Review: 'Verse, Chorus, Monster!' by Graham Coxon
Do all rock musicians really need to publish a memoir?
2022 seems to be the year of the Britpop literary renaissance. From Miki Berenyi of Lush to Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker releasing books this year, everyone from the infamous nineties scene seems to be putting pen to paper nowadays. And it would appear that Graham Coxon, the shy, bespectacled guitarist from Blur, is setting down his Fender Telecaster to do the same thing.
Coxon is not the first from the band to do so. Bassist Alex James released his own memoir, Bit of a Blur, over a decade ago in 2007. There have been various biographies written on Blur and Damon Albarn. Coxon, James and drummer Dave Rowntree have provided fascinating tidbits about the band’s lifespan over the years as a part of Tim’s Twitter Listening Parties. And in 2010, a documentary entitled No Distance Left To Run captured the band’s reunion tour on film.
In short, Blur aren’t suffering from a lack of chronicled history. Neither is Britpop itself, which, practically thirty years on, has had a bit of a revisionist history of its own. What was once a celebration of Britishness and sixties nostalgia has now been revealed to be a rather toxic mixture of misogyny, lad culture, and sensationalism over substance. The 1995 Britpop Battle between Blur and Oasis was really just a media fuelled debate that quickly spiralled into blatant class rivalry (I mean, this is England - are we really surprised?) and Blur, who had initially drawn on their Britishness to parody it, were swiftly becoming the punchline of their own joke.
Despite the less than favourable retrospective of Britpop and its main offenders, I was still curious to pick up Coxon’s memoir. I’ve been a Blur fan since I was 13 - although at that age, the label ‘fanatic’ may have been more appropriate. At 14, I got my friend into Blur: The Best Of. Later, we would jam in her room to ‘There’s No Other Way’ and ‘Parklife’. Not having enough money to buy proper merchandise, I painted the Blur logo onto a plain grey T-shirt and wore it everywhere. When I was 15, my sketchbooks were filled with drawings of Blur, Lush, and Elastica, but especially sketches of Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon. At 17, my lockdown project du jour was creating art posters for various Blur B-sides. I still have a Smash Hits poster of them up on my bedroom wall from the height of their fame.
Blur were a fundamental element of my adolescence and an absolute must when curating the soundtrack to my high school years. Even though I’ve stepped back from them a little bit, I still view them with a great deal of fondness and I could read into their body of work like an English lit student doing an analysis on Chaucer.
Admittedly once upon a time, Graham Coxon was also my favourite member of Blur - partly because I had a blatant teenage crush on him, and partly because I deeply admired his work as a guitarist. Coxon created so many interesting riffs and hooks whilst also filling out the band’s sound in spite of being the only guitarist (when he left in 2002, it took several musicians to fill in for him on tour). While my 14-year-old self’s crush may have long gone, I confess that this musical admiration still lingers.
So imagine my disappointment when I read Verse, Chorus, Monster! and found it entirely forgettable.
Let me be clear: I don’t think the book was terrible. But it wasn’t remarkable, either. It was simply okay. I’ve probably read more music books, biographies and memoirs than I’ve had hot dinners, and Verse, Chorus, Monster! is another one that follows a paint-by-numbers structure. Coxon did this, and then he did that. Here is an album he recorded. Here is the next one he did. Then he toured it. Rinse, repeat.
This formulaic structure isn’t always a bad thing. With some compelling writing and clever storytelling, such books can still offer enjoyable insights to fans and serve as a fairly decent musical history. But with Coxon’s memoir, his recollections of being in Blur provide nothing new.
If you don’t know a thing about Blur, or if you’re a casual fan, then this may be more interesting. But for us, the people that range from big fans to utter devotees, we’re not learning anything we haven’t already gleaned from the myriad of books and documentaries that have been produced on the band. The amount of time given to something like Blur’s landmark album Parklife and one of Coxon’s minor side projects are roughly the same.
With that being said, knowing less about Coxon’s solo work was what made reading about those albums more interesting. I especially enjoyed reading about 2009’s The Spinning Top, a folkier affair that features the likes of Robyn Hitchcock and Danny Thompson. It was fun to hear about working with Thompson and the technical aspects of writing guitar parts for the album, particularly how Coxon had gradually developed a percussive style of fingerpicking over the years.
I will concede that the discussions surrounding the more technical and musical elements in Verse, Chorus, Monster! stood out more to me as a guitarist myself. I loved reading about how Coxon came up with riffs, chords, and sounds, or why he chose a certain guitar for a certain recording. I liked learning about Blur’s process in the studio and what it was like working with different producers, and it would have been great hearing even more on these fronts. But I’m aware that these in-depth discussions are not for everyone.
The other part of this book that I believe warrants merit is Coxon’s candid reflection on his struggles with alcoholism and mental health. It’s an unflinchingly honest explanation of what it’s like to get on and off the wagon, to have the possibility of succumbing to addiction within aching reach at all times. I appreciated Coxon’s openness in unpacking everything he has gone through in the past few decades. As someone who struggles with depression, I empathised with his poor self esteem and lack of confidence. These discussions were one of the few parts of the book where I felt like I had actually gained something, and it was fascinating to see how Coxon’s art intertwined with his struggles to both serve as a reflection of and a release from his problems.
However, Verse, Chorus, Monster! is blurbed as being ‘intimate’ and ‘honest’, which, excepting Coxon’s ruminations on alcoholism, seems fairly difficult to believe. Given the surface level recall of his time with Blur, it’s hardly intimate. Moreover, Coxon is so reluctant to criticise any of his own contemporaries let alone his own bandmates that the entire book feels extremely safe. A sanitised history of Britpop sounds like something that shouldn’t exist, but Verse, Chorus, Monster! proves otherwise.
Having read Miki Berenyi’s memoir Fingers Crossed earlier this year, I couldn’t help but admire her brutal honesty throughout. Unafraid to point out the issues with both herself and the people around her, a couple of lines from Berenyi’s book probably contain more candour than Coxon could muster for the majority of his own.
By comparison, Coxon is very reluctant to point fingers. While I’m not looking for a bloodbath, Britpop was not a very pretty scene, and to have some insider details would have actually made Verse, Chorus, Monster! a worthwhile investment rather than just another generic music memoir. Given how unhealthy Britpop was at its peak and Coxon’s references to the toxic environment within Blur in the nineties, I find it hard to believe that for over 300 pages this book is incapable of even scraping the surface.
There’s a sense that Coxon is tiptoeing around his true feelings. Any slight jab at someone is immediately followed by some form of damage control so we are reassured that he doesn’t hate them. So much has been made of the strained relationship between Coxon and Albarn during the lows of Blur’s career, yet Coxon barely comments on it. Nor does he comment on his relationship with James, who, given the latter’s treatment of women in the nineties, should provoke some discussion from Coxon, a supposed feminist who writes about how he was staunchly anti-sexism and all for defending the women who copped unending misogyny within the Britpop scene.
Perhaps Coxon doesn’t want to dig up old wounds. That would be fine were it not for the fact that deciding to write a memoir inherently means doing just that, especially when you have to cover your time playing in one of the biggest bands of the nineties. Autobiographies and rock memoirs need to dive into the nitty gritty to make them worth being written and published. Otherwise, what’s stopping us from simply skimming a Wikipedia page instead? It would provide the same amount of information with fairly similar levels of emotional depth.
The problem isn’t that Verse, Chorus, Monster! was awful, because it wasn’t. The problem is that it wouldn’t have made a difference whether it was published or not since it was so forgettable. Maybe this could have been more impactful if Coxon had written a series of reflections on alcoholism and how his mental health problems have been entwined with creating art. But ultimately, for a book with a punchy title like Verse, Chorus, Monster!, it lacks any bite whatsoever.