After the Top 30 success of their eponymous debut album, The WAEVE have returned with City Lights, embracing “the beautiful and the grotesque”
It’s Monday morning and, while your bleary-eyed correspondent is nursing his first coffee, Rose Elinor Dougall and Graham Coxon are well into their day, seated at their kitchen table ready for the next task. The couple have been up a while and their occasional, albeit polite yawns are proving hard to disguise. “We haven’t been to bed!”
Coxon boasts, but they’re not suffering from a night of rock’n’roll debauchery. Since first hanging out some three and a half years ago, they’ve delivered both The WAEVE’s eponymous debut album and a daughter, Eliza May, yet to reach two years old, as well as, due September, a second album together.
Coxon, meanwhile, has published a graphic novel, Superstate, with its own accompanying album, as well as a memoir, Verse, Chorus, Monster!, not to mention last year’s LP with Blur. The acclaimed The Ballad Of Darren in turn provoked a run of international dates, a live album and concert film that was compiled from two heady nights at Wembley Stadium in July 2023, plus another documentary, To The End, currently in cinemas. Frankly, then, it’s a wonder that Dougall and Coxon have had a moment to catch their breath, let alone make a new record.
“I’m amazed that we managed to pull it off,” Dougall chuckles of their imminent second album City Lights, recorded over 20 days with producer James Ford back in February. Certainly, holidays have been out of the question. “We’ve had a couple of little breaks,” Coxon allows, “where we’d go and stay with friends for a few days, but with children, so just as hectic, not particularly relaxing. Although,” he insists hurriedly, fearful of being undiplomatic, “really nice.”
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