Graham Coxon Live

Islington Academy, London
Polysics, Academy, Birmingham

Blinking into the spotlight...

By Simon Price

01 August 2004

It's an immutable law of pop music that lead singers need to be willing to be knobheads. No, more than that - they need to know how to be a knobhead. Mick Jagger was willing and able. So was Johnny Rotten. So was Morrissey. And so, love him or hate him, is Damon Albarn.

Graham Coxon is not a knobhead. And consequently, neither is he much of a lead singer. Hunched over a succession of guitars in a tight purple T-shirt, forgetting the titles to his own songs, amiable enough to make self-deprecating jokes ("Listen to this, it's got a really good Who riff" he fesses up before "Hopeless Friend") but, more often than not, not enough of a showman to put them across. A solitary scissor jump is about as demonstrative as he gets.

All of which is, perhaps, to be expected from someone who has spent most of his career as a guitarist and songwriter for a more spotlight-happy frontman. What's peculiarly noticeable, however, at tonight's small gig, is that Coxon's way of singing seems to be learned from Albarn himself. I don't just mean his inevitably-similar accent - his actual way of phrasing a vocal line is pure Damon. It could be counter-argued, of course, that Damon's way of phrasing a vocal line is a direct result of the melodies Coxon wrote for him (and, in the absence of a fly-on-the-wall film crew in the studio, we'll never know for sure). Either way, if you stand in the Academy's stairwell and listen to Graham's distant, muffled voice, it could be a Blur gig.

It's somewhat ironic that while the remaining rump of Blur have become somewhat more experimental since Coxon's departure, Coxon is increasingly returning towards an accessible pop sound (contrary to public perception of their respective leanings). Happiness in Magazines is the most immediate and ear-friendly of all his solo albums, and by some distance his best.

The irritating thing about Coxon's solo career has always been his disingenuously low-budget aesthetic, a multi-millionaire putting out CDs in scratchy cardboard sleeves. (He is, of course, willing to play the commercial game to some extent, paying somebody to hand out postcards bearing a lazily-alliterative tribute from this writer: "Furious, funny and full of life.")

There's still an element of indier-than-thou to Coxon. When he plays a cover version, it's "That's When I Reach for My Revolver" by uber-culty Eighties American band Mission of Burma (also covered by Moby). And there's still a degree of wilfully primitive lo-fi, such as the faux naive gothic blues (with a tiny "g") of "Girl Done Gone", which is not quite in the Jack White class (frankly, who is?). He can, however, write a truly touching song when he puts his mind to it, as he shows with "Life it Sucks" ("It's painful sitting on my hands, when I want to touch your hair").

One track, a blistering B-side, seems to go "Whatever happened to my chart position?/ Oh what I'd give to be a real musician..." and the gossip hound in your head can't help wondering who he's addressing. But when he announces, "This is about being a fuck-up", before the most furious song of the night (we're talking Motörhead velocity), it's proof that Coxon reserves his bitterest bile for himself.

And we all know what he's talking about. Coxon's well-reported alcoholism was surely as significant a factor in his separation from Albarn and co as any of the time-honoured "musical differences", and it's still apparently a sore subject. Midway through the show, somebody hands him a drink. "What is this?" he says, examining the glass with suspicion. "A Coke? OK..." Later, he almost admonishes the crowd for their booze-fuelled exuberance. "Are you all gonna remember this, or are you too pissed?" I'm sober, and I've forgotten it already.

The West has always eyed Japan with a mixture of fear and admiration. One need only look at the Oriental features of baddies in science fiction (Flash Gordon and Star Trek, to name but two examples) to see this psychological process in action: Japanese people were, throughout much of the 20th century, treated - in every sense - as alien.

With the gradual rapprochement and resumption of cultural links between East and West since the end of the Second World War (and of imperial-fascist Japan), the fear, on the part of the West, has been replaced by a kind of patronising amusement. You can see this in the kitschy, fake-Japanese T-shirts sold by websites like Engrish.com, and you can see it in the depiction of Japan in Sofia Coppola's ludicrously overrated and profoundly xenophobic film Lost in Translation.

And you can certainly see it in Western critical discourse regarding Japanese pop acts like The 5,6,7,8s, Shonen Knife, ex-Girl, and the truly bizarre Polysics. "Ha ha, look at these crazy Japs," the standard line goes, "trying to be like us, but getting it all wrong!" But who is taking the Miki out of whom? It never seems to occur to anyone that maybe "they" know exactly what they are doing, and the joke is on "us". What if they find us kitsch and amusing, and this is their way of expressing that? There is, surely, nothing accidental about Tokyo trio Polysics' unique (and utterly Japanese) fusion - or rather, fission - of the most volatile elements in Western avant-garde pop.

Taking the stage in matching workers' overalls with a stencilled capital "P", their eyes obscured by reflective silver visors, making them - that dreaded quasi-racist adjective - inscrutable, two thirds of Polysics (Kayo and Fumi) are near-static, and cyborg-like in their movements, while singer Hayashi is a blur of motion, attacking his guitar with his teeth and screaming lyrics like, "It's a baby baby baby baby baby portable rock!/ OK! Something in my reality might have broke", over a succession of sudden, three-minute blitz-attacks of electropunk chaos which a less tasteful writer than I might compare to Pearl Harbor.

It's berserk, thrilling, and unquestionably deliberate. You've got to get up early to catch out the Japanese. And we all know where the sun rises first.

s.price@independent.co.uk

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd