Blur’s Graham Coxon selects his favourite album by The Beatles
Best known for his work with Blur, guitarist Graham Coxon helped shape the sound of some of the 1990s best records. Blur’s surprisingly gritty 1999 album 13, for example, owes much to Coxon’s interest in alternative American guitar groups like Sonic Youth and Pavement. Of course, Blur’s brilliance was in their ability to meld such international influences with a uniquely English approach to songwriting. Here, Coxon names his favourite album by ’60s music icons The Beatles.
Arguably, without The Beatles, there would be no Blur. The Liverpool group helped cement the guitar, bass, and drums format that Blur relied upon for tracks like ‘Song 2′. Strangely Blur haven’t often discussed their thoughts on the Fab Four. Albarn has often spoken about his affection for The Kinks’ songwriting, but the Lennon-McCartney partnership has rarely cropped up. That said, when Graham Coxon was asked to name some of his favourite records for NME back in 2009, the guitarist did confess that he’d played The Beatles’ Revolver “to death”. Naming the album his favourite, he said: “Revolver would have to be the one that I’ve played the most.”
It’s a good choice. Released in the summer of 1966, Revolver marked a new chapter for The Beatles and features some of their most innovative work. A confluence of leftfield musical influences and a burgeoning interest in mind-expanding drugs, the album gave birth to everything from ‘Eleanor Rigby’ to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, the latter of which is perhaps the finest example of studio wizardry in the entire Beatles catalogue. “We were really starting to find ourselves in the studio,” Ringo Starr recalled in Anthology. “We were finding what we could do, just being the four of us and playing our instruments. The overdubbing got better, even though it was always pretty tricky because of the lack of tracks. The songs got more interesting, so with that the effects got more interesting.”
Coxon’s contemporary, Travis’ Dougie Payne, spoke to us about Revolver back in 2021 and echoed the Blur guitarist’s enthusiasm. “[My sister] was only into the mop-top Beatles albums so that to me was The Beatles,” the bassist explained. “Years later when I discovered the weird, hairy, druggy Beatles I absolutely fell in love with them all over again. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ 55 years on still sounds like it was recorded tomorrow.”
You can revisit ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ below.
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