The minute I was asked to interview Camden rock-royalty Graham Coxon, I began to think I might finally get an answer to one of the world’s burning questions. You know, one of those unanswered mysteries such as why do traffic lights always seem to be red when you're running late, why do other peoples chips always taste better and just what is down that hatch on Lost?
I knew this interview was a chance rarer than an Arctic Monkeys ticket. I would finally be able to ask a 90s icon, who’s better, Blur or Oasis?
Or so I thought. Just days before the interview, when I had already envisioned a trip back into the Brit-pop heyday on the back of Coxon’s finely detailed memories and anecdotes, the blow is delivered. I’m asked nicely/warned not to ask any questions about Blur. In fact in the request they’re referred to as Graham’s old band, it’s as if the word Blur is banned, is offensive or if mentioned, someone in his press office may even self-destruct.
After some sulking and a small tantrum, I realise it’s not an unreasonable request. Graham is about to release his fifth solo studio offering after all.
There’s already been a fair amount of chat about his forthcoming LP ‘Love Travels at Illegal Speeds’. Apparently unlike his punkish yet quaint, ‘Happiness In Magazines’ from 2004, some big mouth musos have said this record’s a bit slushy and lovey. Is that right Graham?
“Lovey [as in luvvie] is a bit amateur dramatics, isn’t it,” he half-jests in his cute cockney tones, which have all the innocence of Frank Spencer and the Brit-wit of Stephen Fry. “I wish I’d never said anything about the love thing. People get the wrong impression. It isn’t exactly a slushy-slushy record. It’s more about relationships and the darker and more frustrating aspects of it. There is some sentimentality to it, but the album has its up-tempo and energetic moments alongside lulling and gentle ones.”
Well there was no way a super brain like Graham’s could craft a straightforward and simplistic project. Contradiction and complexity is in the very fibre of Grahams being. He continues: “It is about falling in love, but not like ‘Reach For the Stars’ by Steps or whoever kind of way. It’s more of ‘I’m falling in love, this is terrible’.
I used to like the Smiths and the Jam, who made more complicated love songs. Where there is not just a surface of gladness, love is more a frightening experience where you're asking yourself an awful lot of questions and double taking your own feelings. You're having thoughts and opinions, but how do you know this is the truth to you?”
You can tell Graham connected with ‘Girlfriend In a Coma’ in a way most Morrissey devotees just pretended to. And a gloomy insight into the workings of the heart isn’t the only thing Graham shares with his musical heroes. There’s another thing Weller, Marr and Coxon could discuss over coffee and possibly Prozac, the importance of painstaking attention to detail. Johnny Marr wouldn’t dare breathe until he’d perfected an arrangement when he and Morrissey were writing ‘The Queen Is Dead’ and Graham is just as calculated. For starters he insists on playing all the instruments on his recordings. “The record really was weeped,” says Graham. “I mean it won’t seem it. I like to control things and this brings a lot of work. But it’s nice to know I can look back and it’s all consistent. You know, sonically and lyrically it all glued together in a good way. I’m loosely a perfectionist. I would say I’m a total freakazoid when it comes to the recording. I do like things right and can get obsessive about the littlest things such as the sound of a snare drum.”
Minor background percussion isn’t the only aspect of a release Graham likes to control. He’s also a talented painter - he dropped-out of a fine art course at Goldsmiths to play full time in B**r – and holds authority over the album artwork too. The album cover is a bright and energetic depiction of a comet, which Graham says connotes both the life-giving power and the apocalyptic, doom-laden aspects of love. “I spent a lot of time on artwork. It really has to connect with the emotional drive of the record and I spent the same amount of time on it as I did the recording.”
It may all sound very intense, serious and conceptual but Graham’s not always been this straight-laced. He was once a famous piss artist and he spent years stumbling around Camden’s hippest watering holes. Or as he puts it: “When I was young and drunk everything was very easy and when I straightened out and got older, I got calmer. You do become more accepting to things but in the same sense they become more crucial.”
He’s still more rock ’n’ roll than a whiskey soaked Rolling Stone though.
“Recording is a bit like watching your diet and eating fruit and vegetables, iron and vitamin C. But when you go live, it’s like a junk food and burger-scoffing mess - a bit more lewd and base.
I write to express how I’m feeling and when I get to shout and scream songs it’s like a kind of therapy and I feel purged. I’m just trying to communicate something successfully. And music is still rocket science to me. There’s still a magic in the recording process and I still think of it as sorcery.”
Talking of miracles, I got through the whole interview without saying it. Well, now he’s not listening… Blur, Blur, BLURRRRRRR. But the truth is I didn’t even want to ask him about it. Graham’s much more interesting than a band he used to be in. He’s got a confident modesty combined with a stupidly clever song-writing talent (be prepared to hear words such as frickin’ on the album) and a command of guitar rifferama his own childhood heroes covet.
Love Travels At Illegal Speeds is out now.
Kerry Eustice