Coffee & TV: Behind the scenes of Graham Coxon’s popular Blur song

The sixth album by Blur, 13is best known for frontman Damon Albarn’s candid songs – a reaction to the breakdown of his relationship with Elastica frontwoman Justine Frischmann. But a very different catharsis was experienced by guitarist Graham Coxon, who expressed his desire to lead a slower life in the song Coffee & TV after surviving the Britpop tornado and making the decision to stop drinking.

With touching lyrics and one of Coxon’s best guitar solos, Coffee & TV was a wake-up call in itself. Here’s why…

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The text: “It reflected my fears and feelings of alienation”

Although Coffee & TV is rightly associated with Graham Coxon, it grew out of a song that Damon Albarn had started writing but had not yet finished. While pushing Blur to record what he described as a “sweet, straightforward, poppy thing” similar to Yo La Tengo’s recent Stockholm Syndrome, Coxon heard a suitable mood in Albarn’s sketch and offered to write lyrics for the partial melody. Albarn was grateful for the help, but had one small caveat: “If you write the lyrics, you have to sing them.”

That evening, back at his flat in Camden, north London, Coxon leafed through old notebooks, looking for ideas that would fit the tune, while at the same time, as he put it in his memoirs, thinking about it: Verse, chorus, monster!“my fear and sense of alienation – that the world is a scary place.”

Having recently quit drinking, Coxon expressed a desire to “start over again”: to escape the “big, bad world” and find refuge in the simple pleasures that gave Coffee & TV its title. Although his lyrics initially led to an argument with his then-girlfriend, who thought he had written a song about one of his ex-girlfriends, Coffee & TV, Coxon recounted, was actually a song. Total guitar Magazine in 2012, “about the idea of ​​feeling like a piece of shit in a shitty job and wanting to marry someone and get away from it all.”

The recording: “Everything he did was brilliant. He never played a wrong note”

During the recording of 13which took place with producer William Orbit (fresh from his work on Madonna’s light beam album, replacing Blur’s previous main producer Stephen Street), Coxon himself seemed eager to get away from it all, often skipping sessions altogether. “It was frustrating because when he turned up, everything he did was brilliant,” bassist Alex James wrote in his memoirs. A little blurry“He never played a wrong note.”

Coxon had previously secured a Blur songwriting credit with You’re So Great, from 13The predecessor, the simply titled BlurBut while this lo-fi DIY song fit the alt-rock sound of the previous album Coffee & TV – although compared to some of the songs on 13 – had a complex arrangement that suited the challenging new music Blur were recording.

“The chord shapes of Coffee & TV are just ridiculous,” said Coxon Total guitar. “They’re just unusual. They’re not normal. They’re kind of like minor chords going up against major chords.” Coxon was inspired by a mix of influences from the Eagles, Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth, weaving it all into “softer textures” for the finished song.