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Back to: Archive · 2004 A man apart From 'this is Brighton' magazine, 1-14 June 2004. By Katya Mira. "Not really," says ex-Blur guitarist Graham Coxon when I ask if he's still pals with his former bandmates. "I don't know if we ever really were friends. You sort of become business associates, everything revolving around money. It's pretty messed up, how bands become." Touted by some as the resident genius of the band, by others as the slightly nerdish, eccentric one and by most as the notorious drinker, Coxon always stood out as being different to his fellow Blurites. Now happily separated from the successful band, the reluctant guitar hero is doing things very much his own way, with low-key gigs and a new album, Happiness In Magazines, acclaimed as his best work yet. He is unimpressed by Blur's album Think Tank ("I don't like it, I just can't see anything in there") and more than unimpressed with Damon, Alex and Dave's treatment of him towards the end of 2001. Drinking problems had escalated out of control and Graham checked himself into The Priory. A month later, he was out again, sober and refreshed ready to re-join the others in the studio. Not very long afterwards, he was taken aside by the band's manager. "They had all called him to say they didn't want me in the studio anymore," remembers Graham. "He said, 'You're not sacked, they just don't want you to go in for this whole LP'. It was weird. I went to get some advice (from a lawyer), who said, 'Do you want to leave? This doesn't sound very good.' "By then, my priorities had changed an awful lot, having given up the drink and deciding I wanted to spend a lot more time with my daughter. So I decided I would go. "I was totally clean and sober when they disinvited me. Perhaps I had used up all my chances and they decided that was it but they did it at the wrong time." As in most bitter break-up stories, this one has two sides. "What threw us was the fact we started and the first day Graham didn't turn up," Blur frontman and Coxon's former school pal Damon Albarn said last year. "It was: 'Do we just go home or do we do something in the studio?' And we thought let's have a go. "We did it not thinking it was a permanent decision. When Graham returned months later, it just didn't work as a four-piece any more, as simple as that. It's ridiculous he's not here but basically he can't deal with the intense scrutiny and emotional demands, it has nothing to do with making music together." Always less poptastic than the others, the signs that Coxon didn't take too well to Blur fame were there from the early days, closely followed by the bouts of alcoholism. At a Champagne-fuelled party in 1995 which celebrated the album The Great Escape trouncing Oasis to the Number One spot, he tried to jump out a sixth-floor window. Damon found him half-way out and managed to halt a tragedy. "It was really stupid," Coxon was quoted at the time. "But I freaked out. It was set up as such a great event, the news going berserk about the Oasis and Blur battle, all that Champagne. I would have rather had a quiet Number One at home with my mum and dad. "Then I was drinking to drown the voices that were asking me, 'What are you doing?' It was linked to my experience of being in Blur. I felt a sort of rootlessness." Perhaps anticipating his future as a solo artist, Coxon broke away to record his first solo album in 1998 while still a member of Blur. Claiming it gave him a chance to explore such genres as country and folk music which didn't interest his bandmates, he continued to record his own material and do his own thing in between Blur work. "I suppose it was like having a little affair with myself," he says. "Something on the side, because I wasn't really getting my needs met in my main relationship." Despite an intense workload making him feel "like a zombie", Coxon seems content to continue this love affair with himself through a solo career. He can make music when he wants without waiting around for other band members to do their stuff, find time to look after his little girl, and shy away from the fame game to his heart's content. "I'm sort of like a free-range chicken. I can peck wherever I want and enjoy what I peck. I can work with a producer that I want to work with or I can not." Happiness In Magazines features the Sixties and Seventies influences which have always been his thing and down-to-earth songs about feeling out of place at a party, being dumped and going through his grandad's house after he died. "I can understand why people say this is my best album yet, it's easy to listen to I guess. I'm proud of the whole record but there's stuff I've done before that I thought was good too. "With Blur I had to be a part of everybody else's expectations of themselves so I can listen to Blur records and be cringing about some of the sounds. I don't have that with my own thing, there isn't really anything I'm embarrassed about - especially with the new album." |