The centuries will pass, civilisations will fall, continents will collide, and still bands will be breaking up because of ‘musical differences’.
The centuries will pass, civilisations will fall, continents will collide, and still bands will be breaking up because of ‘musical differences’. The latest to go is Supergrass, cheeky mop-topped perpetrators of ‘Alright’ all those years ago, who leave us after six albums of increasing maturity and range but gradually decreasing sales. I’m not quite sure why, but I always had the impression that Supergrass were one of those very short bands, brought together not just by musical compatibility but also by the fact that you could fit them all into a decent-sized holdall. (The Small Faces weren’t called that because they were big. The Rolling Stones are even tinier than they used to be. AC/DC could have enjoyed lucrative parallel careers as glove puppets, and the original Oasis were all about the same size as the similarly named soft-drink can.) But I now realise that I have never seen Supergrass live, and they may all dwarf Jarvis Cocker for all I know. It was their youthful demeanour that told against them in the end. You think you can escape your gilded youth, if only by getting older, but it didn’t work for them.
Twenty or thirty years ago, ‘musical differences’ often seemed to be the product of overwhelming success. The better the band did, the more they came to hate each other. The Eagles said they would reform ‘when hell freezes over’. Their comeback album in 1999 was entitled Hell Freezes Over. But later on bands became brands, most of which are far more commercially valuable than the mere individuals who shelter beneath them. For a band-brand to split up now seems bold, even foolhardy, to the extent that you almost admire them for doing so. When Blur split there was a sense that, yes, they had come to the end of the road, and breaking up was the honourable thing to do. Because we knew that they were effectively turning their backs on massive piles of cash. Who of us would? Who of us could afford to?
But Supergrass’s dissolution is borne not of great wealth or exploding egos or the urgent need to express yourself artistically a long, long way from your former bandmates. It is, I suspect, a result of frustration and, to be brutal, relative failure. I think they are short, everybody else sees them as young and impossibly chirpy, and nothing they do can alter these preconceptions. Their last three albums, Life on Other Planets (2002), Road to Rouen (2005) and Diamond Hoo Ha (2008), have all been wonderful in their different ways. Road to Rouen was the bold one, a rather gloomy, downbeat album with lots of stylistic flourishes and a slightly prog rock, Pink Floydish feel. It was apparently a difficult one to record, after the death of Gaz and Rob Coombes’s mother and some annoying tabloid jiggery-pokery; it’s only 35 minutes long and EMI released all the wrong songs as singles. (Listen instead to ‘A Kick in the Teeth’, a brilliant Stonesy rocker, and the brooding ‘Roxy’.) It didn’t sell that well, so the more blatant glam-rock punch of Diamond Hoo Ha was a clear attempt at commercial redemption. That didn’t sell either.
Apparently they had started recording a new album with krautrock leanings, which usually suggests a band on its last legs. When you’re floundering for ideas, desperately wondering what to do next, it’s usually either folk or country or krautrock. You might as well call in the lawyers straightaway and save yourself the bother.
So we fans will mourn the loss of this thoughtful and underrated group, and everyone else will think, so what? Nonetheless, splitting up is so rare these days, it might even be a good career move. Blur were far more loved and esteemed when they reconvened last year for a handful of live shows than at any time during their actual existence. So who knows, these six Supergrass albums — and especially the last three — may yet acquire a resonance they simply lacked on their release. Give it five years or so, and some fool might even offer them one of those massive piles of cash to reform. Will they turn their backs on that? Will they be able to afford to?
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