Happiness is...

Graham Coxon is a changed man.

Although he retains the repertoire of nervous mannerisms familiar to long-term observers of his career – the virtually non-stop fiddling with his fringe and a tendency to speak in a disjointed, diffident near-whisper – the Coxon seated across from your correspondent in The Village bar is nonetheless a lot more placid individual than the hyper-neurotic, Woody Allen clone who clashed repeatedly with his band-mates during the last days of his membership of Blur, before finally departing the group in 2002.
For his latest solo outing, Happiness In Magazines, Coxon has once again collaborated with much in-demand producer Stephen Street, who aside from his celebrated work with Morrissey, The Smiths and The Cranberries, also famously produced Blur’s mid-nineties quartet of masterworks, Modern Life Is Rubbish, Parklife, The Great Escape and Blur. Why did Coxon once more decide to work with Street?
“I just wanted to take the pressure off myself and use someone who would be fussy, and who wouldn’t allow me to slack in the way that I would allow myself to slack,” replies Graham. “You know, my previous albums weren’t meant to be anything other than what they were, but this record definitely sounds a lot tidier, and that’s probably Steve’s influence.
“I’m a very different person to when I recorded the other stuff, and I wanted the finished album to reflect that,” he continues, “I’d just come out of rehab, there’d been problems with alcohol and depression, and the songs this time round seemed to have a bit more going for them in terms of sonic sophistication.
Circa 1995, Coxon seemed to be almost comically misplaced in Blur, forever drunkenly proselytising about the virtues of Slint and Mission Of Burma whilst his more dandy-ish colleagues, Damon Albarn and Alex James, proudly declared their love of The Kinks and XTC. What does Coxon make of resolutely Anglo-centric opuses like Parklife and The Great Escape these days?
“Well, I think the albums that I like the best seemed to come out of a more innocent energy, as opposed to a more contrived approach. So I like Modern Life Is Rubbish and I like Blur; I think those records have real enthusiasm and real vibrancy, whereas with some of the other stuff, there’s a kind of irony, a kind of knowing-ness that I find quite...troubling.
“I wasn’t happy with any of that Brit-pop stuff. It was awful. No one was playing the guitar any good in those bands, it was just perfunctorily strumming away to some mid-tempo, anthemic bollocks. I guess Pulp had some humour and a nice sense of kitchen sink dramatics, but after a while it wears thin. And a lot of that sort of vapid, half-arsed jingle-jangle indie stuff that was around, it was fuckin’ rubbish, it really got on my nerves.
“And so at that time, the only people it seemed to me who were doing anything in any way exciting or dynamic were American kids, whether that was on Gravity Records, an underground label in California, or Sonic Youth, or old sixties garage rock bands. I don’t like baggy; I like drainpipes and pointy-shoes. These wankers in anoraks…that’s what ‘People Of The Earth’ (no-holds barred misanthropic screed on Happiness In Magazines) is about (laughs).”
Coxon and Albarn always seemed to enjoy a fragile, if astonishingly fruitful, musical collaboration. Was it just a case that their tastes had veered that bit too far apart when the group came to record Think Tank?
“Yeah, that kind of was the case,” sighs Graham. “You know, we’d be on tour buses, I’d stick on something like Spiderland or Tweeze, and everyone would just be like, ‘Turn that fucking shit off!’ I had to really just shut-up about American music in the years ‘92-’95. But that’s the thing; I have a real respect for my musical roots, whether it’s late seventies punk, alternative eighties, or whatever was inspiring people via the blues in the sixties. I kind of view myself as being part of that lineage of musicians.
“And something that used to really bother me in Blur was that there was this attitude of, ‘Oh, this week we’re into disco, let’s do ‘Girls & Boys’. Now we’re into Pavement and Beck, let’s do some stuff in that vein. Okay, now that’s rubbish, let’s go to Africa and hear someone play the bongos’. I had a problem with that.
“But as I say, there’s just so many gems in terms of guitar music that I’m still discovering, and I feel really energised and inspired by that at the moment. I guess I just feel a lot more optimistic in 2004 than I have for a long, long time.”

Happiness In Magazines is out now on EMI