Graham Coxon
(Picture: Joshua Atkins for ES Magazine)Graham Coxon is an anxious man. He is ‘a bit scared’ that he might have left someone out of his new memoir, Verse, Chorus, Monster! Or that he’ll ‘come off as miserable’ (‘I’ve already been called a “whinging pom”,’ he laughs). He is open about his decades of sobriety but struggles to get to grips with the feeling of being ‘talked over’ in the past. And then the Queen died and scuppered the release of the first single off his new album, just because the title contains the word ‘dying’. Graham Coxon loves a worry.
But as one quarter of one of the most successful bands of the Nineties, and often lauded as one of the best guitarists of his generation, he has made the neuroses work. The angsty, arty aesthetic of his 20s — the same home-hacked hair and thick-rimmed specs, he’s still basically rocking today — could have been considered a proto-softboi, Timothée Chalamet’s indie uncle, just one who might have been a little scared to fill his boots with the spoils of fame.
