With Graham Coxon turning 48 today, we at Fudgel felt obliged to commend one of Britain’s best ever guitarists. His taciturn tongue, choppy bowl-cut trim and clunky wayfarer glasses are famously incongruent with his cool-as-fuck guitar style, taking diverse cues from Jimi Hendrix, The Kinks, Wire, Sonic Youth and Slint. Despite this vast spread of strong influences, Coxon delivered some of the Nineties most groundbreaking guitar work with Blur.
To celebrate his birthday, we have chosen three deep cuts from Blur’s catalogue to laud some of his most brilliant yet least appreciated performances with the guitar. Have a butchers at what we have to say about these tracks, and listen to them on the Spotify playlist at the bottom of the post.
Death of a Party
When artists drop a self-titled album deep into an already established career, this usually hints towards a stylistic sea change, delivering a brave statement like “Before we was messing around, but now we’re here with the real deal”. On Blur’s self-titled record in 1997, it was Graham Coxon’s tsunami of frustration that triggered Blur’s sea change, as he doused Britpop with petrol and flicked a lit zippo lighter at it, emerging from the “Cool Britannia” bonfire with a new sound of searing, abrasive and Americanised alt-rock.
“Death of a Party” is the unsung gem of this self-titled record, with Coxon serving up a melting pot of menace. He matches the rhythm sections hip-hop swing with a muffled, spidery reggae riff, whilst injecting abrasion into the background by using creepy delay effects on his palm-muted scratches and erratic slides. The chorus is both euphoric and uneasy, like a harsh comedown off potent E’s, as Coxon’s looping bends unravel whilst the protagonist does, “Go to another party/And hang myself/Gently on the shelf”.
Battle
It’s not often you hear a song from the previous millennium which still sounds like the future in 2017. “Battle” is a hair raising slice of shoegaze, space-dub and alternative rock, with Coxon delivering a stellar performance in noise that blows Kevin Shields and Buzz Osbourne out of the water. He builds a monolithic wall of blissed out fuzz, which bulldozes the tracks cosmic synths and rousing sub bass, creating a soundscape that sounds like nuclear war between two extra-terrestrial empires.
Aside from this cathartic blast of distortion, he bends strings until they shriek with displeasure, and slides up the neck with so much delay it sounds like he is launching notes into orbit. The tracks final minute sees the band rear off into an organ led detour, with Coxon bellowing out droney fuzz and wah wah solo’s. It’s fundamentally a Damon Albarn track. But Coxon turns up at his party with a louder shirt.
Stereotypes
During the trilogy of Blur’s “Life” albums, it was up to Coxon to perforate Damon’s cheeky Kinksian ditties with just enough snarl to give them the bite that they needed. On “Stereotypes”, it’s hard to imagine this tune taking off *at all* without the ingenious input of Coxon.
Damon tells the tale of a female B&B owner who hits the town, gets pissed and scopes out married men over a bouncy organ. So Coxon pairs this ditty with an even bouncier yet discordant riff, punching a Hendrix chord and then hammering the F sharp and its octave with funky agitation. His descending turn-round is atypical of his jittery arpeggiated licks, whilst his playing on the bridge is all jangly, fluvial, legato. Even at his most simple, Coxon is a dynamo.
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