Verse, Chorus, Monster!: Graham Coxon

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If Graham is reading this, I hope he knows how many lives he has changed for the better, and how many people he has influenced. His outlook and self-analysis will resonate with a lot of people, and he should be proud that he took this step to air his thoughts when he didn't have to. Coxon comes across as a lovely bloke with a voracious appetite and passion for new sounds and words that I wish I could have a chat to and bond over music, films and books. As is it, for much of the book Coxon appears to be searching for inspiration and validation that he can't find within the orbit of his Blur bandmates, who are sketched here precisely as we would expect to find them. This breed, this species of Pop Song, at least in the 90s, don’t fall out of fashion because the zeitgeist shrivels up when coming down in the shadow itself created. They reach an apex. They are catalogued and kept on best-ofs for a reason in spite of how shallow and how paradoxically grandiose the entire unimaginable affair might appear to be now. It merely acquires New life. New fans. New fads. New fascinations. The Pop Song, about Girls and Boys, about Cigarettes and Alcohol, reveals new, cool, hip, and limitless fascinating reasons for itself to exist. The darkness of which came from the awkward corner occupied by Graham.

I realised that I’d gone a bit stagnant with the electric guitar - I don’t sit down and try and get better or suddenly learn scales, but that’s a whole other compartment that I don’t go near publicly. But that’s the problem with liking so much music - it’s all usable within pop music or alternative music or whatever. I got into prog through Julia, my girlfriend when I was seventeen, and her record collection. I’d got out of the mod music a little bit, I'd had a bit of Human League, a bit of Talk Talk and I’d watched South Bank Show about Van Der Graff Generator and The Velvet Underground. But Julia had Relics by Pink Floyd, a couple of Van Der Graaf Generator albums, Patti Smith albums, all of that stuff. When we started in ’90, a lot of things weren’t talked about because they weren’t known about. You might come across people and be warned, “Careful, they’re trouble.” But not very often. Someone who’s basically been in their bedroom practicing the guitar and is suddenly out there, amongst all of that, is very vulnerable. I didn’t know about boundaries. I was a people pleaser. I didn’t want people to dislike me, so I didn’t like saying no. I didn’t want to hurt people’s feelings. No one told me it could get you into some really bad situations, and you’ve got to learn to say no and to have some boundaries, and you’ve got to really be able to look out for those people who are who are out there to cause you harm, even if they’re in the guise of people that that are wishing you well. It feels like in the book you skim over your personal relationships with your partners, and even with the other members of Blur, a bit like a respectful distance from them. Seymour var orginal namnet på deras nystartade band, som senare bytte namn till Blur. "That rounded Blur typefacez with the 'r' that bleeds of the edge of the sleeve was how we originally designed it".

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Graham Coxons självbiografi är inte ett mästerverk, en poesisamling eller en bok värd att vinna nobelpris. Men ser man den för vad den är, en bok om han själv, så uppnår den precis det. Och eftersom jag tänker att ingen som följer mig här kommer läsa den själva kan jag summera det mest värdefulla här, så slipper ni all bullshit där emellan. Best Fit: It’s interesting how Steely Dan made more sense to you when you were getting into recording at home properly, since now you can make a record that sounds like them without spending however many thousands of pounds on studios, session musicians, and cocaine… It’s just the sound of it, it's that woozy synthesiser sax thing, or an acoustic guitar suddenly strumming a chord, and the subtle key changes. And again, the clipped groove of the drums, and the dryness of it.

I'll start this by saying Blur are my favourite band and have been for over 25 years, so I may have more pre-existing knowledge than the average reader and as such this has probably shaped some of my thoughts around this book. Those with a passing interest in Graham and/or Blur may find this book a better read.Initially, the book was going to be a collectible one featuring Coxon’s extensive visual art. But as Coxon says, “That book would probably sit on a shelf or a table, never get opened and get coffee marks on it. It needed to be more than that.” While Blur has already gone down as one of the foundational bands of the ’90s Britpop era and is still celebrated and lionized, some fans wonder what other angles of the band there are to explore. Blur has been the subject of at least two theatrical documentaries (Lovelace and Southern’s 2010 No Distance Left to Run and Sam Wrench’s 2015 New World Towers),and numerous unofficial biographies. In 2008, bassist Alex James released his book Bit of a Blur, detailing his life and times with the band firsthand, even if most of it was spent pining for a lost love while doing a lot of sleeping around. But be dropped into the middle of all this, the beating heart, the pulsating brain, the throng of it all and talk about your feelings. Something the 90s, during this catastrophic, cataclysmic Brit explosion, didn’t do, and the whole thing becomes a hotspot for various nobodies to hangers-on to cling onto you like you’ve known each other forever. Graham confesses humorously that maybe they should have spent more time being cool, rather than admitting they were a bunch of vulnerable lads interested in pop art and not just playboy. A similar confession, one meditating on how stagnant the whole scene had become since its inception in the 90s. It became ‘more commercialised and sensationalised, everything seemed to wipe out a lot of what had inspired Graham in the late 80s’– a new kind of tension. Another kind of commerciality. Another kind of spectacle. That thing which, to quote Debord is ‘nothing other than the sense of a total practice of social-economic function: its use of time. It is the historical moment which contains us’.