In the earliest recordings, Gaz Coombes, on vocals and guitar, does not yet look like somebody about to become one of the most distinctive frontmen of Britain's guitar-driven decade. He is half hidden behind his instrument and slightly combative. The broad voice and nervous movements are already there, but everything else is still falling into place. Charisma did not descend on him with his first record contract. It plainly grew out of playing.
Before there was a frontman
Coombes grew up around Oxford and, as a teenager, played with drummer Danny Goffey in The Jennifers. They knew one another from school, so their first musical experiences contained more youthful need to make noise than any plan for a career. A loud guitar was simply more interesting than a school timetable and, with time, began to organise life far more effectively.
There is no especially useful legend here about a singing teacher who recognised a future vocalist in Gaz. His voice sounds more like the result of playing with people he had to shout over. Goffey was hardly a drummer who treated his kit as decoration. Coombes therefore learnt to carry a melody above the racket without trying to smooth that racket away.
You can hear his musical upbringing in it too. The Beatles and the Kinks could meet dirtier rock, psychedelia and indie without anybody checking whether the combination had been approved. That is precisely why the later Supergrass would be able to leap across several stylistic decades within one song and still sound natural.
A Harvester instead of a founding myth
The beginning of Supergrass is pleasingly down to earth. In the summer of 1993, Gaz worked in the kitchen of a Harvester restaurant where Mick Quinn, bass and vocals, was also employed. Together with Goffey, they began meeting after work to play, at first without grand declarations, and later with an increasingly clear sense that something worth developing had happened between the three of them.
I like that ordinariness. Instead of a story about destiny, there is work, pubs, flats, rehearsals and a few people trying to decide whether a song is good already or needs to be played again from the beginning.
Their ambitions remained very local for quite a while too. An important goal was a show at Oxford's Jericho Tavern, one of the city's key venues. Wembley could safely wait. First, they had to make sure strangers in a small club did not leave after the second song.
This is when Supergrass interest me more than they later would in most summaries of Britpop. They are not yet Blur's younger mates, they are not competing with Oasis and they represent no generation. Three men are trying to find their own way of playing before anybody has time to call it part of a wider phenomenon.
Three people who made one another faster
The first four-track demos were made in flats along Cowley Road. You can hear something in this music that would prove more important to Supergrass than genre itself. Each of them turned the other two up a little.
Goffey could give a song speed even when it had not asked for any. Quinn held everything together without robbing it of spring. Coombes, meanwhile, had a particular gift for finding a melody that survived all the guitar and rhythmic commotion.
That is probably one of the things I like most about Supergrass. Their songs can be packed with ideas, sometimes much too tightly, yet rarely lose contact with melody. The band could make a racket without pretending that catchiness was somehow suspect.
They were not especially interested in choosing between punk, pop and rock. If all three fitted inside four minutes, so much the better.
Sawmills. When it became clear that it worked
The first more serious recordings were made at Sawmills Studios in Cornwall. They financed the session with their own money and recorded six songs in five days. There was no time to spend a month considering the sound of a snare drum, and perhaps that is precisely why they kept something that would later be far harder to produce.
The speed of the musicians' reactions mattered more than the speed of the songs themselves. One of them offered an idea, the second answered it and the third immediately shifted it somewhere else. The music was not created in front of them, but between them.
Supergrass were not a band built around virtuosity. Their advantage lay elsewhere. In the same room, Gaz Coombes, Danny Goffey and Mick Quinn each played a little more boldly than any of them would have played alone.
That is probably where Coombes's stage charisma began too. Not in poses, haircuts or a particular way of holding a microphone. He became most interesting when the music behind him gathered momentum and, instead of trying to control it, he simply moved with it.
A few years later, millions would remember three young men, bicycles and the chorus of Alright above all else. In 1993 there was no image to remember yet. There was a Harvester kitchen, a few flats in Oxford, small clubs and three musicians who were exceptionally good at playing together.
Everything else came later.
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