Interview: Graham Coxon, musician

HE’S happy to talk about the “weird, four-headed monster” that is Blur, but with his latest solo album already wowing the critics Graham Coxon’s got more on his mind than Hyde Park mega-gigs, he tells Aidan Smith

A couple of questions, that’s all I’m allowed. Graham Coxon will only tolerate passing mention of his other job, according to his PR, because he’s not wearing that hat today and the focus should be on his solo record. This is understandable and also justifiable, because the album A+E is a fine thing, but in the end the guitarist turns out to be quite revealing on the elephant in the room, or as he puts it, the “weird, four-headed monster” you and I know as Blur.

He’s relaxed about discussing the current and future state of the Britpop legends because this life rarely, as it were, blurs with his career as a performer in his own right. “In Blur I’ve got a nice guitar and two Marshalls at full blast and in the dressing-room someone’ll have laid on super-duper food, plus flowers and maybe some freebies,” he explains. “With my solo stuff it’s a bit different. The loo I use will be the same one as the punters. There’ll be hammering on the door: ‘Hurry up mate – he’s on in a minute.’ Then I appear. ‘Look everybody, it’s Coxon!’ And of course there’ll be cocks drawn on the walls and the loo will have no seat. But, you know, I love doing both. I’m lucky that way.”

He’s now made more solo albums than Blur ones, A+E being his eighth to Blur’s seven. After holing up in his country retreat for the psych-folk of The Spinning Top – not, he insists, a very big house in the country – he stayed in Camden, north London for the follow-up, and the sound is more urgent, agitated and urban.

“I wrote the songs right here,” he says in his den at the top of his house, surrounded by guitars, though he began them on bass, just mucking about, before picking up his old saxophone. With synths burbling away, this is probably his danciest record, and the rave reviews have pointed out a pronounced krautrock influence.

“That’s an obvious thing to say,” suggests Coxon, 43. “I mean, I like beat music, I like prog-rock, I like interesting, dynamic music with riffs. But I also like stuff that’s meditative, those long organ outros on Pink Floyd songs, hypnotic grooves that go on and on. A girlfriend I had when I was 17 was really into Floyd and Van Der Graaf Generator and she was quite an influence on me because I thought I just liked my Beatles and my Kinks. I was in a band at art college, me on sax, very improvisational. We thought we were Gong or Soft Machine.”

Right from first track Advice, though, A+E invites discussion about Blur, from whom Coxon split acrimoniously in 2002 before signing up for the big reunion. The amateur psychologist is going to wonder if a line like “I’m pretty much back where I started and it’s quite concerning me” is a comment on the band reforming. Same with “I wrote a new song while I was touring. Man, it was no fun, it was really boring.” He laughs. “Actually, that track doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to me, although it probably contains a sarky comment about new bands and how they’re stuck on a treadmill.” Then he says: “Songs! I’ve always been touched by the absurdity of my job. I love music but in a sense it’s ridiculous. We don’t really need it but it’s so important.”

It was in 2009 that the four members of Blur – Damon Albarn, Alex James, Dave Rowntree and Coxon – kissed and made up. Will they now get back in the studio together? Coxon has already hinted at a new album, and he’s certainly keen for them to do more than just accept gongs and grateful thanks. “I don’t want us to be this kind of celebrity show. I’m totally up for making new music, seeing what this weird, four-headed beast has got. I think we’re in a healthy place.

“Even in 2009 we were probably trying to second-guess each other’s motives and wondering: ‘Are we really in this for our friendship?’ It hadn’t been so long before that when the band had been dark, weird and f****d up but playing those songs reminded us of how important we are in each other’s lives. We’ve managed to reach the point where we can be ourselves with each other again.”

They’re playing a mega-gig in London’s Hyde Park to mark the end of the Olympics. Coxon is looking forward to the show but is more circumspect about the sporting spectacular. “I still don’t really believe the Olympics are coming. I’ll probably notice when they’re here but hopefully I won’t notice too much. My daughter and I have got tickets for something, the synchronised swimming I think, but hopefully we won’t all be herded round like cattle by people with radio mics and clipboards.”

Before then Coxon will be back in the realm of graffiti-ed penises and hoping his return to Scotland isn’t marred by anything like the dodgy Edinburgh oyster which landed him in hospital the last time he played here. If there is a theme to A+E it’s a wild British night out of the kind this reformed alcoholic doesn’t have any more. “Do you know that French people pop over to England to see Binge Britain in all its glory? They join in for a weekend then go back to France to drink wine with lunch in their civilised way. We just don’t seem to be able to do that, it’s in our DNA that we must abuse alcohol. My song Ooh Yeh Yeh is about bumping into an ex-associate, the devil, basically, who’d been boozing all night and was trying to tempt me out. It was early morning and I was getting a pint of milk, for goodness sake.”

• A+E is out now on Parlophone. Graham Coxon plays the Liquid Room, Edinburgh, on 16 April and the Garage, Glasgow on 17 April.