Blur’s sixth album, 13, is most often remembered for frontman Damon Albarn’s heart-on-sleeve songwriting – a reaction to the breakdown of his relationship with Elastica frontwoman Justine Frischmann. Yet an altogether different catharsis was taking place for guitarist Graham Coxon, who, in the song Coffee & TV, expressed his desire to live a slower life after surviving the Britpop tornado and making the decision to stop drinking.
Featuring touching lyrics and one of Coxon’s greatest guitar solos, Coffee & TV was a wake-up call of its own. Here’s why…
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The writing: “It reflected my anxiety and feelings of alienation”
Though rightly associated with Graham Coxon, Coffee & TV grew out of a song Damon Albarn had begun to write, but which he’d yet to finish. While pushing for Blur to record what he called “a cute, straightforward, poppy thing” like Yo La Tengo’s recently released Stockholm Syndrome, Coxon heard in Albarn’s sketch a vibe that fit, and offered to come up with lyrics for the partial tune. Welcoming the help, Albarn had one mild caveat: “If you write the words, 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 suit the tune while also reflecting, as he put it in his memoir, Verse, Chorus, Monster!, “my anxiety and feelings of alienation – that the world is a scary place”.
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Having recently given up alcohol, Coxon voiced his wish to “start over again”: to avoid the “big, bad world” and find refuge in the simple pleasures that gave Coffee & TV its title. Though his lyrics initially led to a fight with his then girlfriend, who thought he’d written a song about one of his exes, Coffee & TV was, Coxon told Total Guitar magazine in 2012, actually “about the idea that you feel like a piece of shit in a crap job, and you want to marry someone and get away from it all”.
The recording: “Everything he did was brilliant. He never played a bum note”
During the recording of 13, which took place with producer William Orbit (fresh from his work on Madonna’s Ray Of Light album, and replacing Blur’s previous go-to producer, Stephen Street), Coxon himself seemed keen to get away from everything, often skipping sessions entirely. “It was frustrating because, when he did [turn up], everything he did was brilliant,” bassist Alex James wrote in his memoir, Bit Of A Blur. “He never played a bum note.”
Coxon had previously scored a Blur songwriting credit with You’re So Great, from 13’s predecessor, the simply titled Blur. But whereas that lo-fi DIY tune fit the alt-rock sound of its parent album, Coffee & TV – though a more straightforward ballad compared to some of the songs on 13 – had a complex arrangement in keeping with the ambitious new music Blur were recording.
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“The Coffee & TV chord shapes are just ridiculous,” Coxon told Total Guitar. “They’re just unusual. They’re not normal. They’re sort of minor chords going against major chords.” Drawing from a mix of Eagles, The Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth influences, Coxon wove the whole into “gentler textures” for the finished song.
