I’d like to know where all the strange ones go,” belted out Gaz Coombes on track one side one of Supergrass’s 1995 debut album. In real life, they were all around him. There was Cosmic Bob, ragged denizen of Oxford’s Market Street cafes, with his notebooks full of diagrams proving that humans were secretly alien life forms. Chris and Julie, the travellers camped up at nearby Shotover country park who’d take the band “driving around in cars and f***ing things up” every afternoon for weeks, until they’d played truant enough to get expelled from school. Daryl the band’s ex-army housemate who’d poke his head out of the shower to make lyrical suggestions during writing sessions. Caught by the fuzz, you say? “I was still on a buzz!” a damp-haired Daryl exclaimed.
These were the local outcasts and oddballs who inspired and populated I Should Coco, colourful extras in the background cast of Nineties British pop culture alongside Tracy Jacks (from Blur’s Parklife), Pulp’s Grecian poverty tourist (from “Common People”) and Elsa the Alka-Seltzer addicted dog (from Oasis’s “Supersonic”). But the album track that immortalised them – “Strange Ones” – was as much Supergrass self-portrait as weirdo-based city guide. “We were little hippies, little f***ing street urchins,” says drummer Danny Goffey, joining his bandmates on Zoom from a stately, mirror-festooned lounge. “We didn’t want to walk around town wearing Nike track suits. We’d probably rather wear some strange velour, slightly wizardy outfit because it was just fun to dress up weirdly.”
