It’s pretty hard not to love Graham Coxon. As Blur pick up their Outstanding Contribution Brit and prepare to headline the mammoth closing gig for the entire bleedin’ Olympics, here he is with an album packed full of krautrock thrums, yelps of disenchantment and a track called ‘Meet + Drink + Pollinate’. You can almost hear the Transatlantic sighs of confusion. But, whilst Coxon’s solo output – from the itchy thrashes of 2000’s ‘The Golden D’ to most recent, acoustic effort ‘The Spinning Top’ – has always resolutely trodden its own track, ‘A+E’ goes some way to tying all the ends together. From the giddy guitar thrills of ‘Running For Your Life’ to the prickly soundscapes of ‘City Hall’; the social alienation riddled throughout the aforementioned ‘Meet + Drink + Pollinate’ to ‘Knife In The Cast’s murky bassline and lost-sounding vocal – these are songs that flinch as much as they fight, that veer wildly into strange territories but never overindulge and that, essentially, draw all of the best bits from Coxon’s weird and wonderful arsenal into one inimitable package. Then, just as we think we’ve got him sussed, we get ‘What’ll It Take’ – a whirl of samples and a mighty leap from anything he’s tried before. Contrary so and so.