FEATURE:
Going Out
Supergrass' In It for the Money at Twenty-Five: The Jubilance, Musicianship and Diversity
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APRIL is packed with…
PHOTO CREDIT: Gie Knaeps/Getty Images
important album anniversary. Supergrass released their second studio album, In It for the Money, on 21st April. Following the amazing I Should Coco (which contained Alright), I think they strengthened on In It for the Money. This is my favourite album from them. In terms of the confidence, you can feel that they are hitting a real stride. As I do with album anniversary features, I am going to combine some features and reviews. When it arrived in 1997, Britpop was still going, but many of the bands who cemented and defined the movement had moved on. Supergrass were part of Britpop, and I think they retained some of the Britpop sound on In It for the Money. Their second album is broader and grittier than that. Songs like Richard III and Late in the Day are polar opposites. Hollow Little Reign and Sometimes I Make You Sad are brilliant album closers. Great deep cuts that are almost as strong as the singles, we have Sun Hits the Sky, Richard III, Cheapskate and Late in the Day. My favourite song is the incredible Going Out. It is the moment Gaz Coombes, Danny Goffey Mick Quinn and Rob Coombes at their coolest, most swinging and infectious! A lot of bands who put out albums in 1994 and 1995 took a different direction by 1997. The same is true of Supergrass. Maybe darker and edgier in places, those expecting something exactly like I Should Coco were disappointed. Though few were!
This was the band maturing and showing the full extent of their talents. There are a couple of articles that offer interesting perspective on the mighty In It for the Money. Loud and Quiet explored the album on its twentieth anniversary in 2017:
“So when ‘In It For The Money’ arrived twenty years ago today, it was slightly bamboozling: a band known for their lightheartedness had returned with what, from a certain angle, appeared to be a rather serious second album – thoughtful, expansive and gently melancholic, with distinctly fewer barrelling japes. If ‘I Should Coco’ was giddy with youth, ‘In It For The Money’ was the sound of growing pains, and two months after Blur had re-emerged with ‘Beetlebum’, it seemed Supergrass were keen to ensure that Damon Albarn et al didn’t have the monopoly on Britpop bands testing out more mature territory in 1997.
That said, ‘In It For The Money’ doesn’t represent a personality transplant in the vein of ‘Blur’. There are still the blaring horn riffs, sticky key changes and pop-punk passages that made ‘I Should Coco’ so loveable, and thankfully so – after all, one of pop’s most tiresome tropes is a once-playful band suddenly requesting decorum. Alongside that existing template, though, the band added colour, calm and a gentle complexity, but crucially never in a splashy way. Indeed, perhaps the album’s finest characteristic is exactly that modesty: songs like ‘Cheapskate’, ‘Sun Hits The Sky’ and the raucously enduring ‘Richard III’ are marked progressions in Supergrass’ songwriting and playing – there’s an extra chord investigated here, a neat prog-influenced flourish there – but it’s never presented remotely triumphantly. It all makes for a record of progress rather than reboot, which rather magically combines all the fun of their melodic guitar pop with a more composed joy of witnessing a maturation.
And nowhere on ‘In It For The Money’ is that spirit best encapsulated than on the gloriously resigned ‘Late In The Day’. The stripped-back first verse, sly extra half-bar in the bridge, the back-to-back solos – it all adds up to a sense of expanded imagination, of a gravity without earnestness. And then, as if to remind everyone that despite the solemnity this is still Supergrass, the attendant video – initially a piss-take of Oasis’ ‘Wonderwall’ promo that descends into footage of the band larking about on pogo sticks – dodges any accusations of pomposity quite gleefully.
Nonetheless, it’s clear from ‘In It For The Money’ that three years being thumbs-up cheeky-chappy Supergrass was taking its toll, and lyrically, escape was on the brain: “Here I see a time to go and leave it all behind,” runs the album’s opening overture. The very next song sees Gaz Coombes yelling to himself, “I know you wanna try and get away, but it’s the hardest thing you’ll ever know”, and ‘It’s Not Me’ confesses that, “as everyone listened my head turned away”.
Even if there was not an instant anthem like Alright on In It for the Money, there is greater musicality and depth. A more adventurous album, In It for the Money is a defining moment from the Oxford band. Guitar.com revisited Supergrass’ second album in 2020:
“Yet the big shift between In It For The Money and its predecessor lies in how much the band upped the ante in terms of production and musicianship in the few years between writing the songs. While the second record lacks a timeless pop single like Alright in among its 12 tracks, what it offers instead feels like witnessing The Beatles’ musical transformation on fast-forward.
Going Out, the first single, was released almost a year before the album, in February 1996. Opening with a catchy 60s fairground-organ riff, it was a genie let out of the bottle: a great Townshend-esque guitar riff driven by Goffey’s pugilistic drums, its brief respite of a horn and piano section, its jam-session climax fading gradually into extended tremolo and ending with a guitar jack being pulled out, here was a taster of the experimentation to come.
They’re in it for the music…
The rest of the album, recorded in the sequestered setting of Cornwall’s riverside Sawmill Studios with engineer John Cornfield, continues the hyperactive burst of creativity and energy hinted at by that amazing single. With swerves at every turn, it weaves in a record collection’s worth of references and telling touches that disappear in a flash.
PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Natkin/Getty Images
The title track sets the tone with a series of builds and releases that pack in menacing Happiness Is A Warm Gun-esque descending arpeggios, retro vocal harmonies, brass lines and a wall of OTT distortion and organ sound, topped off with an abrupt shrug of an ending. Next up is the rampaging Stooges stomp of Richard III, as magnificently manic as anything on I Should Coco but with just enough melody in the basslines to sweeten the dissonance in the furious guitar parts, which flit from octaves to wah lead lines to soothing hammered-on sus4 chords in the blink of an eye. There’s also a Theremin solo that you didn’t know you needed.
The rocky shuffle of Tonight flits expertly between distorted wall-of-sound rock guitar and brass flourishes, before the album’s musical high point, the majestic Late In The Day, takes the spotlight. The fade-in of a late-night Neil Young-flavoured strummed acoustic intro with major seventh chords smoothly gear-shifts into a harmony-laden 60s-pop jaunt worthy of the Kinks, before the middle section’s Moog solo foreshadows a mighty guitar solo with expressive unison bends – it’s pure melody, through a distorted lens.
Elsewhere, G-Song offers a downtempo, Blur-like psychedelic foray with a bombastic guitar solo tricked up with feedback, whammy bar, sustaining notes, harmony guitar, unison bends and tongue-in-cheek attitude. Sun Hits The Sky condenses around seven songs into its five minutes, happily smashing together ominous indie-rock chords and AC/DC-esque breakdowns with a wacky prog-rock-parody keyboard solo and a bongo outro.
Sonic juxtapositions like these make perfect sense on In It For The Money. It’s Not Me punctuates tender acoustic guitars with filtered synth bass and Cheapskate melds funk with backwards-reverb vocals and busy Paperback Writer-esque riffs, but the underlying sense of humour means none of it seems jarring or try-hard”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Rasic/Getty Images
It is worth collating a coupe of reviews for the supreme In It for the Money. AllMusic highlighted the textured nature of an album that nods back to their debut at various moments:
“Supergrass' debut album, I Should Coco, rushed by at such a blinding speed that some listeners didn't notice the melodic complexity of its best songs. On their second album, the cleverly titled In It for the Money, the band brings the songs to the forefront, slowing the tempos considerably and constructing a varied, textured record that makes their ambition and skill abundantly clear. From the droning mantra of the opening title track, it's apparent that the band has delved deeply into psychedelia; hints of Magical Mystery Tour are evident throughout the album, from swirling organs and gurgling wah-wahs to punchy horn charts and human beatboxes. Supergrass substitute such sonic details for I Should Coco's punky rush, and while that means the band only occasionally touches upon the breakneck pace of their debut (the hard-driving "Richard III"), it also deepens their joyful exuberance with subtle songs and remarkably accomplished musicianship. There might not be a "Caught by the Fuzz" or "Alright" on In It for the Money, but that's not a problem, since the bright explosion of "Sun Hits the Sky" and the nervy "Tonight" are just as energetic, and the album features introspective numbers like the gorgeous "Late in the Day" and "It's Not Me" that give it substantial weight. Even with all this musical maturity, Supergrass haven't sacrificed their good-natured humor, as proven by the detailed production and the bizarre closer, "Sometimes I Make You Sad." Sometimes, maturity turns out to be everything it's supposed to be”.
Finally, I want to quote from Pitchfork’s review of Supergrass’ In It for the Money. They reviewed the Remastered Expanded Edition last year. Despite some minor reservations, they do praise and admire the studio-born songs and the sense of confidence the band had when making their 1997 classic:
“Indulgence can be its own reward. Take In It for the Money, the wild, careening sophomore set from Supergrass. Flush with success and fresh out of adolescence, the Britpop trio embraced all the new adventures heading their way, a journey that steadily pulled them away from the frenzied pleasures of their 1995 debut I Should Coco. Where their peers sang of common people and wonderwalls, Supergrass concerned themselves with teenage thrills: buzzing on speed, getting busted by cops, telling dirty jokes, and hanging out with friends. At the center of the album was the smash hit “Alright,” an incandescent pop song about being young, dumb, and free. Other bands might have chased the charts by attempting to re-create the spirit of “Alright.” Supergrass instead chose to see how fast and far they could run.
In It for the Money isn’t so much a departure from I Should Coco as a progression. Often, it feels as if Supergrass are attempting to offer a crash course in the history of British rock, cramming in elements borrowed from the swinging 1960s and 1970s classic rock, then filtering these well-known sounds through the irreverence of punk. They still sound vigorous—witness the rampaging single “Richard III”—but they lack the exuberance that fueled their first album. The shift was necessary for their long-term survival. “Alright” threatened to pigeonhole Supergrass as loveable teenage imps, a role they played to the hilt in the song’s supremely silly video. (They played their part so well that Steven Spielberg believed Supergrass would be ideal candidates for a gen-X spin on the Monkees.)
Supergrass turned down Spielberg, choosing instead to do the things normal rock’n’roll bands do: play an enormous amount of shows before hunkering down in the studio to make another record. It helped that Supergrass had arrived just as the Britpop wave crested, its rising tide not only lifting the shaggy group into the Top Ten but putting them squarely within a happening scene. They shared space on charts and festival bills with the amiably straightforward likes of Cast, Sleeper, the Bluetones, and Ash, yet they were qualitatively different, possessing punk-pop smarts to rival Elastica, a brawnier musicality than Oasis, and a self-evident sense of humor.
All of this comes to a head on In It for the Money, an album where the riffs and jokes are wrapped in woolly psychedelia, blaring horns, and splashes of sweet melancholy. Where I Should Coco blew by at a breakneck pace, In It for the Money unfolds with a deliberate sense of drama, slowly coming into focus with the menacing swirl of the title track and proceeding to ebb and flow across its 12 songs. The record feels so unified that it’s remarkable to realize they entered the studio in 1996 with only two completed songs in tow, forcing them to write the bulk of the album during the recording sessions. Along for the ride was Rob Coombes, a keyboardist who was the brother of Supergrass frontman Gaz. He’d been on the band’s periphery for a while, hammering out the piano to “Alright” and playing woozy organ on “Going Out,” the stopgap 1996 single Supergrass released between their first and second albums, but he’s an integral part of In It for the Money, earning writing credits on all 12 songs and adding distinctive color throughout. (Rob Coombes would officially become a member of Supergrass in 2002.)
Listen closely—or spend some time with the clutch of monitor mixes and rough versions that fill the second disc of the new 3xCD deluxe reissue of the 1997 album—and it’s apparent that Supergrass did indeed write In It for the Money in the studio. Many of the songs are rooted in vamps that blossom into full songs: The slinky funk that propels the verses of “Cheapskate,” the circular stomp on “G-Song,” the lazy, shambling gait of “Hollow Little Reign” all bear telltale signs of compositions that began as group jams. None of these songs sound tossed off, though, littered as they are with overdubs, backwards guitars, and sound effects. Supergrass couldn’t resist any bit of studio trickery when they were making In It for the Money, yet they retained their sense of concise craft. The record feels vibrant, not overstuffed.
The triple-disc reissue of In It for the Money can dampen some of the album’s energy. Some fine B-sides, such as the tuneful neo-music-hall ramble “Melanie Davis,” are buried among the alternate mixes and working versions on the second disc, a collection of ephemera that plays better as individual tracks than as an album. The disc of live recordings is another story. Anchored by a full show from January 1998, a concert given nearly a year after the release of In It for the Money, the live disc shows Supergrass at full roar, turning these studio creations into breakneck rockers.
The title of In It for the Money is a nod toward Frank Zappa’s anti-hippie classic We’re Only In It for the Money. Supergrass may not sound anything like the Mothers of Invention, but their choice reflects the extent to which they were steeped in rock history. Supergrass never attempted to be innovators. They were magpies who busied themselves with figuring out how to assemble pieces of glam, psychedelia, punk, and pop in fresh, surprising ways. They would continue to hone their craft, making sleeker albums than In It for the Money, yet the group’s enthusiasm and imagination are at a peak here. They sound delighted to discover their full potential, and that giddiness remains infectious decades later”.
On 21st April, so many people will mark and celebrate a remarkable album. It came out when I was thirteen, and I was instantly and affectionately struck by the album. I followed Supergrass since then and still love them to this day! Whilst they released other incredible albums, I feel their finest moment is In It for the Money. It came out almost twenty-five years ago, but it still has the ability to surprise and offer up its multiple rewards. From its big hits to those deeper cuts, In It for the Money is…
IN a league of its own.