IT was December 2020 when Rose Elinor Dougall suggested she and Graham Coxon should write a song together, ostensibly for her fourth solo album. They’d met only briefly since Dougall was a Pipette and, huddling for a smoke outside a socially distanced benefit for victims of that summer’s Beirut warehouse explosion, they had little idea that within two years they’d make their first album together, even less a baby.
Under normal circumstances, this brief encounter might have led nowhere, but, with another lockdown looming, time was in generous supply, and both were at a crossroads, personally and creatively. They began exchanging messages, testing each other’s musical boundaries, and, with common ground established, convened a month later amid the pandemic’s renewed desolation, beginning their collaboration soon afterwards. It took mere weeks…
