Supergrass were the most buoyant of Britpop bands, three cheeky scamps from Oxford whose classic 1995 debut album I Should Coco combined 60s pop melodicism, frenetic garage-punk and indie anthems. After this initial fuzzy burst, their records became more explorative and grown-up, their songs veering from big summery singalongs (Going Out, Alright, Pumping On Your Stereo, Grace, Diamond Hoo Ha Men, Moving (well, the chorus anyway)) to Kinks-y ballads (Late In The Day, When I Needed You, St. Petersburg, Moving (well, the verse anyway)) to glammy guitar-pop (Rush Hour Soul, Bad Blood, Cheapskate, Seen The Light). Whatever sound they made, though, you knew you were going to have a good time with Supergrass, their songs steeped in a sort of joyous recklessness that will no doubt be the ecstatic vibe when they tour in support of I Should Coco’s 30th anniversary in a few months.
But there was a time when the spark went out for Gaz Coombes, Danny Goffey, Mick Quinn and Gaz’s keyboardist brother Rob. In the wake of their 2008 sixth studio album Diamond Hoo Ha Men, a return to up’n’at’em rock’n’roll after the introspective Road To Rouen, the quartet got to work on a record that was to-be-titled Release The Drones. It would’ve represented a fresh start of sorts for the band, with a new record deal in the pipeline after they’d parted ways with their long-term label Parlophone. But, despite being close to completion, Release The Drones was never finished and remains on a shelf somewhere. Instead, Supergrass announced they were splitting up and, after a farewell tour in 2010, that’s exactly what they did (until reuniting nine years later, of course).
Speaking to this writer in 2019, the core trio of Gaz, Goffey and Quinn recalled how what was meant to be their seventh album ended up with them going their separate ways.
“Diamond Hoo Ha Men had gone well with Nick Launay producing over in Berlin, it was fun, plenty of ideas, fresh ideas,” said Coombes. “Then it gets round to that cycle, comes to conception time and the initial song ideas weren’t really happening. A lot of that demoing, writing period, we’d go to each other’s houses a bit, down to Danny’s a few times to start writing. It’s not unusual for it to be a bit slow, Life On Other Planets [their 2002 album] was like that, I remember going round loads of different houses through Europe where we’d stay for four days, come back home then fly out somewhere else the next week, and come back with shit loads of minidiscs full of nonsense, weird comedy songs, loads of lot then every tenth track this little gem, so not unusual to get a bit slow on the writing period.”
But this occasion felt different, explained Coombes. “I remember at the time feeling uninspired.” Over a number of weeks, the group got around a dozen song ideas in shape in advance of entering the studio but it was a bit of a hit-and-hope situation, Coombes recalled. “I was hoping it would be a bit like [1997’s] In It For The Money, where we’d go in and write in there and things would happen.” A good half of In It For The Money was written as the band were making it, Coombes remembered. But not this time. “I sensed a bit of boredom with the set-up, people trying to go on other instruments a lot, that’s how I interpreted it,” he said. “We weren’t really playing to our strengths.”
The band were working at Ridge Farm Studios, a residential recording complex in Surrey, and Coombes said the experience couldn’t have been more marked from how he felt going away to make an album on previous occasions. “I remember waking up in the morning where it’s so exciting, a bit like birthday or Christmas morning, cos you know you’re gonna wake up and see the boys and it’s such a brilliant feeling where you feel so lucky to do what you do when you get that buzz,” he said. “I was waking up at Ridge Farm thinking, ‘What’s going to happen today? What are we gonna do? I didn’t like that idea yesterday…’, there wasn’t a connection.”
Bassist Mick Quinn remembered the atmosphere in the studio getting worse and worse. “The music was still quite interesting,” he vouched. “I did invest a lot in that music but inter-personally it wasn’t working well. We were moving in different directions musically, we weren’t writing stuff that was lighting each other up. That’s when it started going badly.”
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Quinn said some of the tension might have been down to him wanting to push the band into new areas. “We’d moved away from why we wanted to make the music, or what we wanted out of the music,” he stated. “For me, making those albums is to explore areas we haven’t sone before and not repeat what we’ve done. Maybe other members of the band felt we’d been too experimental and needed to rein it in. I’ve got more of a deathwish than that.”
When drummer Goffey thought back to that period of turmoil, his mind was immediately cast to a strange collection of doodles he’d recently come across. “I’ve got a notepad at home where I was doing lyrics and ideas around that session,” he said. “I looked at it the other day and it’s got loads of pages of really angry cartoons, like Tim Burton-style weird monsters and knives and shit. I looked at them and thought, ‘Fuck, I must have beben in a really not happy place…’.”
Goffey wondered if they might have found a way out of this turbulent period in the modern era. “What’s interesting nowadays,” he ventured, “is you’ve got WhatsApp groups and these platforms. We never really had that. We’d turn up and have a meeting before the album and some emails but the world feels a lot more democratic and organised and structured and it’s because everyone can talk more on platforms.”
But Supergrass did not have a WhatsApp group in 2009, just had a load of bottled-up frustration that the magical alchemy between them, the thing that made them such a special band, had somehow evaporated. It was Coombes who first considered the thought that this might be terminal.
“We’d started recording and you’d take CDs away with you on your journey home,” he recalled. “It was the first time I’d never played them to anyone, which was weird. There’s always an excitement, getting back from a session, whether it was on cassette, calling round to a mate or playing it to Jools.”
Jools, Coombes’ wife, picked up on the vibe that something wasn’t right, he said. “Totally. I just didn’t want to play them to anyone. I was trying to be optimistic thinking that they weren’t ready, but I just wasn’t digging it. I just felt quite sad about it really. I thought it was a really strange feeling, not wanting to play stuff to people, and I hated that feeling.”
Next came a disastrous playback session with a new label the band were looking to go with. “We went to Battery studios in London, played them two or three tracks,” Coombes winced. “I was sitting there listening to them thinking, ‘These aren’t very good’, and the guys were very flat after we played them to them. It just felt horrible and demoralising. There was a couple of moments that were cool on the Drones stuff so it wasn’t completely disastrous but there were moments that I found really tough.”
Coombes thinks back to trying to be constructive and move forward, being open with his bandmates and trying to get the record finishing before he realised he couldn’t go on. “It got to the point where I didn’t want to go in,” he said. “It was painful. I didn’t see a way out apart from leaving the band.”
And so, the effervescent, ever-jubilant band who’d made Caught By The Fuzz and Alright and Sun Hits The Sky, proper cloud-busters of songs, had reached a mundane end of the road. “I just needed to get my head sorted out and feel good,” Coombes continued. “I knew it was a big thing to do, because we were fully operating at that point, touring every year, doing festivals, it’s a big income financially, I knew I was stopping everything. I just knew that I had to for my headspace, I didn’t want to feel that low and uninspired, I was used to having ideas and doing things and working fast, travelling in a visceral way through life. I know I was always a bit of a space cadet as well but vibe and moments are really important to me. I can dive in and get all detailed but what I feel in that moment is really key to me and affects me a lot.”
Looking back at the making for Release The Drones now and those torturous sessions feel like a nasty but necessary step. Coombes has gone to make some masterful solo records, Goffey has made a couple of fine efforts too and Quinn went on to follow his experimental side working with Swervedriver. For Supergrass, going away meant they could come back again – their initial 2019 reunion was elongated because of Covid and they’re back for a second time this year. Those I Should Coco shows will feel extra special in a way they might not have had the band kept ploughing on.
But there still hasn’t been any new material, Coombes sticking to his stance when speaking to me back in 2019. “I don’t want to rule out anything but that’s not part of it, no,” he said. Instead, they get to celebrate the past without any of the here and now getting in the way. Maybe one day, they’ll revisit the material from Release The Drones and decide some of it should be heard. But perhaps they need a few more years’ distance first.
