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Graham Coxon discusses Blur’s bad times

By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 8 May 2009

He’s about to play a string of reunion shows with Blur, he has a new solo album coming out and he recently performed live and on record with a sober Pete Doherty, but Graham Coxon has been reflecting on the bad times in his past, where drink and depression brought him close to suicide.

Speaking to The Mail On Sunday, Coxon revealed that at a party organised to celebrate Blur beating Oasis’ ‘Roll With It’ to number one in the singles chart with ‘Country House’, he attempted to throw himself out of a window. He said: “It felt like a hollow, pointless victory to me. I felt I was being forced into enjoying the moment and I just wanted to be alone really. I couldn’t handle being part of that crowd so I tried to jump out of a sixth-storey window. It was Damon [Albarn] who talked me out of it. Looking back, I should have enjoyed myself a lot more than I did during the Blur days. I quite liked the idea of being in a successful band but it was the workload I couldn’t handle. As soon as it happened, all I dreamed about was achieving some peace and stability in my life”.

So enjoy it he didn’t, and his behaviour became more erratic. He continued: “When you find yourself asking a policeman, ‘Am I dead or alive?’ it means you’ve had too much to drink. There’s a famous photo of me taken in 1995. I’ve just been run over by a black cab and I’m lying in the gutter with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth. I’m about to ask the copper that question. I naturally gravitated towards speeding vehicles in those days. Being run over is a strange sensation but it’s a good way of sobering up in a hurry”.

As for the Britpop scene that Blur found themselves unwilling figureheads of, he said: “I’ve got nothing positive to say about Britpop. The whole thing was a grotesque travesty. It was meant to make Britain look cool but made us all look like a joke. It was meant to be a celebration of music but it was more about petty rivalries. There was no real affinity between the bands. The scene was full of dirty little bastards trying to get off with my girlfriend all the time. Every time I went on tour it was like going off to Troy. I’d come back and have to kill off a few suitors who’d been going behind my back”.

But all that’s over now and Blur are back together. Coxon reveals that he and Damon settled their differences over tea and cake, as all things should be. “The biggest doubt surrounding a Blur reunion was whether me and Damon would get along”, he said. “A lot of nastiness had gone on between us. After I left the band in 2002, I kept in touch with the others but Damon and I only communicated through lawyers. In October 2008, I turned up at one of his gigs. There was no guarantee we’d get on. But we went for a walk, had a cake and some tea and realised everything was OK between us. I started to apologise about things that had been on my mind. He said, ‘There’s no need to apologise, mate’. After half an hour of chat, we knew a reunion was a strong possibility. We all realise that what’s most important in life is being nice to your mates”.