The New Cue #395: Graham Coxon And Rose Elinor Dougall of The Waeve
"My whole concept around making music since meeting Rose has changed..."
Good morning,
Well, that was quite the weekend wasn’t it?
The excitement isn’t over yet though, as in today’s New Cue we speak to Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall about their excellent forthcoming second album together as The Waeve, parenthood, paranoia, prog rock and more. Today’s edition is free so please do get stuck in and if you enjoyed it, maybe share it among some of your music loving pals?
See you Friday for a landslide of new musical recommendations, albums to blow your mind and more. You need to be a subscriber to get all of that though, so if you’ve done so already, just click down there to join the party.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… The Waeve
Picture: Kalpesh Lathigra
Blur guitarist Graham Coxon and former Pipette Rose Elinor Dougall began writing songs together during the tail end of the pandemic. Recorded in Coxon’s front room, they released their debut album as The Waeve in 2023. In case you missed it, you can have a listen here…
Since they starting working on that first album, the pair have become a couple and in 2022 welcomed a baby daughter, Eliza May, into the world. Despite becoming new parents and the small matter of Blur’s recent reunion, the pair managed to find time to record a follow up, City Lights, which is out September 20th on Transgressive.
Far from sounding like a rushed job though, it’s brilliant. Fleshing out and expanding many of the retro-futurist, folkie and post-punk strands explored on its predecessor, it’s a much fuller sounding, more confident and in places more aggressive record. They sound like a proper band this time around.
The pair have already released two singles from it, the agitated Bowie/Roxy Music-like title track, and a couple of weeks ago, You Saw - a lovely bit of floaty Kraut-pop which should appeal to anyone partial to Stereolab…
Chris spoke to Graham and Rose a few weeks ago about making the album, and everything that’s changed since their debut…
Is it safe to say the circumstances to making the album were fairly different this time around?
Graham Coxon: It was really different.
Rose Elinor Dougall: The fact that I was living here now and we had a baby in 2022 changed the whole way of working. We only really had three or four hours three times a week to work. There’s no sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike, you have to really focus. Especially when you’re massively sleep deprived. You had to sort of switch your head into the game, which I found quite challenging at the beginning.
Was it hard to toggle between being new parents to being in a band together writing songs?
RED: When you have a baby, your whole identity gets flipped. We were gigging up until I was eight months pregnant so the music has been a constant thing. I mean, we did a tour when Eliza was eight-months-old so I didn’t really take a break necessarily, but I think it’s been a real gift in a lot of ways to relocate myself in the process of making music. It’s a really common thing for mothers that have their first kid to sort of lose themselves completely. I definitely felt that, but I had a focus point to really locate myself through writing which was really lucky for me.
When you made the first album you weren’t really thinking about what it was or where these songs were going to go. Now this is actually a band, did having a more solid idea of what The Waeve was effect how you approached it?
GC: Yeah. On the first album, we were really inventing our world and pulling what we wanted into it. On this one, we knew what we liked sonically.
RED: We didn’t have the same process of having to talk about each other’s references. There was a foundation that we’d laid so we could skip that bit and get into the meat of making the making the music. We’re nailing our colours to the mast a little more this time around because there’s an identity to work with.
It’s a lot denser. The first one could be a bit more drifting at times, but this is a much more urgent-sounding record.
RED: Yeah, I’m glad. I think that partly comes a bit from the limited time that we had to work on it. It’s like a drive, that energy, which actually the album really benefited from.
You can hear a lot of different influences on this album, too. Song For Eliza May has this Fairport Convention thing going on, but then a track like Broken Boys sounds like Cabaret Voltaire.
GC: My whole concept around making music since meeting Rose has changed – whether it’s guitars, saxophones, what we use as instruments, synthesisers. And so do my references for it or what I then might listen to to back that up. So, it might be Cabaret Voltaire, it might be Chrome, and it might be Magazine, stuff like that. On that the first album, I could hardly get through the day without listening to Laughing Stock by Talk Talk just so I could calm down before Rose came round. So we started off without limitation, really. And that’s good because we can stay that way. We don’t have to suddenly say, ‘Oh, we’ve got this eight-minute psychedelic jazz thing on the new record...’
RED: We’re still free to harness all these different influences. I don’t feel like we boxed ourselves in. I know that a lot of people get really nervous about making a second record because they sort of overly stated their case on the first one and then it means that you’re stuck in this box that you can’t really work in. But luckily I think we left a lot of loose ends to pick up on, so that was a freeing thing.
It’s really prog in places too, some of it sounds a bit like Yes.
GC: There’s no point arguing with a song once it’s got its identity. There’s a lot of references to that in Song For Eliza May. We were listening to Lindisfarne on tour so there’s some Alan Hull sitting in this record. I love that a song can move between areas and types of music and flavours. I think that song is my favourite on the record, because it’s almost like listening to all of The Old Grey Whistle Test. It’s like watching all of those DVDs at the same time. I love the idea that it’s unapologetically ‘70s.
Lyrically too, it’s much more direct. You can tell it’s about you and your lives together.
GC: There’s a wider focus life-wise. On the first one we didn’t have much to focus on apart from if some of the not-too-distant past entered into it. I was really focused on where I was and the present because I was finding it hard to even look into the past and I didn’t know what my future would be. On this one we know each other a lot, we hang out with each other all the time and so there’s a lot more processing of our present and our past. It’s more like our lives and our neurosis. And that comes from me. I feel like I’m the more neurotic one.
RED: I actually had quite a struggle for a period of time thinking about what to write about. Because partly life had become quite small. I thought, ‘I’ve got nothing to say, I’ve just been wheeling a pram up and down...’ I was really resistant for a while to even consider referencing the birth of our child.
I always get a bit nervous about this kind of thing, but I felt like it was actually really important to represent that side of motherhood to other women. My ex-bandmate Gwenno has done a really brilliant job of representing her creative processes whilst having two children. She’s always been someone that I’ve really looked up to in that way. The music industry is not a place for mothers at all and there’s so much that gets lost from that, because having a child is the biggest creative act you can actually ever engage with. I feel like it’s actually a duty to make sure that that voice is heard.
It’s not done in a mawkish or sentimental way though, there’s worries and anxieties and all the real-life side of it in there too.
GC: Yeah, there’s a lot of anxiety, a lot of tension, paranoia, there’s stuff about jealousy in there. There’s some quite aggressive stuff and moments of real beauty. Even when it’s quite idyllic there’s also a sense of panic as well as being a real celebration of Rose and I’s relationship and our daughter. That’s what I’m like though. Even when things are going well you always think people want to destroy you and destroy your relationship. Sometimes these things are there and sometimes they’re imagined. I’m probably never going to be able to write these ballady love songs because that’s all such a big part of relationships.
But that’s what makes it more realistic and effective because that’s what it’s like.
GC: Yeah, it’s part of all of that. I think it’s like that that when you actually eventually get what you want. It’s almost like the same feeling as you get when you’re a parent you see threats everywhere. You think the block you’re living on is surrounded by XL Bully dogs ready to rip your head off.
I appreciate how busy you both are making a record and looking after a toddler so thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
GC: No not at all, thank you.
RED: Yeah, thanks.
CC
City Lights is out September 20th on Transgressive. The Waeve play The Village Underground on October 29, and prior to that are supporting both Elbow and Noel Gallagher and appearing at Latitude and Green Man. More info HERE.