Graham Coxon - Standing On My Own Again (Parlophone)
UK release date: 27 February 2006
You must know what a Coxon sounds like. Those short sharp shards of guitar strangled out of the neck of the guitar? That's a Coxon. For the first fifteen seconds of Standing On My Own Again, you get plenty of that, but before you can adopt Song 2 bracing positions and scream "Woo-Hoo!!", the whole thing bizarrely mutates into some kind of bastard offspring of an 80s power-rock ballad, albeit performed by a man in corduroy and thick glasses.
To his immense credit, that is turned from a notion less appealing than an hour spent in a Thai prison with a rubber glove clad guard who thinks the Geneva convention was some kind of business conference for men in lederhosen discussing cheese clocks, to something charmingly skew-whiff.
Course, if he'd released it immediately following the split from his former employers, we'd have thought it was something else - the Kidman-esque clenched fist following the hefty settlement granting divorce hearing - but now we're just going to have to take it for what it is: a lo-fi version of Livin' On A Prayer by Bon Jovi fronted by Johnny Rotten. Which is an obviously fantastic thing.
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