Blur’s Graham Coxon On His Candid Memoir And The WAEVE

In any survey about ’90s Britpop, the group Blur immediately comes to mind for their distinctive Englishness and alternative/art rock that defined an era. The band of Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree scaled the dizzying heights of fame and fortune during Cool Britannia with U.K. hit singles (“Girls and Boys,” “Song 2,” “Tender” and “Country House”), successful albums (Modern Life Is Rubbish, Parklife, The Great Escape and Blur), and major touring. Adding to the Blur legend is the band’s “rivalry” with Oasis, which was extensively hyped by the British music press. Thirty-five years after their formation, amid hiatuses and periodic reunions, the band still commands popularity; this year, Blur will be playing in Europe, Colombia and Japan, culminating with two huge dates at London’s Wembley Arena in July.

As a member of Blur, Coxon was in the eye of the storm, navigating through the British band’s ascendancy on the charts as well as the accompanying heavy media exposure. But as he tells it in his recent memoir Verse, Chorus, Monster! (co-written with Rob Young and published by Faber & Faber), being famous in one of the biggest bands of the ’90s wasn’t all that was cracked up to be—especially when he also contended with a serious drinking problem. Thus, Verse, Chorus, Monster! isn’t a glamorous tale about rock stardom but rather a candid recollection from someone finding creative expression both music and art and coping with personal issues (Before eventually pursuing music full-time, Coxon studied fine art at Goldsmiths College in London).

Outside of Blur, Coxon has carved out a well-received solo career with eight eclectic-sounding studio albums; he has also collaborated with artists such as Duran Duran and the Libertines’ Pete Doherty. Here, in this conversation, Coxon spoke about aspects of his memoir (which was recently published in the U.S.) and his latest project as The WAEVE with singer Rose Elinor Dougall. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What prompted you to write the memoir?

The idea of me doing an art book had been around for a while, filled mostly with pictures rather than chatter. We decided to get back on track with Faber on this one. I decided that if it was going to be more of a memoir like they wanted it to be, then getting in somebody for conversations would be the best way to approach it. And I read Rob Young’s book about folk music [Electric Eden] and I thought he would be a good person to talk about. He would know the English references really through the ‘70s and stuff like that, and anything like weird TV programs. Above all of that, I had come to a part of my life where I really had to start thinking about how I was gonna continue my life…I ended up in kind of a pretty battered way emotionally throughout 2020 and slightly beyond. So it was really a very big punctuation mark on life, generally.

Your book is unique in that it isn’t a celebration of having success in a popular band, but rather your mixed attitudes toward the trappings of fame.

Record labels, touring, TV shows and everything like that are different from how you imagine it’s going to be. It’s very difficult for me to look back. I do regret not just allowing myself to have a good time and do what everybody else does: live it up, make the most of it, and go crazy. But I was not that sort of person. I was very socially awkward. I would drink a lot and then become the opposite of socially awkward. Sometimes that was quite fun, sometimes it wasn’t. So the vibe I gave off was a little bit snarling sometimes or completely enclosed. I do remember having some really great times, but you do suffer for it.

I grew up watching The Kids Are Alright, the Who film, and it seemed like that was gonna be what touring was or what being in a band was gonna be like. But the documentaries don’t let you see the really cruddy bits of it. They let you have the 30% of the amazing times, and then there’s that 70% where you’re sitting in the back of a tour bus with a hangover. You don’t really know what to do, and you pull off somewhere and you don’t really know what to eat or feel. You miss home and your girlfriend and you know that five blokes are after your girlfriend while you are away. And you’re thinking, “Maybe she’s getting off of people while I’m away. Why shouldn’t I get off with people?” You can get sort of resentful of your situation quite easily.

Generally, I’m not a moody person. I’m quite happy-go-lucky, quite cheerful. But if you drink a lot and you’re exhausted, you’re not thinking about the next day. After two or three weeks, you’re sort of in tears and you don’t really know why.

You are very candid about being under the influence of alcohol. Was drinking your way of coping with the pressures of Blur’s success?

I drank like that before I was in a band. I didn’t really start drinking until I was 18. When I drank, I freaking loved it. I would sort of drink until I was falling over, not all the time, sometimes it was okay. There was no way I would have been playing a gig in the early days without having had the best part of a bottle of wine or something like that. That would be my setup. I’d get on stage, put my bottle of wine under whatever my amp was sitting on, under the chair. And when I got off stage, I would drink the rest.

It wasn’t really the fame. The fame stuff was alright. People are always nice to me if they come up to me in the street. It was to do with my chronic shyness really, my anxiety. That’s why I started drinking. I remember the first gig I did without drinking was terrifying because I had too much coffee as well. It’s really, really sort of frightening.

Before Blur’s emergence, you were faced with the decision of either pursuing a career in music or fine art during your young adulthood, and you chose the former. You emphasized in the book that had no regret in making that choice.

Music is the best sort of communication. When I was a kid, it was absolutely my first love. I don’t feel any self-consciousness really within music. I feel like I can pretty much hold my own. I feel like I have my own space, my own language, my own vocabulary, especially with the guitar. With art, it wasn’t part of anything. It was really a lot more like diary entries. It was a mishmash of styles from cartoons to absurd drawings to then more serious kind of stuff about processing my own feelings.

But music was always first. Absolutely no doubt about it. And Damon and I made a pact early very early on that one would drag the other along if either of us made it [in music] in some way into some situation where we could be getting signed, we’d drag the other in. But we both went in together, so it worked out well in the end.

Was there a particular moment when you felt Blur truly entered into the national consciousness—that the band reached the mountaintop?

Maybe it was coming up to [the 1994 album] Parklife. I’m not quite sure, but I mentioned in the book where we’re doing one of the big tent gigs, Reading Festival or something like that, I think, in 1992. We made a film around our festival outings in 1992 called Starshaped, which sort of illustrates pretty much how we were at that time. We were still struggling and in trouble financially. So I was going home after these promotional tours and festivals and not having enough money for a bag of chips. I’d go out and people would have to buy me a beer and stuff like that.

I suppose in parts of England, we were getting pretty big, like in the Midlands, in Wolverhampton and Birmingham, and places like that. But the national consciousness probably happened when [it was us] and Oasis. To make it onto the news in that way was kind of interesting. I didn’t really enjoy it that much. I didn’t see what the big deal was. I’d rather it would be for other reasons than this sort of childish competition. I suppose that’s when you hit the national consciousness, but still not many people knew Blur perhaps it wasn’t like we were super huge. We had number ones and things, but we weren’t exactly Michael Jackson or something like that.

Another revealing aspect of Verse, Chorus, Monster! is that you were initially reluctant to promote your solo music.

I’m a weird person. I didn’t know my own worth, let’s just say, for a long, long time, and perhaps still don’t. I was never in relationships with somebody that would say, “No, hold on a minute Graham. Don’t say that about yourself. Don’t think that about yourself.” They would almost enable me to keep thinking that about myself, which was another very unhealthy trait I had within relationships throughout my life. I felt like I was being kept in my place in a way. There are a lot of insecurities within musicians, no matter how confident they seem. And so the competitiveness is pretty massive.

I think it really was to do my own self-worth and also not wanting to travel necessarily. I like being at home, recording stuff. I was really finding myself a little more as a solo person because, for that brief time, I wasn’t really working in Blur. It was a couple of albums when I started to use Stephen Street as a producer, et cetera, [that] I decided, “Well, I should go on tour and this looks like this is what my life is, writing my own stuff, so maybe I should tour it. Maybe I should.” I was frightened of getting on people’s nerves.

Your latest project is The WAEVE with Rose Elinor Dougall, which resulted in a self-titled collaborative album. The two of you have terrific musical chemistry, and I definitely hear a lot of influences on the record: early Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, progressive rock, art rock, Scott Walker and psychedelia. Talk about The WAEVE and how it came about.

Rose and I met at the end of 2020. We were both extremely despondent. We’ve both been emotionally pretty beaten up that year and didn’t know how to go forward in our lives within ourselves. We didn’t quite know how to approach it as lockdown came to an end. We didn’t really know what to do musically, with how we were feeling. It was like, “Do we drag ourselves through another breakup album or another moaning about life?”

So we decided to try something different. I’d never collaborated with somebody like that. I got myself this little house in North London. I set out this small ground floor space and set up a keyboard for her and a little guitar mike for me. We wrote to each other a few times about how it could go but not really write a lot about it. We just linked each other to music we liked. We seemed to really hit a lot of common ground within jazz, rock and some prog stuff. There were things that she introduced to me that I hadn’t listened to closely enough, and then those things that I could introduce to her. She had pretty amazing tastes.

There was no audience, no record label, there was hardly anybody outside, It was like semi-post-apocalyptic. So we put everything that we have loved about music into it, and we drew from obviously folk music and prog rock. There was a lot to laugh about suddenly, and it seemed like, “Oh boy, if I’m gonna do anything musically, and I can do it with this person’s support, this should actually be alright.” And I guess that’s what she felt, too. So it was a great support for us both to get back after such a rough bunch of months into making music again.

Do you feel you’re in a better place now than you were 10 or 20 years ago?

I don’t know if I’m in a different place. I’m in my 50s: new worries, new stresses, gray hair, dodgy knees. And my mum dying in early 2021 really made me think about death a lot more. Which is kind of bleak, but these things happen, and the time I have left has to be really good. It has to be productive, it has to be happy. But making big changes in your life, you do have to suffer for it. And I’m still smarting from the changes that I had to make in my life. They were all pretty traumatic, and that doesn’t clear up overnight, no matter how much therapy you have.

I’ve got a very busy year with WAEVE shows and maybe even writing some new WAEVE stuff, and gigs with Blur, of course. Although it’s gonna be probably half insane by the end of the year, I am determined to enjoy it and savor every sort of moment and maybe have those good times I should have always had…[and] allow myself to have a good laugh. I know what the downsides are. The thing is the downsides and the boredom, I kind of welcome them now. I didn’t welcome them in my early 20s, and boredom was my enemy. Now, I quite like boredom and peace and quiet.

‘Verse, Chorus, Monster!’ by Graham Coxon with Rob Young is available at retail outlets. The WAEVE’s self-titled album is also out now.