When they emerged in the mid-90s, Supergrass were the most effervescent of British guitar bands. The Oxford trio (and later quartet) were stacked to the pearly whites with fizzy, playful indie anthems. Their music was 60s pop in a punk hurry, a hurtling rush of indelible anthems being played like someone was about to call last orders. Perhaps that’s because that’s how guitarist and vocalist Gaz Coombes, bassist Mick Quinn and drummer Danny Goffey actually wrote many of their early songs, bouncing mischievously from pub to party to pub on the outskirts of Oxford, making up songs about the characters they would encounter, songs that within a year or two would become huge, era-defining hits.
“A few were written just on our way out to the pub in the village, picking up an acoustic as we were going out the door. They all came about like that, without trying to force the issue,” Coombes told this writer a few years ago. “We weren’t trying to think, ‘We’re gonna be this incredible band…’, we were in our own little mad world writing mad songs.”
