GRAHAM COXON - Castle Park

It can't be said that Graham Coxon has been taking it easy these past few years. The renewed activity with Blur, plus the three soundtracks he's tackled, not to mention The Waeve project put together with Rose Elinor Dougall, are all tiles of a mosaic as vast as it is lively in its many shades. So we can forgive the English guitarist for having left his solo material in a drawer for twelve long years — it finally sees the light of day as "Castle Park", ten songs in which the British sound of the Sixties — them again, yes — echoes and blends with the young Coxon's personal memories.

A double leap backwards, actually a triple one, considering the tracks and recordings date back to 2011: the same sessions as "A + E", to be precise. From these postcards kindly delivered from the past emerges the most dispassionate and, in some ways, most sincere side of Graham Coxon as an artist: a musician in love with an era, a sound, and with the possibility of conjuring it all up simply by picking up a guitar and standing in front of a microphone.

Overall, the mood is mostly breezy and light-hearted, as well demonstrated by the first two singles released, "Billy Says" and "Alright", fittingly placed at the start of the tracklist, legacies of his mod upbringing. Delving deeper into the album, things get a bit more complex and varied: we move from the rock'n'roll of "When You Find Out" to the shadowy, reflective moods of "Isn't It Funny" and "Forget Today", from the Spanish-tinged gallop of "Dripping Soul" to the naïve indie-rock of "There's A Little House", from the soft comfort zone of "Easy", a 100% Coxon-esque track, to the near-modern-classical territory of "Mélodie Pour Christine".

An album pulled back from the archives, one that kicks off the countdown to the now-imminent reissue of the Englishman's entire catalogue, "Castle Park" translates into music the idea of England depicted on the postcards that adorn the cover: an idyllic place, reassuring and comforting, so longed-for and perhaps even stereotyped that it becomes real.

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21/06/2026