Graham Coxon has spoken to NME about finally releasing his lost album ‘Castle Park‘, as well as reflecting on his life as a solo artist and what the future holds for Blur.
Released on Friday (June 19), ‘Castle Park’ was originally recorded back in 2011 alongside the songs that would make up his 2012 album ‘A+E‘. It was then shelved as further Blur activity kicked off, before his soundtrack work on The End Of The Fucking World, his graphic novel and accompanying music for ‘Superstate’, his life as half of The WAEVE with partner Rose Elinor Dougall, and even more Blur activity leading up to 2023’s ‘The Ballad Of Darren’ and massive shows.
NME hailed ‘Castle Park‘ as a showcase of “what an underrated force Graham can be away from all the Britpop arena bluster that found him fame”, adding that “for this album to have stayed lost and gathering fluff down the back of the sofa would have been a terrible shame.”
Coxon explained why the album spent so long in limbo, and how different his life was back in 2011 – sharing that he was “all over the place, really.”
“I wasn’t living in London and motorbiking in from Canterbury everyday and then zooming out every evening,” he told NME about that period. “There’s lots to think about as you’re thrashing in and out of London. Musically, it was weird. I had 20 songs and 10 songs of that became ‘A+E’, which was more chaotic, motorik grooves.
“Then there was this other pile of 10, which I didn’t think would go down well with anybody because they seemed to be harking back to trad indie with a ‘60s tinge. I wasn’t quite sure if anybody would be interested in that for I parked it for a bit.”
He understatedly explained how “other stuff started happening” and consuming his time, but ‘Castle Park’ still kept a place in his heart.
“The album just sat there,” he shared. “I would go back and listen to it every now and then and wonder if it would be received at all well. I don’t know if that really mattered to me, but it just didn’t seem as if there was ever a good time to put it out!
“I just thought, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter if no one likes it’. I was getting hassled online to put it out so I thought I’d better take advantage of polishing up all my old back catalogue and stick that out as well to see what happens.”
Now that’s finally out, Coxon admitted that “it feels good to have no secrets now”.
“There are still lots of songs that never made it onto anything, but at least the things that could actually be called albums are out and I don’t have anything lying around,” he added, leaving his fans now fully stocked.
Along with ‘Castle Park’, Coxon will be celebrating his whole solo career by reissuing his back catalogue and hitting the road again for a UK tour for his first full-band shows in a decade. Check out the rest of our interview below where Coxon told us about the making of his lost album, building his confidence as a songwriter over the years, and how he and Damon Albarn will be writing together until one of them dies.
NME: Hello Graham. You previously said at the time that ‘A+E’ was a pop-rock, visceral reaction to previous album ‘The Spinning Top’. Was ‘Castle Park’ part of that feeling, just in a different shade?
Graham Coxon: “I don’t know. Maybe ‘The Spinning Top’ just got so complicated and made my fingers hurt. It was very intricate music, very conceptual and quite augmented songs with the finger-style guitar. I was gigging around it and thinking, ‘This is exhausting’. I was doing sets far longer than guys who do that kind of guitar style would normally do. I wonder if I got some arthritis.
“I suppose ‘A+E’ just came out of having fun with bass, but the ‘Castle Park’ songs were definitely going back to a cleaner electric jangle. They were really simple little songs, mostly centred around getting dumped and silly relationships. The whole album seems to start in quite a confident place with ‘Billy Says’ and then there’s a getting dumped song after that, and then ‘There’s A Little House’ sounds like Max Bygraves ‘Gilly Gilly Ossenfeffer Katzenellenbogen by the Sea’ – a call-and-response children’s song.
“Then there are songs about isolating like ‘Forget Today’, ‘Dripping Soul’ and ‘Isn’t It Funny’ which get darker and it ends on ‘All The Rage’, which I think is one of my most depressing songs. It’s about that feeling of oncoming irrelevance, whether that’s as a man or a musician, I haven’t quite worked it out.”
What does Castle Park in Colchester mean to you, and why is it the home for these songs?
“It could be anywhere, I just called it that at the time because it seemed to be quite a romantic and sunny place. I never saw it raining at Castle Park. It has a castle, a bandstand, a little lake, this weird cottage, this golden angel out the front. We’d have a few and I’d always have to climb up and give her a kiss. It was a really simple and romantic time before life really shook us by the shoulders and a few realities became apparent.
“Although it’s 15-years-old and there’s something autobiographical about ‘Castle Park’, it was still written from a pretty innocent point of view. It’s still there with me now – all romantic, but maybe slightly less so. You get older and those things seem to dwindle.”
But you’re doing alright now…
“I’m not doing bad! Aside from the old aches and pains, but I even mention them on ‘Castle Park’, so they’ve been around for a while.”
How has your relationship to these songs changed?
“I don’t know. I think you rarely know exactly what you’re writing about. It is interesting, because I didn’t realise when I put it together all those years ago quite how much it does plummet from confidence into absolute zero confidence. It’s quite an interesting journey, and I suppose I’m always looking for a concept or some kind of story on every album that I make so that might be it. It’s sort of a slow decline.
“They’re about kind of real situations, but then it gets a little bit more Eldridge with this feminine spirit that seems to crop up quite a lot in my stuff. She’s always been there. I’m an old goddess worshipper. I’m not sure where it comes from, but I’ve always had that comforting thing of there being some kind of presence of a divine feminine spirit. Maybe that’s what a muse is? She always seems to make her way in. Rose and I have definitely played with that too, and ‘The Spinning Top’ was all about that.”
Naturally due to the influences it sounds quite timeless, but did you any way tinker with it or update it since 2011?
“No, I didn’t touch it. I thought it would ruin it, because it’s there in all its imperfection and it’s definitely a record of how I was then. Why change it? Her brother came out, and hopefully this is ‘A+E’’s sister.”
Is there a deeper, more profound reason for re-releasing everything and spotlighting your whole solo career, or did you just think you might as well with ‘Castle Park’ finally coming out?
“A bit of both, really! I just thought, ‘Yeah, great, I’ll polish everything up and put it out’. Maybe there are some overlooked works of genius, but I doubt anyone will see anything more than what is there. There is some good stuff. Listening to it all later on, perhaps I should have been a little more reticent to show my development in public. The first three albums are a slightly ramshackle affair where I hadn’t quite found myself as a songwriter particularly, but was interested in sound. That was the point, really.”
What do you remember about wanting to go solo in the first place?
“The ‘90s had made me tired with chasing the [Beatles’] ‘Revolver’ album. It just got quite overblown and pompous, so [I liked] the idea of being influenced by Smog or Yo La Tengo or Pavement, and that albums could be made and still be emotional and mean something to people no matter how they’re recorded or how ramshackle they are. I do get lots of people, including those who are quite close to me who I didn’t know then, who tell me that [debut album] ‘The Sky Is Too High’ [1998] meant quite a lot to them. I wasn’t even going to put that album out under my own name, I really didn’t quite know what to do with it.
“Then out it went and I got addicted to it. ‘The Golden D’ came after that, and that’s a really ridiculous record. It has two cover versions from the same band [Mission Of Burma], which is a particularly weird move, but off I went and I enjoyed it. By ‘The Kiss Of Morning’ [2002] I was finding my arsenal of sounds; sort of finger-picky stuff and even attempting some blues, getting into Essex-style country music. I couldn’t stop myself. Then by the time we got to ‘Happiness In Magazines’ [2004] I just thought, ‘These are quite nice little trad pop songs’ so I started to take it a little more seriously and got a producer in with Stephen Street [Blur, The Smiths]. It seemed like a good idea to step it up a little bit, get a little band together, do some shows and some touring.”
Naturally Blur are so associated with the ‘90s, but it must have felt quite ace that ‘Happiness In Magazines’ and ‘Love Travels At Illegal Speeds’ have become two of the definitive indie rock records of the ‘00s?
“Oh did they? I know ‘Freakin’ Out’ did pretty well. I know younger people going to revisit them seem to like them more than they were liked then. I was lucky because journalists in the papers and magazines were always pretty nice about what I did, and I’ve often wondered why. I think it’s because there was a non-pretentiousness in what I was doing in a way. Whether the songwriting was good or not, I think it was taken as being authentic: an authentic representation of what I could do at any given time.
“I’m sure some journalists were like, ‘This is shit’, and maybe they were right. But if you’re authentic then there’s not a lot of proper negativity that you can draw to yourself.”
By 2004 did you feel a lot more confidence in your own voice and yourself?
“I had more time to sit on the sofa in front of the news with a guitar, to write songs and make the lyrics a little less dark and weird. They were still pretty whiny, and the subject matter was probably still about romantic stuff, but when I wrote ‘Bittersweet Bundle Of Misery’ there was something clever about the lyrics. You were never quite sure who it was directed at. You’d assume it’s about a woman, but often it’s about my kid! ‘You & I’, I just made it up as I was singing to my kid in the bath. A lot of those came out of nowhere.
“If you practice writing songs, you just get better. It’s often as simple as that. Once you get better, you feel more encouraged to do it. I’ve always wanted to improve as a guitar player and I’ve never been a great singer, but I’m finally getting a bit better at that or maybe more confident. Maybe I have to act in some sort of way or pretend I’m someone else so I can sing without feeling subconscious. There was something apologetic about the early albums, and even that was great for some people.”
Soundtracks aside, it’s been 15 years since you sat down to write a solo album. Are you keen to do another?
“I don’t think I’d sit down with a mind to write another solo album quite yet. I don’t really feel like that at the moment. I’m sure I could scrape together some stuff and stick it out, but it would absolutely depend on why I wanted to do it, what need I had and what it would be about. There are plenty of songs knocking around, but I don’t really see the point of doing something like that at the moment.
“To think about that now among the chaos of this early summer for me is a bit too much and a little overwhelming, but who knows? Perhaps?”
Is there a new album from The Waeve on the way?
“Yes, we’ve been working on the third one, which has been lovely. It would be nice to do some shows and I love playing with the live band we have. Rose and I have been working on a set-up where we can do some shows with just me and her so we’ve a couple of festivals for that. I’m just taking it as it comes. It’s quite an intense year. I wouldn’t mind a bit of feet up time next year at least.”
Is it just solo and Waeve stuff for the foreseeable? Do you an advanced warning of Blur returning?
“Yes, 10 years in advance! No, no one has said anything about that at the moment. I’m quite happy with things now. Next year there will be new music from The Waeve. I’ve got a few things going on so there a number of voices in my head and I hope none of them become permanent. Maybe by next year they’d have all disappeared so I can be a little more calm to figure out what might be a nice thing to do. I’d like to get a studio together and maybe release some music, do some shows.”
The last time we spoke you said Blur would have to get together again sooner rather than later as you were “knocking on”. Do you have a cut-off point in your mind for Blur? How do you imagine the next few decades for Graham Coxon?
“The next few decades? Let’s hope! I imagine slowly drifting off stage left and going, ‘See ya later!’ It’s an exhausting thing, the music industry. As I was saying, I’ve always wondered about relevance. Even so, you still get newer younger people coming to see what you do. There seems to be this forever-changing front row, for want of a better way of putting it. There’s always going to be people to make music for, it’s just a matter of how I do it. I’m always thinking about that.
“There might be new people who want to hear stuff but it might not be that many, and I’m fine with that. I’m always going to want to make music. And Blur too: Damon [Albarn] and I will probably both do it until we pop our clogs.”
‘Castle Park’ is out now, along with reissues of ‘The Sky Is Too High’ and ‘The Golden D’. Reissues of the rest of his solo catalogue will follow throughout the year. Coxon will be touring the UK to celebrate his solo career throughout November. Visit here for tickets and more information.