Many times on a dark night I have walked home past the station and up over the Seven Dials and looked up or do...
more >>
|
Ashley Varney from Leonards-on Sea accomplished an incredible 30-race running feat when he recently crossed the London Marathon finishing line.
The 42 year old Sussex swimming pool engineer took on 30 races, which he named &...
more >>
|
Shakespeare's plays are best watched standing up. I watched his work like this as a youth paying a fiver for standing matinee places at the rear of the stalls at the old RSC in Stratford Upon Avon, in Warwickshire.
Once, all the standing-ups cheered loudly, like football fans, as Edmund the Bastard was finally killed off i...
more >>
|
"What do you wear to a literary event?" my friend Rachel asked me in the school playground a couple of weeks ago after I had invited her to the Faber Social, at the Corn Exchange, on the opening night of Brighton Festival 2012.
“I don’t know, whatever you like I suppose”, I answered<...
more >>
|
The Bee Detective must have looked, to the assembled band of worthies from the cultural Olympiad, to be just up their street. As they clutched their list of 'things we need from our attempt to show that sports people are intelligent too and that the Olympics is actually not a boring load of expensive shit, a fitness contest sponsored by McDonald's and Coca-Cola, a drug-fuelled cheats paradise with mind numbing events like rifle shooting and wrestling actually CHARGING money to get in' they must have thought like this.
It is about the death of bees, a modern issue with environment relevance… tick!
It is c...
more >>
|
|
|