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ERIC BACHMANN AND GRAHAM COXON
CROOKED FINGERS AND BROKEN STRINGS
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Back when guitarist Graham Coxon was brother Dave to Damon Albarn’s Ray Davies in Britpop’s reigning mod cons Blur, there was seldom any competition for the spotlight: Damon was the star and Graham was the guy in the corner sculpting subtle yet crucial hooks and, on "Song 2," turning the polished band on to a little Amerindie discord. His first solo CD since leaving Blur — Happiness in Magazines (Astralwerks) — finds him rediscovering his roots in the kind of wry Britpop his former mates were so fond of. But as his show fronting a five-man band a week ago Monday at the Paradise revealed, Coxon is still no fan of spotlights. It was only after he stopped the intro to Happiness’s generic blues "Girl Done Gone" to announce "Spotlights freak me out. . . . Turn it off!" that he began to breathe life into what had been a low-key set with a run of a half-dozen punkish tunes. He was breaking guitar strings every other song as he tore into the angry, Buzzcocks-style "Who the Fuck?", a cover of Mission of Burma’s "Fame and Fortune," and the feedback-filled "People of the Earth." Gulping down Red Bull instead of beer, the now sober Coxon may be a little ill at ease in the role of bandleader. But as lyrics like "I’ve been heading in the wrong direction/I’ve been heading into a pile of shit" suggest, he’s happy to be free of Blur. When in the late ’90s Coxon was busy making his first lo-fi attempts to become England’s answer to Stephen Malkmus, Eric Bachmann, who’d fronted Archers of Loaf (North Carolina’s answer to Pavement?), was also scaling back with a solo project called Crooked Fingers. Replacing the electric-guitar clamor of the Archers with moody, atmospheric backdrops and vaguely rootsy finger-picked acoustic guitar, Bachmann has, over the course of four albums on the indie Warm, created a Bukowskian world of tragic romantics, broken dreamers, and beaten-down barflies. And downstairs at the Middle East a week ago Tuesday, Crooked Fingers included a drummer, a keyboardist, a trumpet player, a female background singer, and former Archers bassist Matt Gentling. Unlike Coxon, Bachmann has never been afraid of crowds; with Crooked Fingers, he’s even made a habit of turning off the PA and bringing his mates with him into the crowd to play unplugged. They did that Tuesday for a mini-set that had fans clapping and singing along to a yearning "Valerie." It was just one high point in a set that, like the new Crooked Fingers CD, Dignity and Shame, seems to have brought Bachmann full circle, back to the anthemic heights he reached with the Archers.
BY MATT ASHARE
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