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“Can I go to the toilet for this one?” asks Danny Goffey, before standing to attention, flicking up his collar and slamming the door behind him. “I’ve answered that one ten times now today,” he adds, each word getting quieter as he walks down the staircase in search of the rest room. It’s taken twenty minutes for our conversation to touch on the subject of Britpop, and how, over a decade since the movement, and many of its founders, popped, Supergrass have continued to grow into one of Britain’s most treasured bands. “I don’t know,” sighs Gaz Coombes, the band’s frontman, eyeing up his own escape route. As Coombes’ response crumbles in his attempt to come up with an original answer, Mick Quinn, the band’s bassist, puts it simply: “Luck.”
“Maybe luck, yeah,” concedes Coombes, invigorated again. “We’re all close, we’ve been friends for years, me and Bobs (Rob Coombes, the bands keyboardist) are brothers. We’ve had things in the past that have really shaken the band but never enough to destroy it. It’s just life, you get through these things and you come out stronger. I think we’ve come out stronger quite a few times from various situations.” Goffey, now relieved, marches back in and takes his seat again.
As they sit in the elegant confines of a West London pub, Supergrass have their reasons for so flippantly annulling any talk of the past: at the moment, quite refreshingly, it’s all about the now. All now in their thirties and looking surprisingly alert following a whirlwind four-week tour previewing tracks off their sixth studio album, ‘Diamond Hoo Ha’, the only time Coombes, Goffey or Quinn reflect on the past is to make reference to their last album – 2005’s dark and heavily introspective, ‘Road To Rouen’. And then, it’s only because it is hard to ignore the impact that that record has had on their latest.
Indeed, to understand ‘Diamond Hoo Ha’, you have to go back to the tail end of 2004. Following the release of ‘Supergrass Is 10: The Best Of '94-'04’ – a collection of their finest singles since 1994 - Supergrass are in a purpose built facility in France recording their next studio album but something isn’t quite right, or, at least the same as it used to be. For the first time personal issues – the Coombes’ brothers lose their Mother and Goffey, for a multitude of reasons, loses interest – come between the band and making music. Although Goffey admits today that he briefly left the group because he was “finding it hard to control” his personal life with “being really productive in the band”, the group did eventually release, ‘Road To Rouen’. Aptly entitled, it was met with a cautious reception from critics and fans alike because it wasn’t the instantly accessible Supergrass that people had, perhaps naively, come to expect.
I ask whether, in hindsight, ‘Road To Rouen’ was a record that the band needed to make in order to move on. “I don’t think we planned it like that, I think we’d just released a ‘best of’ and I think if we released a record like the one we’ve just made straight after our ‘best of’ then it would seem a bit odd,” says Quinn, before conceding that “with what had gone on in our personal lives”, there was no interest in making ‘Road To Rouen’ a “happy record”.
Coombes has a different take. “I think we were a bit defiant as well at the time,” he says, passionately. “We were a little bit reluctant with the ‘Supergrass Is 10’ CD because it can really quickly display a band as a pop band.” Goffey, joking, interrupts: “Even more reluctant in hindsight that it didn’t sell millions and millions of copies.” Coombes frowns at his band mate before continuing. “Yeah, but my point being that ‘Road To Rouen’ was definitely a little bit of a fuck off in a way, you know. I think we just wanted people to see that our band is more than just a bunch of singles that were quite commercial – because our band is more than that to us.”
At 32 and the father of one daughter, Coombes, who formed Supergrass alongside Goffey and Quinn in 1993, is the staunchest defender against people who suggest that they’ve never managed to re-create the magic of ‘Alright’ and debut single ‘Caught By the Fuzz’. Throughout our conversation, maybe subconsciously, it’s he who raises the ‘issues’ that people have had with the band. “It’s a bit of a running gag really, isn’t it,” he says at one point, with a brave smile, “everyone’s second favourite band.” And again, when talk returns to ‘Road To Rouen’. “Why should we provide that – another album with singles on it – we’d just be a one-dimensional band that just provide one thing.” Does he still find criticism hard to take? “I suppose that’s something that you get more comfortable with as you carry on,” he responds, before his thoughts turn to the current record, “but it’s having belief and confidence and I think the belief in this record is really, really high, and the confidence is flying high – so you just kind of go with it, it feels good.”
Things started to feel this way for Coombes and the rest of Supergrass as they came to the end of touring ‘Road To Rouen’ – a tour that also saw Goffey reinvigorated by music once again. “We changed the whole sort of touring set up, we did stuff that was actually really fun and it kind of mended itself really,” he says, before adding with a smile, “I stopped doing so much cocaine as well.”
It’s not surprising that these positive feelings, including Goffey’s second coming - charted on the track ‘Ghost Of A Friend’ – make up the majority of the lyrical content of ‘Diamond Hoo Ha’. The album was written for the first time in pairs during the opening three months of 2007 and sees the Coombes brothers, Goffey and Quinn recall their shared and personal memories from the previous two years – from the fuzzy magic of a night in Beijing (‘Whisky And Green Tea’) to explosive riots on the usually peaceful streets of Reykjavik (‘Bad Blood’). “We were kind of really flying then, writing a lot in that period,” Goffey enthuses has he discusses the writing phase, which took place at each other’s houses around Oxford. “I think we wrote about sixteen songs to a pretty finished standard of songwriting, which was a really good creative period.” From there they took their work to the Hansa Studios in Berlin and producer Nick Launay, whose previous collaborators include Nick Cave and Arcade Fire. “As soon as we met him we kind of got on with him straight away and I think that we were pretty confident that it was going to work out in the studio,” Coombes reveals. “I think most of the times it’s like you’ve just gotta get lucky with the person and for them to be on your wavelength and have similar sense of humour if anything and he had all that.”
One of Launay’s greatest attributes – as highlighted by his recent Grinderman project with Nick Cave – is the ability to extract the best from each individual. As ‘Ghost Of A Friend’, which features an emphatic Queen-like guitar solo, shows, he was able to do the same with Supergrass. For Coombes, who is the member responsible for that solo, Launay’s ability triggered memories of Sam Williams, who recorded Supergrass’s debut album ‘I Should Coco’, which was released in 1995. “It’s like, you know, we’re all kind of quite capable now obviously and really good with our instruments, but being able to just see something, a part, or the way that someone is performing it, and be able to transform it, and I think that’s really valuable as a producer and he did that really, really well,” he says. “He was quite ruthless in some ways,” adds Quinn. “In a good way.”
Perhaps inevitably for Supergrass, after a prompt three week recording period and summer support slots for the Arctic Monkeys - which, for the first time painted them as the slightly elder statesmen in British music - something had to go wrong. Rather surprisingly however, it came in the shape of Quinn, the group’s eldest and arguably most responsible member, breaking two vertebrae in his back and smashing his heel during a family holiday in France at the end of August. What Quinn thought in the early hours was the entrance to the bathroom actually turned out to be a first floor window. “Weirdly enough I think it all worked out OK,” Coombes says, drawing laughter from Goffey and a painful smile from Quinn, who narrowly avoided paralysis in the incident. “It worked out kind of beautifully,” Goffey adds, with even less sympathy. “Once we knew Mick was going to be alright and was on the way to recovery…” Coombes interrupts him, “We kind of relaxed a bit then in a way, it gave me the chance to give up beer properly actually, it was good.” Confusion suddenly descends across the faces of his band mates.
“What did?” Goffey asks. Before Coombes can answer, Quinn points to an empty pint glass with a stubbed cigarette fizzing at its base. “What about that?” he enquires. “Yeah, that was then though,” Coombes responds, struggling to defend himself. “No that was because you were getting really fat,” jokes Goffey. “Yeah, but then we weren’t touring so I thought actually I don’t need to, I’ll stop drinking lager,” Coombes insists.
Goffey, who still looks gobsmacked, adds, along with all the necessary hand gestures: “When I went round your house…crates of beers.” “I haven’t drunk a beer for weeks and weeks,” Coombes replies.
“What did you drink last night then?” enquires Goffey, still not convinced. “Champagne and Wine,” replies Coombes, after some thought. Goffey falls reluctantly silent.
Joking aside, if every cloud does have a silver lining then the reality is that Quinn’s fall has had an enormous positive impact on Supergrass, most notably in the relationship between Coombes and Goffey. A friendship that existed initially as teenagers in a band called Jennifers, and one that had, Coombes admits, over recent years “lost its thing.” He continues: “I think we lost a bit of what makes us sort of tick together but I think that came back, like Danny was saying, a lot more in touring and as a band, when we got closer again as a band, then me and Danny got a bit closer again.”
The pair have also spent the last few months rekindling their friendship as Randy and Duke - the Diamond Hoo Ha men from Berlin whose travelling circus comes complete with Elvis inspired white jumpsuits. While Quinn has been recovering, they’ve been playing impromptu gigs at inconsiderate hours previewing tracks off Supergrass’s new album. Coombes looks wistful at their mention. “It reminded me loads of when we started out; kind of how everything is really small scale,” he says, smiling at Goffey. I ask him if that was because there was no pressure to supply crowds with singles and no expectation to live up to the billing of Britain’s second favourite band, “Yeah, cause this was a new thing,” he replies, heartedly. “It was a great feeling doing that.”
