Music

Supergrass: ‘We’ve always been about manic energy’


In a way, it’s incredible that Supergrass lasted as long as they did. That they survived the mania of Britpop having bounced into mainstream consciousness fully formed in 1995, with the three of them trolleying around on a bed in that video, young and free, their teeth nice and clean. Where Alright became an era-defining anthem as much as a career-bothering albatross that they later hated playing, they triumphed with the punky, eccentric immediacy of I Should Coco. It became Parlophone Records’ bestselling debut album since the Beatles’ Please Please Me.

The bare basics of what happened next could be taken as rock’n’roll textbook: drugs, chaos, a bonkers offer from Hollywood (Steven Spielberg, very seriously wanting to make a TV show with them) and five more albums released to diminishing commercial returns, despite at least three of them (In It for the Money; Supergrass; Road to Rouen) being consistently great.

For a period, drummer Danny Goffey’s marriage to the fashion designer Pearl Lowe and proximity to the so-called Primrose Hill set of the late 90s made him a tabloid target, and at their peak, Supergrass were playing Wembley Arena-sized shows. Nonetheless, they combusted making their seventh album – an experience so fraught they called it quits via email and the entire recording was scrapped.

And so 25 years since they released I Should Coco, and 10 years since they split up, it’s a genuine kick to see Gaz and Rob Coombes, Danny Goffey and Mick Quinn sitting in a dressing room at the Paradiso in Amsterdam, hoping to reignite a live chemistry they first stumbled on when at least of two of them were still teenagers.

Watch the video for Alright by Supergrass.

Goffey has a stomach bug; it was his birthday the night before. Inexplicably, he’s turned 46 despite very much still retaining the silhouette and silliness of his much younger self. “I’m sorry if I’m a bit subdued,” he says politely, elegantly slumped on an armchair. “I didn’t even drink that much last night.”

It is perhaps inevitable but no less compelling that Supergrass have reformed for a run of anniversary live shows; they have been opening the gigs, tongue in cheek, with In It for the Money. The band have strictly sworn off making any more new music together (for now, anyway) but watching them play over two nights and jigsaw around one another afterwards, I can well believe that they’re up for the sheer craic of simply doing all this together again.

“It was being in the studio that broke us,” says Gaz the next day. “For me it was almost like post-traumatic stress – why would you want to revisit a place where one feels it was at its worst? Supergrass has always been about manic energy. The essence of playing live is where it really works.”

Gaz has had a significant solo career, playing headline shows at London Palladium, but says the timing “felt right” to revisit this particular time capsule. “I’m really aware that when we’re on the stage and when we’re hanging out in the dressing room and after the gigs, that’s where we were always really good, and really tight together, right to the end.”

For all that Britpop has become the most painfully over-analysed moment in recent musical history, few bands made it through the period without walkouts, breakups and extended hiatuses. What do Supergrass make of its legacy now?

“I saw more of it because I was living in London at the time,” says Goffey, who moved to Somerset with Lowe and their three children in 2008. “I went out with a few of the more dodgy bands for a period and saw the trends go in Camden Town and all that stuff.” He affects a strut and snaps at his jacket lapels. “There were all these bands you’d never heard of going round in their little leather jackets. We always politely tried to go ‘Ahem, we’re not really involved with that.’”

Supergrass – left to right, Danny Goffey, Gaz Coombes and Mickey Quinn – photographed in 1995 at the height of their Britpop fame



Supergrass – (l-r) Danny Goffey, Gaz Coombes and Mickey Quinn – photographed in 1995 at the height of their Britpop fame. Photograph: Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images

“It was a big movement,” says Quinn softly, sunglasses on. “It was the first time guitars were in the top 10 since, I don’t know, the early 80s.” We spend the next five minutes debating whether that’s true and whether Suede really did kick off the whole thing (Goffey), or whether the Stone Roses had an overlooked part to play in it all (Quinn). Later, Gaz will marvel at how much of it was “just absolute bollocks, a lot of it media-led. In your teens and 20s you’re going to say and do stupid things, and when you’re that young you don’t think of the bigger picture. You arrive, you get plied with champagne and whatever else is around, and you just lose that cool. Across all the art forms in the 90s … it was a strange period.”

Still, it’s surprising that Supergrass managed to outlast so many of their peers and endure as friends that can still hang out, riffing back and forth. Between their first and fifth albums, each of the band became fathers (Danny at 21, Mick at 24 and Gaz at 27); they officially added Rob (Coombes’s older astrophysicist brother) as a member in 2002; Gaz and Rob lost their mum, and Gaz moved from Brighton back to the family home in Oxfordshire; and Goffey developed and kicked a heroin addiction.

“It’s not like [the friendship] fully disappeared over the last decade and that we never saw each other again,” says Gaz. “There was always something going on, some reissues and then weddings and birthdays and things,” adds Goffey. “I just wish I had kept a diary because I can’t remember jack shit about most of it.”

Watching them sell out over two nights, it’s a relief to see that they are on monstrous form. The last time I saw (and interviewed) Supergrass was as a student in the mid-00s, when my fandom was all-consuming. It was around this time that Gaz joked “we realise we’ve always been Britain’s fifth-favourite band”, a line that sticks watching them play, as it seems they never really got their due.

At the bar, two Dutch fans tell me they can’t get over “how many good songs they do”, while one keen bloke invades the stage after several aborted attempts at crowd-surfing the moshpit. The hits (so many hits! You’ll have forgotten how many) are cut with underrated gems – She’s So Loose, Mary, Late in the Day – while Alright is introduced as “a B-side not that many people have heard of”.

On the second night, giddiness descends backstage. Friends have arrived from England, including Pearl Lowe, Goffey’s brother Nic and his directing partner Dom Hawley (the two of them have been behind almost every wonderfully daft Supergrass music video). A belated birthday cake is presented to Goffey and the band’s rider of booze is hit with full force.

Gaz tells me about the time he was driving from Paris to Rouen in his nippy new BMW when headlights began flashing behind him. “We’d left the session for the day to stock up” – on weed for the recording of Supergrass’s fifth album – “and I was an hour away from Normandy, and I was just driving too fast or a bit silly, when this nutter French driver started chasing me.” They played cat and mouse for a few minutes. Gaz drove faster, then slowed down and opened his window. “I thought, ‘What is this? What is he doing?’, so I put my arm out telling him to fuck off. And that’s when the blue lights went on. Which was out of order really.”

Supergrass in concert at Paradiso, Amsterdam, February 2020



In concert at Paradiso, Amsterdam, February 2020. Photograph: Nick Helderman for the Observer

Of course, it wasn’t the first time Gaz was caught by the fuzz: the story of his arrest at 15 for possession of cannabis went on to become a song that sealed Supergrass’s reputation as a band built on effervescent youth, idiot drama and brilliant tunes.

Back in the car, Rob was in the passenger seat in a panic about all the drugs stashed under the seat. “I was thinking, ‘Should I eat all this grass? Am I going to die… should I just ingest it?”

Goffey starts giggling. “Do you really want all this in the Observer?” Gaz shrugs, eyebrow cocked. “It’s just stuff that happened! Anyway, I kept apologising to this officer, going ‘I’m so sorry, I’m soooo stupid, man, I’m just a stupid English idiot. Here, kick my ass!’ And they let us go.”

It’s a standard Supergrass story. Like the time they were recording in a studio on a farm and gleefully headed for a relaxing swim in the indoor pool only to find it filled with dead animals. Or when they took acid in the American desert and then had to record a segment on BBC pop programme The O-Zone.

“That got a bit heavy,” says Gaz. “The guy from Blind Melon, he was really lovely, he gave us the acid…”

Goffey picks up the thread. “We took it a couple of days later, and as we were coming up we got the call that, unfortunately, the guy from Blind Melon had passed away.” Gaz shakes his head. “We had to record this thing for TV with Jamie Theakston. They’d spent all this money coming over to America and we couldn’t even talk properly.”

“And that story is called Dead Man’s Acid,” says Goffey solemnly. “God rest his soul.”

The band’s children are now about the same age as Gaz and Goffey were when they first started a band at 14 and 17, but none of them can imagine their kids packing into a Transit van to tour the country. Gaz’s younger daughter goes to the same school he did. “She’s 11 and she’s trying to navigate it a bit, with people making a lot of comments,” he says.

“What, negative?” asks Goffey, incredulous.

“No, more, I don’t know, ‘Is your dad famous?’”

Goffey laughs. “Tell them we weren’t in Britpop!” he jokes. “Actually, my oldest kid just signed a publishing deal and is in his own band. He doesn’t care what I do! Occasionally he’ll put on something from Coco and be like, ‘Fucking hell, you lot were fucking bonkers, why do you play so fast?’”

Someone, although it never becomes clear who, has booked a suite at Amsterdam’s Soho House for an impromptu predawn portion of the afterparty, at which Gaz and Quinn sit in a corner chatting sweetly about their decades of friendship. They unpick knots and let loose with stories of their favourite tours and star-struck encounters. Both loved meeting David Bowie (he asked them to play his Meltdown festival in 2002; Gaz does a spot-on impression of their 30-second chat) and Robert Smith.

“I’m not very good at staying in touch with people,” says Gaz. “Danny will come back and say ‘I had dinner with Keith Richards last night!’, but I never really did that.” If Goffey is the social butterfly, Quinn more an introvert, and Coombes the elder more philosophical, where does Gaz see himself?

“I don’t know. I think I just float. I enjoy people, I love getting into whatever’s happening. But I think I’ve grown a lot over the last 10 years since I left the band. It was an opportunity for all of us. We’ve all grown up a bit.”

Supergrass: The Strange Ones 1994-2008 (BMG) is out now and they are currently on tour, see supergrass.com



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