Politics & Power Quote by Graham Coxon

Coxon is clocking a cultural boomerang: American bands, restless with their own present, circling back to a moment when British guitar music felt like a solution rather than a style. The key word is "focus" - not virtuosity, not bigger hooks, but discipline. Late-70s and early-80s UK scenes (post-punk, new wave, the leaner end of pub rock) were built on subtraction: sharp rhythms, wiry tones, economy in songwriting, attitude as arrangement. When Coxon hears Americans "sounding quite English", he is really hearing a recommitment to constraint.

The subtext is about authenticity without saying the cursed word. "Quite English" is shorthand for a particular kind of taste: dry, angular, slightly aloof, suspicious of excess. It's also a subtle dig at periods when rock drifted into sprawl - jammy indulgence, overproduced gloss, endless genre-hopping marketed as innovation. "Ages and ages" exaggerates, but it signals fatigue: an era of music where everything was available, and therefore nothing felt chosen.

Context matters because Coxon comes out of Britpop, a movement itself obsessed with reclaiming "Englishness" in sound and posture, often by sampling earlier British waves. So he isn't neutrally reporting a trend; he's identifying a lineage that flatters his own aesthetic values. There's also a transatlantic power flip embedded here: the US, usually the exporter, now importing British restraint as a corrective. It frames "English" less as nationality and more as a method - editing, edge, intention.