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Partly buoyed by the long-awaited return of Oasis, Britpop is back in the music spotlight. But Blur guitarist Graham Coxon has some concerns regarding his classic rig.
When they were fighting for top spot in the British rock food chain during the height of their powers, Oasis and Blur waged war with hodgepodge pedalboards, haphazard rigs, and massive tunes.
Oasis played to 125,000 people at Knebworth in 1996, and Noel Gallagher's pedalboard at the time was literally a piece of plywood. Coxon’s rig was just as basic – but even harder to operate.
“I had this disgraceful pedalboard during the Blur years,” he tells Guitar World in a new interview. “It was this big fucking thing that, when we turned it on, it would be brighter than the stage lights. I’d be stabbing my foot away, trying to turn on a Rat pedal, but you couldn’t see it!”
A lot has changed in the gear world since the early and mid-’90s, and it’s left Coxon’s rig looking a little dated. He isn't looking back on his Blur gear with rose-tinted glasses. He's embracing the new.
“Back then, I had everything I needed,” he says. “But now, in my older age, I’m thinking, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have been playing Marshalls for 35 years.’
“It sounded great. But it was loud… it was a 100-watt mofo, right? So, lately, I’ve been thinking, ‘Oh, what about more Fender amps? What about headroom?’ I’ve thought an awful lot more about it.
“When I turn my fuzz pedal off and on, I want it to take people’s heads off. So, it’s this crazy dance of headroom, and if I should use a Marshall, a Fender, or a 20-watt Hamstead, which I use with [his band with Rose Elinor Dougall] The Weave.”
Pedal choices have led Coxon to forge a partnership with JAM Pedals, which has also collaborated with Greg Koch and turned heads with its take on the Rat. Coxon's also experimenting with new sounds.
“When I was growing up, I had a Rat pedal,” Coxon reiterates. “I would just hit that in the chorus and turn it off for the verse. That’s how simple it was.
“Now there’s phasers, flanges, compressors… crikey, everybody is making stuff. Then, there’s the Third Man pedal, the [Gamechanger Audio x Third Man Hardware] Plasma [Coil]… I can’t live without that.”
The Plasma Coil, a distortion/overdrive pedal built by Jack White’s Third Man Hardware and Gamechanger Audio, is very much the antithesis of the busy and ever-inventive pedal market in the 2020s.
It’s a world that Coxon, though a tad overwhelmed by, is diving headfirst into regardless.
Elsewhere in his Guitar World interview, Coxon looked back on the time Damon Albarn rejected an entire album of Blur songs – and accidentally kickstarted his solo career.
Coxon’s full interview with GW will be published online in due course.
