Gaz Coombes, Mick Quinn, and Danny Goffey
Prawns, Pranks, And Pop Songs
»
 |
But the sold-out crowd didn't seem to mind, perhaps spurred on by Supergrass’ frenetic opening set. Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder marveled at the throngs of bundled concertgoers later in the evening, dubbing the event as the "Ice Bowl." The next afternoon, NATN Associate Editor Jonathan Cohen caught up with the sufficiently thawed threesome of Gaz Coombes, Mick Quinn, and Danny Goffey for a hearty lunch and witty banter on the life and times of the U.K. rock scene’s shining lights.
NATN: Was last night the coldest show you’ve ever played?
Gaz Coombes: It just kind of felt like.. you have to sort of really get into it, to stay warm but also to warm up the atmosphere a bit as well. We’ve been out exactly a week so far.
NATN: Do you change the set every night?
GC: We have so far every night, yeah.
Mick Quinn: Hopefully we’ll keep doing it.
GC: Yeah, I think we probably will. The main thing really was to get at least six songs that were the most solid and would probably remain in the set the whole tour. And then just around that, mess around a bit.
MQ: Most people are arriving at the beginning at the set, so the front end of it is a bit wasted.
GC: There’s probably no point playing “Pumping On Your Stereo” or that sort of thing. We’ve all sort of enjoyed the fact that’s it’s different every night. If we can keep doing that, we won’t get pissed off with it if we kept it all the same. There are certain songs like “Richard III” and “Far Away” that I probably will want to play throughout the whole six weeks. There are some that I never get fed up with, never.
NATN: Are there any songs that can’t be reproduced on stage?
GC: We used to play the title track from In It For The Money a lot, but my voice couldn’t handle it.
MQ: There’s stuff that we’ve never played.
GC: (to Danny, as he sits down at the table) Interesting shirt/pullover combo there. I was gonna wear a suit jacket over the top of this jumper, but it looks a bit weird. So, I think Mandy is coming tonight?
Danny Goffey: Amanda Hugandkiss? Will she bring her camera? Oh, do you know Keanu Reeves has a gig tonight? He wants us to come see his band. They’re playing at half-10 tonight.
GC: I would say, "I love you in The Matrix!!"
NATN: Are they good?
DG: Apparently not, but I just want to get pissed at the gig.
GC: And meet some celebs!
DG: Have you ordered any food?
GC: No.
DG: What are you having?
GC: I’m not telling you. I’m waiting for you to decide.
GC: [Asking Jonathan] Is that it then, the interview? I was watching that show “Jenny,” that woman with glasses who does the “Springer”-type show.
NATN: Sally?
GC: Is it Sally? I was watching it, it was about kids, teenagers who were complete nutties. Their mums were on and stuff, and I basically realized at the end that it was as much for their mums to get on telly. Some of it was just total hate. Some of the mothers were screaming, “why don’t you shut up.” And the kid would go, “oh shut the fuck up, you dirty bitch.” I couldn’t believe it. Do they shout out for tickets like they do in L.A.?
NATN: I think so.
DG: Can we smoke here?
Waiter: You can only smoke at the bar.
NATN: Are you guys doing any of your own headlining gigs on this tour?
GC: No, we aren’t. I don’t really think there’s time. We get one day off every four days or three days, and on that day you kind of need to just chill out and give your voice a rest.
MQ: We’re not even doing any in-stores or anything.
GC: You don’t interact with fans as much. When you’re in smaller clubs, and when you’re at the bar at the end of the gig, you always meet people. It’s weird just going to cold venues, and getting on the bus.
MQ: It’s really depressing.
NATN: Aw.
GC: It’s not depressing [grins]. It’s lovely.
NATN: Are you done promoting this album here? Will there be another single?
GC: I think “Moving” is going to be a single.
DG: Is it a single or just played on the radio?
GC: How do you get on the singles charts? Is it just airplay?
NATN: It used to be sales only.
GC: We don’t sell singles, do we? There’s only been two singles from this one. When you think about it, we only released this about three or four months ago here. It came out last September in the U.K. We have some bits of new songs. Nothing sort of really solid, but there’s never nothing happening. There’s always stuff floating around. But we do have stuff that didn’t quite make it on the last album which we should do something with.
MQ: We should get the new stuff together on this tour!
GC: Well, I just have to write it first.
DG: I’ve got a song! I woke up about half-eight today.
GC: Well, we have an off-day tomorrow.
[The waiter appears at the table.]
Waiter: Would you like to order, or would you like a little more time? Our specials today are Acorn Squash soup and our fish is Escolar.
DG: Acorn soup?
Waiter: No, it doesn’t taste like acorns. That’s just the shape of the squash.
DG: Um, I’ll have the quesadillas for the main, and prawns for a starter.
MQ: I’ll start with the soup and have the quesadillas for the main.
GC: I’ll go for the quesadillas as well. If you could put a bit of extra cheese on that, it would be great.
MQ: I walked all the way to a club last night and got asked for ID, so I had to walk all the way back to the hotel, then back to the club, and then pay $5 to get in as well.
DG: Was everyone having a good night there?
NATN: Were you guys at the show all day long?
GC: We got there at about 2.
DG: We stopped at this industrial shopping estate.
MQ: Next to International House Of Pancakes.
NATN: The Kenny Rogers cover last night was a nice touch.
GC: We bring that out for the American tours. When we do it again, I’ll remember the lyrics next time.
DG: Usually it’s just far too hot.
GC: The grass on the back was just packed.
DG: I need to go out and buy a mad shirt.
GC: A man shirt?
DG: Uh, a MAD shirt.
[All parties walk to the bar, and someone mentions the film “X-Men.”]
GC: Oh, is it that superhero thing? They all have powers, each. It’s very scary right at the start. I thought it was going to be loads more kiddie. But in the cinema it was very intense. There’s a girl who can’t touch anyone. She touches them and kills them. She can never have human contact. She goes to kiss her first boyfriend and she puts him into a coma.
DG: The main character is that wolf superhero.
GC: Wolverine?
DG: He looks a bit like Gaz circa ‘95.
NATN: What do you guys have on tap when you get home?
GC: Just Christmas, really. We’ve got to do some writing. But I’m not really sure.
DG: This is the last main thing for this album.
NATN: When you play in England, what size places do you play?
GC: Between 3-5,000.
DG: We don’t really tend to push ourselves into the huge places.
NATN: Did you play any festivals this summer?
DG: We did V2000 in England.
NATN: How did this tour come about? I understand that the members of Pearl Jam have been fans for a long time.
MQ: That was pretty much it. They phoned up our office in 1998 and asked if we wanted to go, but we’d just finished touring In It For The Money.
GC: We found it a bit weird as well.
DG: We’d done a lot of touring and it was going to be a massive lump at the end.
GC: We’d never seen them live until the other night.
NATN: Do you like the music?
GC: I don’t know, really. We don’t really know it. We’ve only heard a few songs.
DG: It’s quite sort of folky.
GC: They’re a good rock’n’roll band.
NATN: The song "Of The Girl" is a bit Supergrass-ish.
MQ: They’ve got one that sounds a bit like the Who.
GC: We’re a bit partial to the Who too. Eddie said they’d gone to see them.
NATN: Has coming to the States gotten better over the years?
GC: This is the first time in like five years that we’ve really been here for this long. Usually we do three weeks on each coast. It has gotten better. The response to the band has been better, doing gigs and stuff. We’ve managed to get bigger gigs in the big cities.
NATN: Has it always been your own headlining thing?
DG: We’ve done two quite big headlining tours on each album, but this is our American tour as it is for this album.
GC: The Bowery Ballroom shows [in New York] were great.
[We walk back to the table, where appetizers are waiting]
DG: Excuse me, there seem to be some hedgehogs on my plate (looking at his shrimp). Do they have hedgehogs here?
Waiter: The crabcakes look even weirder than that. Do you know Don King? They look like his hair.
DG: But they taste better, I suppose. I don’t know whether to eat them or laugh at them.
NATN: What are your thoughts on things like the Mercury Music Prize [the U.K.’s equivalent for “record of the year”]?
GC: We don’t really know what it’s on about. The winner before this was Gomez. They look for the more obscure things happening in the music industry, so it’s not as commercial. They’re not looking for the Robbie Williams or stuff like that. The bands that have won it haven’t really..
MQ: It’s difficult to know the criteria.
GC: Badly Drawn Boy is quite strong. It’s better that he won than Coldplay, because I think they’re quite dull and boring. At least it’s different, but maybe that’s the point. It’s always a bit strange in England when nobody knows who the artists are either. There are quite a lot of bands that don’t have much spontaneous energy in their music. That’s how I always imagined a band like the Jam as starting. Less good musicians, and more just getting in a room and getting really mental. That’s more where our sound came from. At the time we were compared to all sorts of punk stuff, half of which we hadn’t really heard. We were into the Clash, the Jam, and the Sex Pistols, but not heavily. I think our sound more just came from the three of us and the energy we had, in a room together. As it goes on, you get loads more influences, and you start to realize that you can actually play the guitar properly.
NATN: Do you have any idea what shape the next stuff may take?
GC: I really don’t have a clue. We never know this far in advance. We just tend to start writing and see what shape it takes, rather than choosing a direction and then writing to that.
NATN: Can you compare the new album to older Supergrass material?
GC: The songs are a step forward.
MQ: Stylistically, we’re trying to explore lots of different things.
DG: “Mary” is just three chords. We played it in a totally different way at the start. Then, we thought it would be quite interesting to do the whole song without going somewhere else. The guitar line is really strong, so we built the whole song around these boring chords. But we made it exciting and different. That’s one of the only songs that was really thought about in that way. Otherwise, they kind of cry out for what’s needed.
GC: We all write as well, including my brother Rob. That kind of adds a lot more to the songs, being of big structures, with verse, chorus, middle-eight, and maybe even another section as well. You will find a bit from all of us in each song.
NATN: Why do the songs also have a writing credit for [Gaz's brother and Supergrass keyboardist] Rob?
GC: That’s just what we did at the start, really. It was new for Rob to have written stuff, so legally we just did it like that. We could just get rid of that and say Supergrass.
NATN: Have you seen the "Rock DJ" video by Robbie Williams? It was censored here.
DG: At least they played it. They didn’t play ours. We did a video for "Mary" that we wrote ourselves. It had projectile vomit in it, a housewife who vomits on her children. They banned it. And here’s Robbie pulling his flesh off, throwing it at women, and they’re eating it.
NATN: Any thoughts on cracking the MTV rotation with "Pumping On Your Stereo?"
GC: There’s nothing really massively different from "Pumping" than some of our other videos as far as quality goes. Obviously it’s a bit more "accessible" because its Muppets and stuff. But it shows that if you get the right people behind you, suddenly you can get a breakthrough video on MTV. In the past, everything has been just as strong, but we’ve never had the right backing.
GC: If you’re Bowie or Pearl Jam or something, you could do a crazy black-and-white Super 8 film, and they would put it on their just because of their status.
NATN: Have you had a chance to hang out with the members of Pearl Jam at all?
DG: Yeah, we met Teddy [laughs]. He’s been really cool, actually. Every time he comes in, the record company will come in to do their shake and face. He is a really nice guy.
NATN: They are all really into Supergrass.
GC: We didn’t even know what the other guys looked like. I asked which names went with what. And then you have Lance? Wayne? Fran?
DG: Bernard?
GC: The drummer Matt is from Soundgarden. And the blonde guy is.. Mike?
MQ: And he used to play guitar for?
GC: Glad we got that sorted. [Asking Jonathan] What's your name again? [laughs]
DG: You know, "Moving" has sounded really rubbish on this tour so far.
GC: We don’t play “Alright” anymore. We should play it in a minor key, and in the past tense.
NATN: How old are you guys?
GC: Am I 25 or 24?
MQ: 30.
NATN: Does the band actually have a time limit for its nightly set?
GC: About 45 minutes. We can play 11 songs. If we replaced loads and just played all the short ones, we could play 14 or 15. When we headline, it’s usually about an hour and 20 minutes. With the encore, about an hour and five. All the songs are so manic, it would be impossible for us to play for two hours and 20 like Pearl Jam do.
MQ: In the really early days, we’d play for 30 minutes.
NATN: What do you think of Kid A?
GC: It’s pretty good. I’ve only heard it like once. It’s not my favorite. Maybe I just have to listen to it loads to get into it.
MQ: I still think The Bends is the best album. It’s more about songs.
GC: Sometimes you like to hear that screaming guitar and those choruses. That’s probably exactly what they don’t want everyone to say. They’re at the stage where they can basically do whatever they want to do.
NATN: Care to comment on the state of the U.K. music charts?
GC: When “Alright” was in there, the charts were pretty cool. There were at least five or six bands in the top-15. It was really kind of good. It wasn’t saturated by bands. There was still pop music in there as well, and cheesy chart music.
MQ: In the mid-’80s, I’d given up listening to chart music, because it was all rubbish. Occasionally you would get a good Cure single, Wedding Present, or Smiths. But the majority of it was so rubbish that we’d never bother listening to it. That’s when you start digging up old Stones records and listening to the Beatles.
GC: Although when Oasis got massive, there were loads of offshoots of that sort of thing, like Embrace. There was a lot more of that around. In a way it was a bit weird and stuff, because it was all crap. At least it was a real band, playing musical instruments. It Didn’t really matter if I wasn’t into the music. At least it was real, and not Kylie or Britney or whatever.
NATN: I can’t figure out why “Pumping” hasn’t been a hit.
MQ: Probably because nobody has really heard of us. If we were Metallica and released that song, maybe they would play it [laughs].
GC: You always get a feeling when you know you’ve done a really good song, and you wonder why loads and loads of people can’t hear it. You can’t really worry about that.
MQ: People aren’t willing to take a risk on programming stuff that’s slightly different. We’re not particularly willing to be very aggressive about how we market ourselves, or make ourselves known to radio people.
NATN: Well have you been happy with the switch from Capitol to Island for this album?
GC: We weren’t happy with Capitol. But Island/Def Jam, we’ve done Jay Leno, Letterman, and the Pearl Jam tour, so..
MQ: We can’t really blame the record company for us not doing massively in America, because the history of U.K. bands that have become massive here is pretty small.
GC: Their main priorities are smaller bands, whereas with Capitol the priority seemed to be more established bands, or dead bands, like Queen or the Beatles. It feels like you’re important to the record company. And they’re really nice people, as well. They’ve all kind of come from different companies in the merger, which is quite nice. We like playing in the cold!
[Danny gets a call on his cell phone from his 3-year old son]
MQ: It’s 8 o’clock. He should be asleep!
NATN: Whose idea was it for the x-ray photo album cover?
GC: We’d been playing around with the x-ray idea for ages, and we thought it would be cool to have our faces underneath it as well. It was pretty cool, really. We didn’t want to even have our name on the cover, to leave the album untitled. But then we figured it would be more work to try and explain it. Everyone thinks it’s called Supergrass, but it’s not. It’s not self-titled. It’s untitled.
NATN: Do they feed you guys well?
GC: The catering has been great.
[Dessert is promptly ordered, while Gaz and Danny leave the table.]
NATN: Have you known these guys for ages?
MQ: I’m a bit older, so I knew Gaz's brother in school. His mate was Danny's older brother as well. I’d seen them around for years and years. I lived in this little old house in the middle of nowhere. We played for about six months, then started getting gigs and drumming up interest through that.
Sam Williams, who produced the first record, managed to get us a production deal so we could get into a studio and record without having to pay for it. We had to give him a cut of the album after it, but we got signed about a year and half after we got together as a band. We weren’t really looking for deals. It was always in the back of our heads, but it wasn’t what we were doing it for. We started playing gigs to get free beer in the local pub. It’s good, because we didn’t have to change. Nobody ever asked us to change our sound. We didn’t have a manager either at the time we signed, and we could just tell who was going to be a wanker or who wasn’t. I don’t think we were that desparate for a record contract, so we didn’t feel under pressure to say yes to these people.
NATN: Do you have favorite tracks on the new one?
MQ: I don’t think anything came out really, really well. I’m a bit too much of a perfectionist to see them for what they are. I like “Pumping” because it was such a throwaway, but it actually became quite a monster track. I like the ones that are good fun to play onstage, but were completely dumb ass tracks. There’s nothing clever about them. Obviously, there’s stuff like “Far Away.”
NATN: Do you play “Shotover Hill”?
MQ: We’ve tried. We tried to work Danny into it, and it didn’t work. It’s not quite strong enough when just Gaz and I do it. There’s quite a few guitar parts that we can’t cover with keyboards. Somewhere there’s a tape of us doing “Shotover Hill” with a synth playing all the lead parts.
NATN: I’m sure you guys heard about the tragedy at the Roskilde Festival [at which nine fans were crushed to death during Pearl Jam’s set in July 2000].
MQ: I don’t know how the band could single out themselves. That could have happened to anyone who was playing there. It’s the fault of the people who put the gig up. They’re responsible for the crowd. Unless a band is actually inciting a riot, I can’t see how the band should be blaming themselves. Although I don’t know how we’d feel about it if it happened to us. Not being able to play festivals takes some of the fun out of the gig. It’s difficult to know where to draw the line.
GC: Whenever there’s so many people in one space...
NATN: What do you do to kill time on the road?
DG: Screw!
GC: It’s usually only an hour between soundcheck and our set.
MQ: We read, have a look at the catering, try and take the piss out of each other as much as possible.
DG: We play loads of computer. That’s about it really. There’s 10 blokes on the bus. Sometimes we have a couple of friends in various places.
MQ: We should do a b-sides album, with a nice gatefold.
GC: The problem is you can’t have them as part of your contract. I reckon you should.
MQ: We should just be Pearl Jam and put out a live album for every show!
NATN: Well, how about a live release?
DG: We’ve done quite a lot of live B-sides.
GC: The problem with us is that after you get all the mobile studio up and going, and all the pressure, you just do really shit gigs. Whenever it’s not being recorded, it’s a great gig. We can never combine the two together.
DG: With a mobile, it always sounds a bit flat, compared to like the Who’s Live At Leeds.
GC: But when you take someone like Zappa’s band, to record it all live was kind of nothing. If we did a live album, you’d hear the mistakes.
DG: We could overdub the drums, and bass, and guitar!
GC: A lot of stuff from my favorite artists involves live albums like the Who, Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps. It makes you want to do one as well.
JONATHAN COHEN | Jonathan Cohen co-created Nude As The News with his Indiana University mates Troy Carpenter and Ben French. When not traversing the globe for business and pleasure, he holds down the fort as a senior editor for Billboard in New York. Stop him and he just may ask, "what for lunch?"