GRAHAM COXON, SUNDAY TIMES, Sunday August 09, 1998

In December 1968, the former Jefferson Airplane drummer and Moby Grape guitarist, Skip Spence, checked himself out of a mental institution and motorcycled to Nashville to record his solo album, Oar, in four days, before disappearing back into pharmaceutical oblivion. In 1972, the manic depressive English folk rocker Nick Drake silently abandoned the master tapes to his final album, Pink Moon, at the front desk of his record company, where they lay around unopened for weeks before anyone realised what they were. Syd Barrett made two unhinged solo albums in the late 1960s wilderness years between leaving Pink Floyd and going back to spend the rest of his life with his mum in Cambridge. And Graham Coxon, guitarist of Britpop chart-toppers Blur, recorded the LP The Sky Is Too High, according to his own sleeve notes, "bashing the songs out in five days...during a period of t-totallism (sic) in the year 1997".

Putting down a fresh copy of Q magazine, with a four-star review that also mentions Drake and Barrett as favourable points of comparison, Coxon, who is 29 and arrived at the interview by skateboard, seems genuinely surprised. He smiles delightedly and begins to use the word "nice" more times than is strictly sensible.

"Wow! That's a nice review. I don't understand how people are being so nice about it. It's nice that people are being so nice about it though. The Face said I was a stupid spoilt rich kid brat making a cheap rubbish record. I expected a lot more of that, really."

But while The Sky Is Too High (released tomorrow on Transcopic) isn't the work of a "stupid spoilt rich kid brat", neither is it a solo album that will achieve the record collector cult status of Oar or Pink Moon. Coxon is far too "nice" to become the Camden rock scene's own Barrett, and he is also already too old to die tragically young, even in a bizarre skateboarding accident. But The Sky Is Too High does have the same air of intimacy as those classic mad sabbatical solo albums by the famous pop stars of the past, even if it was recorded in relative sobriety.

"Yeah. Blur wasn't doing any thing and however tantalising a year off sounds, believe it or not you do get a bit bored after a bit. And I wasn't really doing anything with myself either. I was just being quite hermit-like and I wasn't even going to the pub. And if I did go to the pub, I'd just have a glass of Coca-Cola and my teeth would feel horrible and then I'd play a couple of games of pool and go home really bored and watch TV and drink loads of coffee and smoke cigarettes and play my guitar so..." He tails off.

You have to admire Coxon. As a member of master media-manipulators Blur, he knows he could easily pass off The Sky Is Too High's edgy hybrid of English psychedelic folk rock and American post-punk noise as the desperate recording frenzy of a man driven to the brink of sanity by the pressures of top-level touring and studio commitments, but instead it appears it was recorded, at least in part, as a result of young Graham becoming bored by Coca-Cola making his teeth feel "horrible". And nobody uses the words "Coca-Cola" in 1998. Even the Coca-Cola company calls it Coke. Like his heroes, Coxon is mad, but in a "nice" way.

Coxon is unusual among people who work in the music industry in that he is a music fan and still has a fan's relationship with the music he loves. Being in a successful pop group has obviously enabled him to remain in the artificially prolonged cocoon of late adolescence. He is allowed both to skateboard around Camden in broad daylight and still like pop music. But if The Sky Is Too High has a fault, it is that at times it amounts to a condensed trip around Coxon's, admittedly tasteful, record collection. Who The F***? splurges the guitar part from Sonic Youth's White Cross over a disaffected rant; I Wish and That's All I Wanna Do rewrite sensitive lo-fi Americans Sebadoh by way of Essex; and Waiting is essentially the acoustic guitar figure of Drake's Horn overlaid with the vocal of Barrett's Opel. But at least Coxon is open about his influences, even acknowledging them in his sleeve-notes as if to pre-empt criticism. I Wish actually includes the line, "I wish I could bring Nick Drake back to life, he would understand, hold my hand..." In explaining the lyric, Coxon again reveals himself as the fan who never grew up.

"I think I'm terribly pious at times...pious in the original meaning of the word..." Which is? "Well, I don't mind giving away emotions and being sincere about things and...I dunno. Sometimes, people like Nick Drake and Barrett, and people who are into them would understand what I mean, they become like friends that you miss. You're so into the music you think of them as friends, and then you realise they're not on the planet any more because they're dead. I just got really sad about how it would be impossible ever to meet them, and it made me have a bit of grief about missing someone you thought you knew. And I wanted Nick Drake to be around because I was feeling pretty lonely."

Coxon seems to think of Drake in the same terms as Raymond Briggs's The Snowman. Maybe he should invest some of his pop millions in funding a short animated film in which his own childhood self is visited by a flying version of the dead English songwriter, who then swirls him around the sky to the accompaniment of an acoustic guitar and cello version of Walking in the Air.

Coxon's candour here is almost embarrassing - and uncharacteristic. While Blur reinvent themselves every year, moving from baggy pop funsters, to aggressively suited and booted Mods, to eclectic post-punk art rockers, with The Sky Is Too High isn't Coxon coming dangerously close to actually revealing something of himself?

"I dunno. It's the real me I think. I mean, I wanted to make it as simple as possible. A lot of it was just recorded onto dictaphones, in hotel rooms, in my front room and in the bathroom..." Coxon breaks off and scurries to close the magazine that carries his picture, suddenly self-conscious again as a family walk past our cafe table. "I've just finished carrying out the dreams I had when I was eight, being on Top of the Pops and that, and now it's time for some new ones. And the new ones, now I'm 29, are more like having stable relationships, and not wanting to tour ever again, and having a life that causes as little destruction as possible to my mental and physical health."

And does that future include making more solo albums? "Yeah. It felt really natural doing it, not contrived. And I'm lucky to have been able to do it. I'm surprised so many people wanted to talk about it. And there's reviews with pictures. I never really meant it to be a big deal." Who's going around putting up posters advertising the record all around London then? "Oh, I dunno. I go out at night trying to catch them. I don't mind, though. I suppose you've got to advertise a little bit."