Supergrass brings the strange ones back together in Boston
By NICK TAVARES
STATIC and FEEDBACK Editor
I love those moments frozen in time. Standing on the floor of a club, watching as the band walks on stage, guitars are strapped on and they immediately blast off:
“I’d like to know where all the strange ones go!”
Here they were, and here we are, back in the room. Supergrass were in Boston for the final night of their tour, celebrating 30 years since the release of I Should Coco, which first thrust them into the spotlight while Britpop was at its peak in the United Kingdom.
And nearly 20 years since I last caught them live, and 30 since their debut, Gaz Coombes’ voice still sounds incredible, Mick Quinn’s bass is rumbling and jumping and Danny Goffey remains a brilliant menace behind the kit.
Thirty years is a long time, but the ferocity they still held after all these years and at the end of a long tour was not to be missed. They were clearly having fun bouncing in and out of the songs, laughing when guitar straps went AWOL or tunings might have gone briefly awry. But mostly, they looked like overgrown kids up there, literally performing in the shadow of the album that launched them.
Playing their debut album gave the band an opportunity to stretch out a bit on songs they would’ve normally bypassed, giving Goffey the chance to step in on bass on “We’re Not Supposed To” (and sung by Gaz in a normal key — a change from the sped-up version on the record).
In a move that was certainly appreciated here, they didn’t just run through I Should Coco front-to-back as quickly as possible, before winding up the night and the tour with a few scattered hits from the later records. They broke it up, shuffled it a bit and inserted some of those catalog gems throughout, allowing them to close the main set appropriately with “Time to Go.” While I’m not crazy about the gimmick of when a band advertises that it’ll play this album or that one on a tour, it’s hard to argue with results (I don’t mind it when a band plays a full record by surprise, mind you). Hearing all those songs sung so brilliantly all these years later was special, and definitely welcome.
And they still managed to hit every record beyond the first on this night. “Late in the Day” was the first break, following up the trio of singles that opens up I Should Coco, and “Diamond Hoo Ha Man” hit that crowd hard. Topping that, even, was the force with which “Richard III” ripped through the set, that climbing riff sounding absolutely evil before being punctuated by the theremin-esque sounds coaxed out of the keyboards by Rob Coombes.
They didn’t settle there, pulling out “St. Petersburg” from their brilliant Road to Rouen and capping the night with “Pumping on Your Stereo,” which the crowd began singing during the extended coda of “Sun Hits the Sky” before the band could even begin the song in earnest.
That illustrated a great sense of appreciation I felt from the crowd. This band went away for so long, only recently reconvening in the wake of the pandemic, and this anniversary gave them a chance to run through the world and say hello to all these folks again, all the ones who stuck with a band that seemed to always be above the drama and just pumped out one incredible album after another, until they stopped.
I’m just glad I got to see them, and that it wasn’t a pure nostalgia trip. They still bring it as well as they did in 1995 or 2005. Here’s to the next trip, around and around until it’s time for all the strange ones to go home.
E-mail Nick Tavares at nick@staticandfeedback.com