Graham Coxon reflects on Colchester, his celebrated career, and new (old) album 'Castle Park' • Interview • DIY Magazine

If all of us are constantly reckoning with past versions of ourselves, building up layers of experience and figuring out what it even means to grow up, then Graham Coxon seems to feel it more
than most. “I think there’s still an eight year old me in, there’s still a confused 13 year old, there’s still an 18 year old that thought smoking was a good idea at art school. We call ourselves adults but
we’re just older kids who are still learning and making mistakes and can’t quite explain our behaviour,” he sighs, mussing his hair as he speaks to DIY from a room filled with music and clutter. “Some people seem to be together but for me, as a creative person, I am still an idiot child trying to find some sort of way to live peacefully.”

Now aged 57, Coxon has lived several musical lives - firstly as one of Britain’s most celebrated guitarists, wrangling magic from his stage right position in Blur; now as one half of The WAEVE, alongside his partner Rose Elinor Dougall; and in the middle as a solo artist with a canon
of records ranging from the self-described “massive tantrum” of 1998 debut ‘The Sky Is Too High’ through to a relative commercial peak with 2004’s Top 20-charting ‘Happiness In Magazines’. Over the next year, he’ll reissue this solo catalogue, giving people “another chance to discover that underrated genius,” he deadpans. Meanwhile this month, he’ll drop ‘Castle Park’, an album that’s been sitting in the vaults since 2011 when it was recorded as part of the same sessions for the following year’s ‘A+E’.

A record full of “personal experiences rather than fantasy mayhem” that sees Graham leaning into his early influences of bands like The Jam and The Velvet Underground, there’s an innate sense of youthful romance and nostalgia to ‘Castle Park’. Its title is named for the Colchester hub where, as a teen, he would spend his time “congregating with friends, tarrying too long and then having to climb over lethal fences to get out after it shut”. The artwork features colourised postcards of a quartet of landmarks dotted around the space, including a particularly beloved statue. “What I liked to do among other insane things was to climb up and kiss her,” he recalls. “I was a teenager full of romance and optimism and I just thought she was beautiful. I thought she’d appreciate it but I don’t know whether she did - probably not!”

Colchester would turn out to shape Graham’s life: it’s the town where he first met Damon Albarn as kids at the local comprehensive school, and the place that ultimately would lead them to Blur. “But I very easily could have grown up in Derby, it was just a toss of the coin [for my parents],” he shrugs before suggesting in a way that surely would have broken the nascent internet of the ‘90s: “If I’d have been brought up in Manchester, I probably would have been in Oasis. We like the same music, we’re similar ages, why not? That’s why it was so daft in a way, all of that [rivalry]. By fate I ended up growing up in Colchester and bumped into Damon, but it could have very easily been different and I would still have been some idiot guitar player in some band.”

“If I’d have been brought up in Manchester, I probably would have been in Oasis. We like the same music, we’re similar ages, why not?”

Talking to him about his multi-decade career, the greatest takeaway is that, creatively, Graham never really had a choice. He describes making music as “kind of the worst job ever because what you really, really want to show people is so often just rejected”, but he can’t live any other way. Though ‘Castle Park’ begins in chipper fashion with the mod bop of ‘Billy Says’ and the jangly indie of ‘Alright’, it ends with ‘All The Rage’ - a track he calls “probably the most depressing song I’ve ever written,” that wrangles with existentialism as he speaks of “rungs on a ladder” and “the future looking deader”.

As a song, it names the mental turmoil that he’s always wrestled with but never knew how to address. “I was writing about something that I’ve known since I was four years old, that life is just anxiety and is it as good as they say? I’m not sure, but you have to carry on regardless,” he contemplates. “The sensation of being alive for me seemed to be difficult, but I didn’t really realise that the sensation of being alive for me is not what everybody experiences. [I have a] ridiculous, weird resilience - but even the word resilience means that you’re getting ground down. Resilience is something where it’s taking its toll.”

Re-releasing his back catalogue seems like a slightly confronting exercise. His scrappier early material was not, as it seemed to the public, an act of purposeful rebellion against Blur’s increasing commercialism but just an artist working out how to write good songs in real time. “My first efforts at writing songs and messing around with sounds which couldn’t be useful to Blur I did in public, which might have been a bit foolish,” he concedes. By the time he reached the fizzing highs of tracks like 2004 single ‘Freakin’ Out’, he’d begun to “take things a bit more seriously,” but he still speaks of his trajectory like a kid perpetually trying to catch up with the adults.

“I’ve always been just a little bit too young and ill-equipped, and it’s taken me a while to equip myself to deal with this world. I’m always gonna feel at odds, and always gonna have some existential angst about shit while, with other people, it feels like they’ve got it all together and they’re writing about stuff which I’ve never really understood. So all I’ve demonstrated [on these albums] is my own inability to deal with life out there,” he decides. “It’s just putting it all back into my face so I can relive each bout of anxiety all over again.”

“For me, as a creative person, I am still an idiot child trying to find some sort of way to live peacefully.”

If that all sounds like a bleak way to go about promoting a release then, conversely, Graham actually seems in great form. His innate struggles come with an ability to see the funny side. “I know I’m being a dreary old bastard, but I am 57, so grant me a little bit of grump,” he grins. When he talks about the frustrations of following an artistic life, and knowing that “neither of us [he or Rose] are gonna write songs that are going to get to Number One”, we point out that, actually, he has had quite a lot of Number Ones and recently played to 160,000 people over two nights at Wembley Stadium. “But it’s never enough!” he jokingly sighs.

For now, ‘Castle Park’ is an excellent new addition to a back catalogue that’s as idiosyncratic as its author: charming, funny, despairing and delightful all at the same time. He’ll be taking his solo band out on the road in November for the first time in a decade, embarking on a run of shows that he’s equally as terrible at talking up. “Oh, the muscle memory’s well gone,” he says, shaking his head at the amount he’s given himself to relearn. “But, whatever. If people wanna come and see this mess, it’s up to them! Hopefully it’ll be entertaining, that’s what it’s all about really. And hopefully by the time those gigs come around we’ll be a somewhat decent rock’n’roll combo.”

And if there’s a man who knows a thing or two about being in a somewhat decent rock’n’roll combo, it’s Graham Coxon. His first one might still be taking another time out (“I don’t think it’s in anybody’s mind right now, give it another five years I suppose,” he says of Blur’s future), but Graham has got plenty else going on. In his own way, he’s feeling optimistic. “I’m a bit grumpy but I’m pretty happy, and I’ll always make music until I pop my clogs,” he says. “And anyway, maybe my best stuff is just two years away? Who knows. I think my best stuff is coming.”

‘Castle Park’ is out on 19th June via Transgressive.

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