Gig review: Graham Coxon, The Garage, Glasgow

GRAHAM Coxon is a beacon for reluctant adults everywhere. Even though Blur are of sufficiently veteran stock to be the recipients of the Outstanding Contribution to Music award at this year’s Brits, their guitarist cannot quite leave his youth behind, dressing in the same clothes, producing feral adolescent punk tunes and musing on the perils of liquor-fuelled exuberance on his current album A+E.

His avowedly lo-fi solo career has lurched along in scrappy counterpoint to Blur’s steady maturation. This summer, they will play a prestige show at the Olympics, but last night Coxon was right at home kicking up a fuzzy racket at a grungey club gig.Even though his pop tendencies are never too far from the surface, this was where he could really indulge himself with lengthy Krautrock drones and other cult influences to produce the distortion, dissonance and detachment of Meet + Drink + Pollinate, his dispassionate take on Saturday-night social rituals. There was a bratty catharsis to the pell-mell Running For Your Life – it certainly takes talent to engineer such controlled musical chaos.

Coxon is a sweetly awkward frontman and somewhat diffident as guitar heroes go, but not too cool to unleash some good old-fashioned string-mangling histrionics on the febrile garage-country hangover number Ooh Yeh Yeh or the closing strung-out jam.

His accompanying vocal style is rather fey and was often overpowered by the maelstrom whipped up by his frenetic band, but he held his own during the hi-octane encore with the nihilistic howl of “what’s wrong with me?” from recent single What’ll It Take.

A rhetorical question maybe, but, other than a tendency to overplay the bashful paranoia, “not much really” would be the answer.

Rating: ****