Life's Pleasures Quote by Graham Coxon

There’s a quiet swagger in how Coxon frames sobriety: not as moral triumph, but as a new baseline everyone else politely orbits. The line opens with comparison and a faint flex - “they don’t drink anywhere near what I used to” - which slips in a backstory of excess without begging for pity. He’s measuring the room, and also measuring his old self, the way a former chaos agent might, half-amused, half-wary, at the damage he once normalized.

What makes it land is the social realism. Sobriety isn’t presented as a private decision; it’s a negotiated treaty with your band, your friends, your scene. “Slightly respectful” is perfect British understatement, suggesting the respect is real but not sentimental. Nobody’s staging an intervention, nobody’s making a big deal. That’s the point: he’s describing a culture where drinking is default, yet workable accommodations exist if you’re blunt enough to claim space.

The subtext is about power and boundaries. In a band ecosystem, habits become communal rituals; opting out risks becoming the difficult one. Coxon flips that anxiety by emphasizing consent and ease: “so it’s not a problem.” It’s a sentence that tries to make itself true, a small spell against relapse and awkwardness. Coming from a musician whose era practically mythologized intoxication as creativity, the quote is also an unglamorous correction: the music can still happen, the hang can still happen, and the world doesn’t end when you stop performing excess.