Graham Coxon has spoken to NME about Blur‘s new Live At Wembley Stadium concert film, the headlines that surrounded their Coachella performance, and what the future may hold for the band.
July saw the release of To The End – a documentary directed by Transgressive Records founder Toby L. It followed the reunion of Coxon with Damon Albarn, Alex James and Dave Rowntree on their return to record 2023 comeback album ‘The Ballad Of Darren’ ahead of a tour culminating in pair of shows at London’s Wembley Stadium last summer. The film frankly depicted Albarn reeling from the split from his long-term partner Suzi Winstanley after 25 years, and the struggle for other members to return to being in an arena band.
Reviewing To The End, NME concluded: “They bicker, they hug, they call each other c**ts, they get the job done. While Blur’s last doc and accompanying live movie No Distance Left To Run was a portrait of a band celebrating their legacy and giving a nostalgia-hungry world exactly what they craved, this spiritual sequel shows a band simply supporting each other. Whether they return again or not remains to be seen. But even if they don’t, this was one hell of a final fling.”
Today (Friday September 6) sees the release of the accompanying movie of the shows themselves, following the success of their Wembley live album. Check out our full interview with Coxon below, where he tells us about the long road to Wembley, being there for Albarn, having a pop at the crowd at Coachella, and when we might see Blur back again.
It’s also worth noting that this interview took place before Oasis’ reunion was announced.
NME: Hello Graham. How did you feel when it was first discussed that Toby L would be filming and documenting Blur’s return to the studio and the road to Wembley?
Graham Coxon: “I thought it was a good idea but I was worried that it was going to be boring. We are individually quite different characters with different senses of humour and quite different vocabularies these days. We all have our own strange way of looking at Blur’s journey and our own present situation within the band. So eventually I thought, ‘Why not? As long as it’s funny’.
“I suppose my main preoccupation was about not being a bit of a mardy brat and playing my arse off. That’s all I wanted to achieve and I think I did that.”
Do your differences come into more focus with time?
“I think of myself as quite an emotional, sentimental person – but then Alex completely trumped me on that all the way through the film, which is very sweet.”
The film’s very good at finding each member’s thread and arc. What was it like to see that play out on the big screen?
“Blimey! Dave plays his cards quite close to his chest about how he’s feeling. He’s quietly funny and sweet and spends most of his time hanging out with sheep. Obviously some of us have been through stuff recently that’s kind of heavy. For those people, we had more mood swings within the film. We had to accept that would become part of a character that would make sense to people watching from the outside. I had my quiet moments and was trying to talk seriously about this and that, trying not to talk in cliches and be straightforward in my own way, but there had definitely been some decent tantrums.
“When you’ve been travelling in a car for two hours to rehearse for six hours and your fingers are already giving up, then you’re gonna blow up a little bit. I still can’t really talk about my own stuff that I’ve been through an awful lot – maybe one day – but it was obvious that Damon was dealing with something. As he’s older, the narrative stuff has gone a little more and he’s writing more from an emotional standpoint. I don’t think he could help himself with this [album].
“There is the bit where Damon breaks down. I think about that myself. It’s all very well jotting down some lyrics in the back of a cab or in front of the news or at 4am at the side of the bed, but then when you sing these things and they gain such a lot of power, then hearing them back they gain more power again. I can completely understand why he got overwhelmed by that, but then again he’s very resilient and self-contained in a lot of ways.”
And you’re not?
“I could never quite contain myself. I was a lot more messy, emotionally. It’s a weird thing as to really control yourself or not emotionally. Alex and Dave do a professional job of that, but Damon and I are possibly more erratic and shifted in personalities.”
There’s the part of the film where Damon explains that he was going through something, and that he couldn’t only do these songs with his old friends in Blur. Did you feel a different sort of compulsion when the band got back in a room?
“Not that I was glad that Damon was going through that, obviously, but I thought, ‘Here’s something that I can get involved with because that’s where I’m here’ – to react to Damon’s emotional drive and eek out what the song might mean before the lyrics are even finished. To create a decent landing ground for his vocal with the right material.
“This was a couple of years ago now. There was still stuff that I wanted to exorcise in a way, and this gave me the opportunity to do that. When dealing with heavy things, the answer isn’t always to make noise, but to maybe do something that might ease those feelings or bring them out a little more quietly later on… in the middle of watching Antiques Roadshow and suddenly bursting into tears! It’s not always like ‘St Charles Square’ and making a horrible noise; it could be something like ‘Russian Strings’, which is just as powerful a thing to exorcise anything that needs it. That’s what music is to me and why I make it.”
You’ve said before that you’re into the more punk approach and keeping things raw and simple. How did you feel about getting back into stadium mode?
“I was involved in some way, but I couldn’t bring myself to get really fussy about that stuff. We employed someone and it’s their work. I had enough on my plate so I just wanted to focus on my own really complicated parts of making the live show. Being in those huge, shiny rehearsal spaces where everything sounds awful and you’re auditioning singers and brass sections that you know won’t be used in the end because you can already see Damon frowning, plus you’ve had too much coffee, then it’s just rubbish and seems like a huge waste of time!”
If you were more involved, would you have perhaps added a few more toilets to avoid the scene where you had to pee in a Coke can?
“That’s just such an anxiety I have! I always need to feel ready but never quite do. It was a big deal and a long show and I thought, ‘Do I need another wee?’ I think the can had been abandoned. You have to do what you have to do. No one wants to pee themselves in front of all those people, and you can’t just pee off the stage.”
Damon spoke of his initial apprehension about playing two nights at Wembley. How did you feel about it?
“I thought, ‘Nah, that’s great! Let’s have a go at two!’ I was shocked that the first one sold out. The fact that our manager then advised us to go for a second was a surprise. But there was such a lot of elation after the first one and it felt about as perfect as it could have been, that doing another one seemed like we were asking for trouble. The second one was almost better, and we were extremely fortunate to pull it off like that.”
How do these gigs rank with you as Blur gigs in your mind now?
“I think they have to be the best. They sounded the best because technology has moved on a lot over the years, we played great, I’m more confident with singing, and there was strangely a casualness about everything last year. None of the Blur shows were that nerve-wracking, apart from the anxiety of if I’d have enough wees. We made Wembley feel a lot smaller, because we were genuinely having fun. They were probably the best shows we ever did.”
Now with some distance, how do you feel about that whole live campaign ending as it did at Coachella with all the headlines that came with it?
“Throughout the whole year or so, I felt like we did what we had to do and we’re lucky that we get to do it. We’re falling to bits at times, but Coachella was weird. It’s just a very restrictive festival. You get stuck in a little compound and it’s impossible to really go out and about and see anything. It’s so hot, and there are those strange five days in between where you don’t really know what to do with yourself. It was me, Rose [Elinor Dougall, partner and bandmate in The Waeve] and her mum just wondering around Santa Monica, not knowing what to do with ourselves.
“The second Coachella was definitely better than the first. That was actually a laugh. I decided to dress like a cowboy all in black and Damon had this white suit, so we were like good and evil!”
The film ends by saying that the future is wide open for Blur, given the right reason to return. Are you open to that? Do you need a lot of time to recover?
“We can’t leave it too long because we’re knocking on! Creatively, we’ll always be able to do something, but it’s important that we live life for a bit and hopefully not go through something so traumatic before getting back together again. Damon’s always said too that we need to live life so we have something we can bring together if we’re ever going to do anything again. If that all happens, then there shouldn’t be any reason why not. All year I was saying, ‘Roll on Christmas!’ When I made it to Christmas all in one piece, I was really grateful.”
Can you imagine Blur being a band like The Rolling Stones, still doing it in your 80s?
“Hopefully, I think I’m in different shape! I don’t think we’d very comfortable replacing anyone if one of us died, though.”
Alex is doing another book. Do you ever see yourself doing a sequel to your own biography [Verse, Chorus, Monster!]?
“I did have something factual in mind one, but it was going to be a series of short stories set around the year 1976, but I need to think about that a little bit more. Years ago, I even wrote down the chapters. I’ll have to find that bit of paper.”
To The End and Blur: Live At Wembley Stadium are in cinemas now. The Waeve release their second album ‘City Lights’ on September 20.