Tag: graham coxon

Get This!

Coxon At The Controls

Craig McAllister

Blur. Four musicians. Four mindsets. Four sets of influences pushing and pulling the band in four different directions. Part of the appeal, you might say, and part of the reason they sound as they do (sounded as they did?), but only one of the four is responsible for putting the undisputed art into their uncouth rock.

It’s not Damon Albarn, a mega-talented writer for sure who can turn his hand to Chinese opera as quickly as he can rattle off some pseudo G-funk with Snoop Dogg. It’s not Dave the drummer either. Low-key Dave is more than happy in his old Teenage Fanclub t-shirt and standing for the right sort of politics, ready to be called upon for the pension-topping reunion shows when the public demands. And it’s not you, cheesemaking Alex. Sorry, but your pout and your cheekbones and your studied posturing, not to mention your aching mid-90s desire to be John Taylor for teenage girls in Adidas shell toes makes you just about the most punchable man there’s ever been in music. When people say they don’t like Blur, you’re the reason.

Step forward Graham Coxon. The other half of the band’s unassuming, ego-free side, Coxon quietly gets on with his job of being an arty lead guitar player in one of the nation’s greatest singles bands; hunched and studied, inventive and unique, angry and noisy but restrained and bluesy when required. Always interesting though. Especially when doing backwards rolls, Tele in hand, riffage ringing out from a 4 x 12 cabinet at ear-splitting volume. Oh yeah.

The guitar-as-siren on Popscene. The off-beat grind of the guitar against the fluid groove of Girls And Boys. The Beatlesy clang of Beetlebum‘s chorus. Coxon made them all. Lifted them, elevated the songs from promising to pretty much indispensable.

He’s tight ‘n taught, all wandering XTC by way of Remain In Light Afro-menace across forgotten single Music Is My Radar, before cutting free with an almighty wasp stuck in a food blender guitar break. Remind yrself of its greatness below.

Blur – Music Is My Radar

He’s all over Song 2‘s silly double drummer ‘n double Rat distortion blowout, its noisy jet engine take-off chorus following a clanging intro that he strived to play as horribly and sloppily as possibly. Why? He was fed up with the screaming teenage girls and pin-up appeal of his band. A bit of unexpected guitar Frippery and freakery kept him entertained and the audience on their toes. Woo-hoo.

The tension and release in M.O.R.’s gutbucket punk is magic. An arty use of fuck ’em up effect pedals welded to the band’s call and response vocals, some of them shouted through a far-away megaphone, and open chorded let-go in the chorus is the sound of the guitar player pulling against the grain of the rest of the band. Add in a clanging, out of tune piano right at the end and you have a pop single that made number 15 surely only on the back of the band’s name. Can’t imagine the shell toes and Fila tracksuits lapping this little Britpop ditty up very easily.

Blur – M.O.R.

Coxon is possibly most at home on Coffee And TV, its weird descending chords adding wooze to the vocal’s melody – his vocal, as it goes – before the all-out sonic freak attack of the ‘solo’, a worked-up in the studio affair where he stomped on and off his pedal board with all the enthusiasm of Gripper Stebson pogoing on poor Ro-land Browning’s head. You knew that already though.

Uniqueness. That’s the secret. What makes Blur so great? Graham Coxon, of course. In a lineage of great English singles bands, Blur may well be, for now, the last in that line. From The Beatles, The Kinks and The Who through to The Jam, Madness and The Smiths, an ability to amalgamate melody and electric guitars to an undeniable signature sound is a trick that all guitar bands strive for, yet few manage. Coxon at the controls of his array of effect pedals ensured Blur found their place in this exclusive club.

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

Sustain-ability

Craig McAllister

There’s the clip in Spinal Tap when Nigel Tufnel, all Jeff Beck hair and street punk gum snap, is showing off his collection of vintage guitars. He holds up a Les Paul (of course) – “s’a ’59” (of course) – and, as the interviewer asks him the value of the guitar (of course), Tufnel butts in and implores the interviewer to be quiet and listen to the sustain of his unplugged guitar.

“Just listen…the sustayn…just listen to it…it’s faymous for its sustayn…eeaaaaaaahh…”

It’s ridiculous and smart and very funny, with Christopher Guest playing it straight and just on the right side of dumb but rich Londoner, and with much of Spinal Tap being cribbed from stories involving real-life musicians, you wouldn’t bet against this being a true story too.

Is it a myth that old guitars sound better? Apparently not. Or maybe that should be apparently knot. Old guitars sing with the release of being played again. It’s a fact. Scientific too.

The science of it all (usually a subject that has me passed out and horizontal in under a minute) decrees that as wood ages, the sap in the wood dries out. So the more the guitar is played, the more the wood vibrates, y’see, and it’s those vibrations that help to speed up the drying out process. It stands to reason that an old guitar that’s been well played – a ’59 Les Paul, say, or my own ’78 Telecaster (most definitely well played rather than played well) – will indeed have a more cultured and refined tone than one that’s just straight from the luthier’s workshop.

Acoustic guitars tend to have a more noticeable improvement with age. There’s no pick-ups for starters, so the sound is made at the source rather than via amplification, and the instrument’s hollow body helps that sound to resonate. The wood the guitar is made from (and that could be alder, mahogany, ash, elder, a combination of some or all…) and the tension of strings used and how regularly it’s been played will all affect its overall tone.

When my dad passed away I inherited his Lag acoustic guitar. It wasn’t a particularly expensive guitar and it wasn’t that old when I fell heir to it, ten years maybe, but the old folkie (and that’s a story in itself) had treated it well and played it regularly enough (at gigs – I told you there was a story) that playing it is a proper joy. The action is low and smooth. There is no fret buzz. The bass notes are rich and reverberating. It handles the capo at the highest of frets, happily stays in tune and it responds really well to Keith Richards open G tuning. Best of all, what I’ve found if I tune it a whole step down, is that it sounds bassy and bluesy and bendy and exactly the sort of pitch and frequency that might have someone like Lee Mavers getting a whole set of songs from.

I’ve kept it in this tuning for over a year and there’s rarely a night when I don’t pick it up for a bit – anything from a few minutes to a few hours – and play it, the dusty ghosts of my dad’s fingers, just below my own, spidering up and down the fretboard and dancing across its six strings as I get to grips with a tricky Johnny Marr passage or a pastoral McCartney number or, this week, The La’s Son Of A Gun. Down-tuned and loose and funky, there’s enough give on the strings to give it soul, enough open strings in the picked verses to ring out naturally between the rhythmic off beats played by the right hand’s finger nails on the scratchplate and enough bass to make the strummed chorus full of fat and full of flavour. Unsurprisingly, The La’s version is also played in this tuning; the tuning of humming fridges and ’60s dust and the Merseyssippi and single bloody mindedness. Look long enough around this blog and you’ll probably find it.

Another guitarist more known for his skewed Telecaster playing than anything else is Blur’s Graham Coxon. He’s a great player too, happily chopping out punkish riffs and wiry leads and art-pop, rule-breaking bridges, employing two Rat distortion boxes simultaneously to devastating effect. What’s perhaps less-well known is that he’s also a fantastically accomplished acoustic player.

Graham Coxon – Sorrow’s Army

Sorrow’s Army from his 2009 Spinning Top solo album conjures up the spirit of Davy Graham and rattles its way out of the traps like Mrs Robinson on speed, strings snapping tautly – he favours skinny ones, a 9 gauge after some advice from Bert Jansch, every finger on his right hand employed in blurry syncopation, left hand shifting through 7ths and minors with dextrous ease, the squeaks and scrapes of flesh and nail against the strings adding fireside warmth. It’s not Girls & Boys or Popscene or Beetlebum, but when the song’s clattering Magic Bus rhythm announces itself around the minute mark, it all falls into place. The accompanying album is worth investigating too, should this be your kinda thing.

Old guitars, handed down, played forever. Now there’s your sustain-ability. Just listen.

 

Blur Fanclub Singles

Blessed Is The Cheese Maker

Craig McAllister

Damon Albarn fairly splits opinion. On the one hand, the oikish mockney Cockney wiv an omnipresent Errol Flynn on his boat race, “Oi!, on the other the indie Sting, admirably keen to break out from the expected norm of Blur recordings, releases and tours by teaming up with the Chinese Ensemble, groovy cartoon characters, some of The Clash, the cream of Africa’s elite percussionists and, seemingly, anything else that takes his fancy. Not all of it works, but when it does, the results, such as the recordings he’s made with the elastic-limbed drummer Tony Allen or the West Coast meets East London stylings of his Gorillaz collaborations with Snoop Dogg can be spectacular.

With Blur seemingly no more, it’s as good a time as any to reappraise Music Is My Radar, their 2000 single released ahead of and solely for the purposes of promoting their Best Of album from the same year. Like all the best singles bands – of which Blur are undoubtedly one – Music Is My Radar stands alone as a single without a parent album, save that hits compilation. As such, it’s almost the great lost Blur tune, despite its blink-and-you’ve-missed-it appearance at 10 on yer actual hit parade.

It’s quite the tune, bridging the gap between Pop Blur and Art Blur. The skittering drums and paranoid locked-in groove mooch in like the long lost cousin of early Talking Heads while Graham Coxon’s guitar alternates between oriental expressionist and foodblender set to spin, given free reign to colour the whole thing as he sees fit.

 Blur – Music Is My Radar

Damon’s vocals are double, triple tracked, conjuring up melodies and counter melodies that breeze across the top. His repetitive ‘Aah! Don’t stop me!‘ and ‘Do-do-dooh‘ refrains burrow deep into the ear and settle in the frontal lobes to be called up and played on repeat at will. He adds a line namechecking the aforementioned Nigerian Tony Allen – ‘He really got me dancin’, he really got me dancin’,’ yet beneath the surface there’s enough interesting stuff bubbling to keep even the most ardent of anti-commercial indie purist happy.

Nagging wee keyboard refrains jump in and out when least expected, save you were planning on nodding off to the noodling groove. Extra guitar lines weave their way like needles creating the freefrom pattern on one of those Fair Isle sweaters that Sarah Lund wore in The Killing. It’s the bassline though that hits hardest.

That lanky, wanky, foppish twit that plays bass wanders up and down the frets, apeing the guitar line here and there but mainly driving the whole thing forwards with unfaltering purpose and groovy swagger. He fairly surpasses himself and without the bass player on this form, Music Is My Radar may well have been a sloppy, unravelling mess, a bowl of musical spaghetti in need of some glue to hold it together. The cheese maker is that glue, commiting to record his finest four minutes in a Blur shirt.

Interestingly, the released version was shortened from Squeezebox, the original 6 minutes + demo.

Blur – Squeezebox (Music Is My Radar demo)

Probably the correct choice as this version tends to wander aimlessly up a blind alley occassionally. Just shows what a good producer (Ben Hillier on the single version) can do for a band, turning a meh track into a killer single.

Bonus Track

The b-side to the single – actually track 2 on CD1, as was the fashion at the time, is a really great tune, with loads of crackin’ Coxon guitar lines, electric piano and a gospel choir on the chorus, coming in at a lengthy and bluesy 8 and a half minutes. Jason Pierce would kill for a track like this.

Blur – Black Book

Blur b-sides tended to be crappy, experimental, half-arsed demos or unnecessary wonky, skronky remixes. Black Book is neither, a bona fide lost classic in a back catalogue littered with rubbish. Great singles band though.

Blur Fanclub Singles, demo, Hard-to-find, studio outtakes

B.L.U.R.D.E.M.O.

Craig McAllister

“Have you got Beetlebum?”

“No. It’s just the way I’m standin‘.”

The happiest job I ever had (and possibly ever will have) was when I worked behind the counter of a well-known High Street music retailer. A stop-gap job that somehow lasted 11 years, it took me all the way from Inverness to Leeds and back again via Ayrshire. Amongst the minority of planks, skanks and wanks in management that I was unfortunate enough to share a tea break with, I met a fair number of like-minded music obsessives, film obsessives and the odd stereotypically sulky sales assistant happy to hang off the counter and unsettle casual browsers looking for chart fodder. Like the one quoted above. He did actually say that, and it was funny.

Anyway. Down to business. I’m not about to get all high and mighty here, but I am about to show a shocking sense of double standards. I don’t really like illegal downloading. Rich, I know, from someone who’s happy to provide crappy mp3s of all and sundry to anyone who fancies them. But I’m not talking about harmless, out-of-print singles from 1973 and whatever else makes its way onto these pages. Is that really affecting anyone? What I don’t like is what I’d term mass-market illegal downloading. The recent BBC report that showed Manchester to be the worst offenders in the UK was quite interesting. Rihanna, Bruno Mars and Ed Sheeran are the big losers in the whole thing, as it seems that every school kid and upwards has illegally downloaded their music. It’s said that they’re the generation that understands music to be free, and I’d have to agree. Aye, some percentage or other of them may end up buying the album in the future, but that’s debatable. Anyway, here’s where my shocking double standards really kick in.

I like Blur. I like them a lot. I have done since She’s So High way back when. I’ve bought every single on or around the day of release. Even the shitey ones, and there’s been a fair few over the years. I’ve bought the albums on day of release. Even the shitey ones. Though, they’re all good in their own way, even if some have endured better than others. Leisure and The Great Escape are, to put it politely, ‘of their time’. Think Tank is by far the best, since you’re wondering. So. I have all the singles and all the albums, including Japanese imports and such like. I also have the 10th Anniversary Box Set, bought for a recession-friendly price in the Our Price sale. And there wasn’t even a recession at the time. I have the lot, as they say. Or, at least, I had the lot, until this summer when Blur 21 came out. All the albums. All the singles. All the remixes. Plus some demos and live stuff. At an eye-popping £150, this was one purchase I’d find hard to justify. So, a bit of Googling here and there turned up a download. Low-fi and crappy, but it meant I got all the rarities I wouldn’t have otherwise. The live stuff you can keep, but in amongst the rarities are a few diamonds. Here’s some to chew over:

She’s So High (pre-Blur Seymour demo) Drum machine and studio chatter before some out-of-tune distorted guitar and even more distorted vocals. I can’t listen to the bassline without seeing the cheese-making fop with his floppy fringe mincing about stage right.

Popscene (1991 demo) Mad, noisy, toys-out-the-pram shout-fest. Excellent, as Monty Burns might say.

For Tomorrow (Mix 1 of an early demo). Mainly acoustic guitar and vocals, with the odd bit of shaker for percussion and some synthesised strings. Nice double-tracked la-la-la backing vocals. It’s hard to tell if it’s Damon or Graham who’s singing lead here.

Badhead (demo) The most under appreciated track from gazillion-selling Parklife. Round ‘ere it was all “Oi! get some exercise mate!” Meanwhile, Badhead, with its wistful melancholia and Syd-lite psychedelia was where the real music fans got their Parklife kicks.

Squeezebox (Alternative version of Music Is My Radar) Imagine if Talking Heads got up one morning and instead of micro-biotic, high fibre health food shit ate a big bowl of guitar effects pedals. This is what they’d sound like. Really!

Graham Coxon Fact 1: He favours Converse trainers on stage, as the white toe-cap helps him find the correct effects pedal on which to stomp.

Graham Coxon Fact 2: He told me that on Twitter.

Now. Off you go and buy Blur 21, there’s a good chap.