Graham Coxon names his favourite Pink Floyd song
Blur guitarist Graham Coxon has always been his band’s secret weapon. A distinctive guitar player whose busy work is as sliding as a saxophone, he takes from various areas to craft his dynamic sound and has touched on the likes of alternative rock, shoegaze, post-punk and folk in his time.
Unsurprisingly, Coxon has discussed a variety of familiar faces as heroes over his lengthy career. Exhibiting this, he has mentioned the likes of Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, The Kinks, The Smiths and Scott Walker as significant influences. Possessing a penchant for boundary-pushing musicians, there’s no surprise that Pink Floyd is another act that left an indelible imprint on him.
Whilst Coxon is a fan of much of Pink Floyd’s output, he has an especially deep love for the Syd Barrett era. This was the first chapter of their storied career, when their music was more outwardly psychedelic, led by Barrett’s whimsical tales and hypnotic guitar lines. As fans of the band will know, Barrett left Pink Floyd in 1968 owing to deteriorating mental health. Still, their two albums with him, the 1967 debut The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and its follow-up A Saucerful of Secrets from the following year, are both masterpieces.
When speaking to The Line of Best Fit in 2022 to list the nine gateway songs of his life, Graham Coxon chose ‘Bike’ from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. He said: “I had to pick a Syd Barrett track. A lot of these choices may seem quite obvious, but they’re gateway songs and ‘Bike’ really was a big ‘Who’s this?’ moment when I was listening to it in Julia’s bedroom. There’s a lot of great songs on Relics, and maybe my favourite is ‘See-Saw’, which is a Rick Wright one. But ‘Bike’ was definitely the [makes explosion noise] one.”
The Blur guitarist continued: “It’s like Nick Drake or Kate Bush – it couldn’t have come from anywhere other than some bookish area of England because there’s not an ounce of rock and roll in it. It comes straight out of Grantchester – big flat Cambridge with cows outside. Like I said, it comes out more like Hampstead modernism than New Orleans or anything like that. It’s peculiarly English. And Americans really can’t do that very well. It’s a strange bucolic, melancholic English thing.”
“And the end of the song always reminds me of what it’s like to faint. I fainted quite a lot growing up, and when you come around, you don’t know where you are, and you’re having a quite strange auditory loop. So the insane goose sound that grows in intensity made me go a bit off-balance when I first heard it.”
Coxon concluded: “But then the chorus – ‘You’re the kind of girl that fits in with my world’ – is so lovely, and it’s exactly how you feel when you’re in love with someone, but that was really his own language, really surreal, playful and dark.”
Listen to ‘Bike’ below.
