‘Spirit of Eden’: The one album Graham Coxon will always try to replicate
For a band as omnipresent in the Britpop sphere, Blur was never the traditional band that anyone thought they were initially. While albums like Parklife heralded them as the 1990s answer to The Kinks, Graham Coxon was informed by the sounds of every indie guitarist that had come on the scene, becoming fixated with acts like Dinosaur Jr just as much as he was with The Beatles. When spinning through his record collection, though, there’s one album that he thinks is the pinnacle of what he was trying to achieve.
Throughout Blur’s history, though, Coxon was already looking to defy the traditional look of a lead guitarist. While many artists in Britpop were known to play standard solos without traditional flashy playing, Coxon took a different approach, making guitar moments unapologetic in their dissonant noise.
Like the guitar wizards before him, Coxon’s message behind tracks like ‘Girls and Boys’ and ‘End of the Century’ was about taking apart the standard rock and roll guitar riff and making it sound dirty and mean with every single strike. While Coxon may have assaulted his instrument more than a few times, it all stemmed from listening to one of the titans of new wave.
When coming up in the previous decade, Coxon was entranced by what Talk Talk had been doing on the indie circuit. Cut from the same cloth as acts like Duran Duran at first, the band had been known to blend different elements of various genres of music, all while taking the guitar to places it had never been before.
While the band would be heralded for their massive hit ‘It’s My Life’, Coxon was entranced by the sounds of their 1988 album Spirit of Eden. Despite not having any hit potential with most of the long runtimes, the album would become a significant turning point in experimental rock, informing what the next phase of indie music would sound like in the next decade.
When discussing the music that shaped him, Coxon would say that he hoped to make an album that equalled what Talk Talk had done, telling NME, “If I ever make an album as good as this, I’ll be happy for the rest of my life, probably. Danny Thompson is on it, and it’s kind of obvious immediately, his bass playing is amazing, everything just sounds perfect”.
Even though Coxon has relied on his guitar as the lead instrument on nearly every song he played, his knowledge of the bass leading the back of the mix is paramount to the album’s appeal. Rather than focus on the sizzling leads coming on every single song, hearing tracks like ‘I Believe In You’ come together feels like the bass and the guitar talking to each other, with every member having an opportunity to make a grand statement by the time the song wraps up.
In the context of Blur, Coxon would bring a similar mentality to his work. While some of the band’s more commercial material feature Coxon’s guitar up front in the mix, the albums are known to feature that same kind of musical telepathy, with Coxon leaving space for every musician to make the song better. Coxon may be focused on becoming the best guitarist he can be, but part of being a fantastic musician is being able to listen to the other members of the group as well.
