FEATURE:
Alright
Looking Ahead to the Thirtieth Anniversary of Supergrass’ I Should Coco
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FEW debut albums…
of the 1990s were as successful and impactful than Supergrass’ I Should Coco. Released on 15th May, 1995, I am looking ahead to the thirtieth anniversary. I am not sure whether a vinyl reissue is planned. Supergrass are marking the anniversary with tour dates. I want to get to some reviews and features about the album. On 17th October, 1994, the lead single from the album – and Supergrass’ debut -, Caught By the Fuzz, was released. Most people associate I Should Coco with Alright. The album’s final single was released on 3rd July, 1995. I am surprised the band did not put Alright out earlier. However, dropping in the summer of 1995, it was the perfect time to launch a feelgood and carefree song about youth and living life to the full without stress or responsability. I Should Coco was recorded in Cornwall and produced by Sam Williams. Released during the peak of Britpop when bands like Oasis and Blur were battling it out, I Should Coco became Supergrass’ most successful release when it reached number one on the U.K. album chart. Before getting to reviews of the album, last year, NME spoke with Supergrass’ lead, Gaz Coombes, about the anniversary tour:
“Last week saw the Oxford band announce details of a UK tour for May 2025, playing their 1995 album in full for the first time. Cockney rhyming slang for “I should think so”, ‘I Should Coco’ was released when Coombes was just 19-years-old, and his bandmates drummer Danny Goffey and bassist Mick Quinn not much older.
It featured the huge singles ‘Alright’ and ‘Caught By The Fuzz’, peaked at Number One in the charts, sold over a million sales worldwide, and became the biggest-selling debut album from Parlophone Records since The Beatles’ ‘Please Please Me’.
“Well, I should bloody coco!” Coombes told NME, looking ahead to the shows. “It’s cool, man. It’s been about a year in the making. It’s just such a great record and really means a lot of to us. The great thing about it, is that this record is part of our DNA. It’s mad that 30 years later, we’re still able to pull off that energetic, youthful chemistry on stage and read each other in that way. Although it’s a 30-year-old record, we all feel really connected to it.”
He continued: “It’s going to be exciting to get on stage and do that album as a whole for the first time ever. There are a couple of tracks that we’ve never performed live before, so that’s really cool”.
In 2015, the band’s original trio spoke with The Guardian about the making of and memories of their iconic debut album. Released in one of music’s best years, Supergrass made an instant name for themselves in 1995. Number one in the U.K., I Should Coco was nominated for the 1995 Mercury Prize. Alright won an Ivor Novello for Best Contemporary Song in 1996. The legacy of the album is incredible. It has inspired so many other artists. On 15th May, there will be a lot of celebration and discussion around I Should Coco:
“Mick Quinn, bass
The summer of 1993 is when it all kicked off. I’d dropped out of college and got a job at a Harvester and Gaz started working in the kitchen. We’d get off our shift and then jam for hours with Danny, who had been in a band called the Jennifers with Gaz. We put up the money from our day jobs to go down to Sawmills Studio in Cornwall and did six tracks in five days.
The moment we started playing together, we all started playing better than we had in any other band. Danny is a frenetic drummer but has a brilliant melodic sense; with me being a forthright bass player, we just drove each other on. Gaz is more meticulous. Any comic lyric usually came from Danny, although with Alright, I came up with “keep our teeth nice and clean”. It felt like such a throwaway song, like a toothpaste commercial.
At the beginning, we’d play gigs to 60s bikers who were really into it; by the time we had Alright out, it was OK for mums and dads to like us. Alright became a millstone, creatively speaking. It was difficult to get out from under the shadow. Like with the video: we were happy to go down to Portmeirion, and do a Carry On version of The Prisoner. But then you realise people want that again the next time round.
But I Should Coco is a fantastic record. I had my first daughter about six months before it was released, so I had a lot of hormones hitting me. And it was so exciting to travel. Japan was incredible. It was like A Hard Day’s Night, getting chased down the road by screaming fans.
Danny Goffey, drums
I was at school and got asked to leave. I went to Henley College, and got kicked out of there, too. It might have been an allegation of dope smoking. I tried to start my own babysitting service and I was briefly a dinner lady – it was a good way to meet sixth-form girls by giving them an extra baked potato. Then I was on the dole.That was really fun, very free: waking up late, putting some toast on, grabbing a guitar.
My acoustic guitar invariably had strings missing – Caught By the Fuzz was written just on the first three. I was going over the first line, “Caught by the fuzz …”, trying to come up with another one when our tour manager, Daryl, came out the shower with a towel round his waist and said: “I was still on a buzz!” We honed the songs so they were short and full of energy and life.
We set ourselves little goals. When we were teenagers all we wanted was to play a gig in Oxford at the Jericho Tavern; then you think it would be great to make a video, and record. Our tours started to get bigger, and we went up to Scotland. In Dundee there was this huge surge on to the stage, these kids with no tops on snapping up the wood barrier, pouring pints on the keyboards – a sense of slight mayhem, and that we’d struck a chord with people our age.
When we were recording at Sawmills, we’d try and finish at 10 to get last orders at the Fisherman’s Arms. We were professional, but we still thought: this is a bit of a holiday. There was a thing called Forbidden Rum that we were never allowed to drink. After closing time they used to get it out, and we realised why it was forbidden. I’ve still got a scar down my right eye from walking along the railway line after we left – I slipped, banged heads with someone and fell down the bank to the estuary. I burst into the studio a bit later covered in blood.
Gaz Coombes, vocals and guitar
I was a quiet little 16-year-old. School was uninspiring, and I went just to snog girls and smoke behind the art building. But playing music, I felt like I had something cool to say. When you’re hammering through chords, everything changes – you’ve got a weapon.
When you're out on the road, you come up against dangerous situations. We had this escaped convict on the bus in Texas
The early 90s was an odd time for music. Madchester had been massive and those influences crept in. But the louder we turned up our amps to get over Danny’s drums, the more the sound changed. We were heavily influenced by the Beatles and the Kinks. They had a laidback gravitas, whereas our energy came out in a really fast manic way, but the sensibility was the same: strong melodies you can’t get out of your head.
Before we knew it, we were standing on the famous steps of the EMI building where the Beatles were photographed, signing to Parlophone, the label of our heroes. It was completely insane. Then it was a case of getting back to Sawmills and finishing the record. I Should Coco didn’t sound like anything else that was going on – Oasis sounded like they were on Mogadon compared with it. We soon got lumped in with Britpop though”.
I will finish off with two reviews for I Should Coco. In 2015, The Student Playlist shared their views about the amazing debut album from Supergrass. One of the greatest albums of the 1990s. I remember hearing it when it came out in 1995. It still sounds incredible thirty years later:
“I Should Coco, the first album by Oxford three-piece Supergrass, is not only one of the crown jewels of the Britpop era but is usually thought of as one of the most deliriously fun debuts in pop history. Seriously, without listening to the album, just think of all its joyous moments: ‘Caught By The Fuzz’, ‘Strange Ones’, ‘Mansize Rooster’, and ‘Alright’… and you’re grinning already, aren’t you? Revisited twenty years later, two things stand out on I Should Coco. Firstly, the strength of Gaz Coombes’ pop songwriting abilities, already so sharp at such a young age (the band were barely out of their teens by 1995). Secondly, the shades of dark lingering underneath the album’s surface. Though they dispatch thirteen songs at the kind of breakneck speed that only the energy and impudence of youth can fuel, there’s much more to I Should Coco than the two-dimensionality that such a singular approach might suggest.
It’s an aspect of their songwriting that would be explored in much more detail later on in their career, but we get a really good look at an embryonic version of their darker side on six-minute penultimate track ‘Sofa (Of My Lethargy)’, a hymn of self-beration, and the louche blues of ‘Time’. For the majority of the record, though, Supergrass rarely let cynicism infect their endearingly wide-eyed take on British guitar pop music. For the entire first half of I Should Coco, from the opener ‘I’d Like To Know’ through to its twin song ‘Strange Ones’, Coombes and his bandmates Danny Goffey and Mick Quinn deliver precision-targeted pop missiles. The classic single ‘Caught By The Fuzz’, a story of a naïve youngster in trouble with the police over drugs with its metaphor of the world of responsibility and authority bursting the bubble of innocence and abandon, is one of the album’s two major high points, absolutely fizzing with punk-pop energy.
This delirium continues through the glam-rock stomp of ‘Mansize Rooster’, with its chunky piano power chords, the vaguely grungey ‘Lose It’ and the ‘60s pop throwback ‘Lenny’. After the red herring pianos at the start of side 2, ‘Sitting Up Straight’ picks up the pace once more with a lovingly shambolic punk impression, followed by the daft helium vocals on ‘We’re Not Supposed To’. Coombes’ yearning, minor-key vocals on the otherwise spry ‘She’s So Loose’ are about as downcast as the album gets. After ‘Time’ and the perfectly crafted ‘Sofa (Of My Lethargy)’, the back-to-back duo of laid-back moments mentioned above, we get the sub-2-minute vignette ‘Time To Go’, and that’s it. I Should Coco makes it entrance spectacularly and exits modestly, knowing not to undermine its charm by attempting to finish on a grand arena rock exit.
Without question, the album’s exuberant spirit is epitomised by ‘Alright’, by far the band’s best-known song. The major-minor key shift between bridge and chorus introduces a twinge of melancholia amid the positivity, and it seems to acknowledge the fleeting nature of youth even as it celebrates it. While that may be the standout track for the uninitiated fan, I Should Coco burns with the same spirit more or less throughout. The whole record is accomplished but still has the buzz of being new to the music industry. There’s nothing you could add or take away to make this particular type of debut album better.
In addition to its chart-topping success – the only album of their career to reach to summit of the UK charts – I Should Coco lapped up a great deal of praise by a music press now fully signed up to the concept of Britpop. It is, however, one of the records from this period that still stands up today. The likes of Elastica and Garbage, though they were well-received at the time, somehow don’t shine with the same lustre two decades later. It earned Supergrass a reputation as cartoonish, fun-loving rogues like The Monkees, hit-makers upon whom you could depend to churn out fantastic singles on a conveyor belt. But that reputation unfairly masks the quality of their studio albums, which were every bit as interesting”.
I am going to end with a review from the BBC. If you have never heard I Should Coco then I would advise you to do so. There are no filler tracks to be found. Perfectly arranged to deliver the best listening experience, it is no wonder that is created shockwaves when it came out in 1995. Such an original band who were not messing around when it came to making an impact:
“While the latter-day adventures of Britpop bastions Supergrass have seen appearances at the wrong end of the chart, gory accidents and unfavourable tabloid coverage, 1995 debut I Should Coco has left a deeper and longer-lasting footprint than the band’s legacy overall.
Displaying a shoulder-shrugging joie de vivre normally reserved for that heavenly day when the student loan cheque hits the hall carpet, this guise of Supergrass truly channels the same playfulness peddled so successfully by Madness the previous decade. Yet sadly, this retrospective examination also serves to highlight that few bands even come close to adopting that same energy today. The Kooks and The View may play up to such carefree, youthful ideals, but in the wake of the edge carried by I Should Coco, they sound clumsy, contrived and oafish.
While Alright may have been the initial leg-up required to inaugurate the reign of Supergrass, the downside comes from its notoriety as the definitive Supergrass anthem. A deserving tag, certainly, but later treasures such as Moving, Late in the Day and Pumping On Your Stereo remain in its shadow as a result.
However, within the arena of I Should Coco, it functions exceptionally well. Its recognisable blend of cordial and crazy sits comfortably as part of a mezze of eccentric oddities. A hugely diverse collection, its charms lie in its unpredictability, with the only consistent factor being the high level of quality.
We’re Not Supposed To, which could have been lifted straight from the soundtrack of Labyrinth, sits effectively alongside the bluesy flow displayed in Sofa of My Lethargy. Even individual tracks illustrate the diversity of I Should Coco within themselves, with Strange Ones flitting between, trudging along irately and with high-octane dynamism.
Given that I Should Coco was born during the Britpop sovereignty - a time when harmonious, indie-lite high spirits owned the charts - it understandably became part of the overall movement. No bad thing to be allied with, by any means, even if it did eclipse the content slightly as a result. But hindsight is a marvellous thing, and Supergrass carry even more weight outside of the bubble, underlining that I Should Coco stands up on its own as an iconic 90s masterpiece”.
On 15th May, I Should Coco turns thirty. A classic album that is being toured very soon, if you are lucky enough to be going to see Supergrass soon then it will be a magnificent experience. A masterpiece album from a band who would go on to release a wonderful follow-up in 1997’s In It for the Money, cast your mind to 1995 and the debut. The brilliant I Should Coco. I wanted to get a jump on the anniversary as I know it will get a lot written about it soon. When you consider the quality of the songwriting, production and band performances, then it is…
THE least it deserves.