Blur’s Graham Coxon is the kind of artist who doesn’t sit still. That’s probably why he ended up scoring The End of the F**ing World*, a show about two kids who also can’t sit still—one because she’s angry, the other because he’s pretty sure he’s a serial killer. Coxon’s soundtrack is all vintage reverb, dusty guitars, and brooding, lo-fi mood swings. Basically, it’s what you’d expect from a guy who spent the ‘90s blasting Pavement records at his bandmates until they caved.
He’s also celebrating (or more accurately, being reminded of) the 20th anniversary of The Sky Is Too High, his first solo album, an exercise in raw, unpolished indie rock that landed at the height of Blur’s fame. The way he tells it, the record only happened because a friend was working on a film and asked him to write a couple of songs. The film never got made. The album did. "I had no intention of writing solo material," he admits, which is sort of like a chef saying he had no intention of cooking dinner but just kind of fell into making a five-course meal.
Coxon’s affection for American underground rock was never a secret, but back then, it was more of a hostage situation for the rest of Blur. "I drove them absolutely crazy," he laughs. "I was blasting Pavement, Minutemen, Slint—just battering them with it." Blur eventually absorbed some of that influence on their self-titled album, but Coxon still had an itch to scratch. Enter The Sky Is Too High, a collection of songs that sounded like they were recorded in the time it takes to think them up. That was sort of the point. "You don’t have to spend a huge budget on it. You just do the song," he shrugs, crediting Bill Callahan’s Smog records for that realization.
Flash forward two decades, and Coxon’s back in that world, only this time it’s for a Netflix show about teen sociopaths. The music for The End of the F**ing World* is part score, part mixtape, part whatever Coxon felt like recording that day. "I wanted it to feel like a band that already existed, like they were just pulling songs from some obscure catalog," he says. The result is a series of bite-sized tracks—"fun-size songs," as he calls them—drifting from ‘60s pop to twangy noir to slacker rock without ever settling on one thing. It’s all very Coxon.
There’s also the question of Blur, because of course there is. The Magic Whip proved the band still had gas in the tank, but Coxon is in no rush to force a follow-up. "These things just happen when they need to," he says, which is the nice way of saying, "Please stop asking." He’s got his own projects to keep him busy, including a still-unreleased album recorded during the A+E sessions that he swears will see the light of day. Eventually.
Until then, he’s kicking around the idea of playing some intimate, stripped-down shows, which sounds charming until you realize he means actually intimate—no big amps, nothing to hide behind. "Stuff that scares me to death," he says. Good thing he just spent a year inside the head of a teenage psychopath. That should come in handy.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
