Good morning!
Before we get to today’s interview, we have an exciting announcement. On Thursday 1st December, we’ll be throwing a special end of year bash at The Social in London, bringing together the authors of some of our favourite music books of the year. I mean, look at the line-up!
Tickets are £6 and on sale now from here. There will be readings and chat, plus all the books will be for sale and all the authors will have pens to sign those books. Then, afterwards, we’re going to hand over the sound system to Token Girl DJs and Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton for the first (and best) Christmas rave of the season. It’s literally the literary party of the year. We’ve already double checked that they’ll be no major World Cup clashes, so see you there.
Now, onto today’s chat, as Gaz Coombes invites Niall to his Oxford gaff to tell us all about his forthcoming new album.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Gaz Coombes
Last month, Gaz Coombes announced details of his fourth solo album Turn The Car Around. Due out in January, it’s another remarkable record for someone who’s been in a rich vein of form over the past few years. It explores broadly similar sonic terrain as 2015’s Matador and 2018’s World’s Strongest Man, dynamic grooves and intricate indie-rock with wistful undertones, but his songs seem to be getting more soulfully careworn as Coombes gets older. Back at the end of August, Niall paid Gaz a visit at his house on the outskirts of Oxford and Gaz showed him inside the new studio outhouse he built in 2020, where he recorded the bulk of the new record. Gaz got a pot of coffee on the go, pulled up a couple of chairs by the mixing desk and they got into how the new record came together, why the Supergrass reunion played its part in these songs being written and where he’s at as a solo artist ten years on since the release of his debut.
To me, Supergrass records always felt like their own things, individual of each other, but your solo work sounds much more connected both sonically and thematically. Do you feel like that?
It feels like the last two have been leading up to this. You tend to revisit the same themes a lot in writing and I think what I find interesting about that is that there’s never a repetition because you’re revisiting themes at a different point in life with another two or three years of experiences to tap into of life changes, whether it’s something beautiful and magical, or whether it’s something kind of with heartbreak, that’s always different through life, it’s never the same.
What do you think are the main themes that crop up in your writing?
I think it’s just writing without too much of a plan. I write and then in doing so, you uncover what you’re thinking and feeling. They’re based around thought processes and observations and ways of just processing, trying to get some comfort and understanding through writing.
There’s an undercurrent of melancholy in a lot of your songs. Are you a melancholic person?
Not particularly. I think it comes out in the music, or sometimes it’s a way of expressing certain things that are either contradictory or confusing, or just an interesting take on human nature and why we are like we are and why we deal with the things that we deal with and how we deal with them and how we get through them. Life is quite mental.
It's less the melancholy in day-to-day life but I think life is very complicated, professionally it’s still all go, there’s no slowing down. But in the last 10-15 years, other parts of life have joined into that, whether it’s kids or other friendships and situations and people you’ve that I’ve lost or new people that have come into my life and all of those things creates quite a rich landscape to pick from. I think that’s what I do lyrically, it’s processing all of those things. I tend to connect a bit later on. I just write lots of lines. I was getting into doing quite a lot of Post-it notes of lines that I like. I nicked it off my wife. She writes, you can see on her writing window there, they’re all posted up to the glass. [Gaz points up to an upstairs window in his house, covered in lots of Post-it Notes]
What was it that prompted you to write that way this time?
I think to try and hone the lyrics in even more. It’s definitely a hangover from the Supergrass days, where lyrics were often a bit of an issue, probably because a bit more later on we were writing very equally or writing as a four, nobody would necessarily take on the lead role. That’s how we started it, we wrote Caught By The Fuzz and Alright together. I think just because we grew up together, we were in the same village, and we’d be doing everything together.
Tell me about the title of the new record, Turn The Car Around.
I felt that if the last three years has shown me anything, it’s shown me that it’s healthy to have the mindset of simplifying life and go back, reset, go again. Over the last two or three years, we’ve been forced into a slightly simpler life when it’s been called for, when it’s been necessary. I think an element of that has been really good for my head and good mentally to just slow down and take stock and turn the car around, to back up and reset.
What was it that you felt you needed to do that?
I suppose just the pressures of life and the speed of life and how it seems like you rarely get a chance to not even necessarily to switch off, but just to look at what’s important, and look at what really excites or what really fuels me. This record was made in the last two, three years from 2020 onwards. I don’t think it is a pandemic record, it was written in that time but you can’t help but write about what’s around you. I never really wanted to write about the feelings about what we’ve all been going through at all, but more from a very direct personal sort of observational way.
Supergrass were originally meant to be on tour in 2020, had you planned to write as a way of keeping your hand in creatively?
Yeah, exactly. I knew that Supergrass was a case of live performances, that’s what it was gonna be, we knew that we weren’t going to be able to make a record for the same reasons why we didn’t finish the last record, nothing appeared to have changed internally to be able to do that or to be able to even look at the possibility of something like that happening. I definitely knew that it was going to be a live performance thing. I’ve enjoyed every moment of it and getting on stage with the boys is great and we’re lucky that those songs still sound great, I never feel like we’re treading water or lost in nostalgia. But I knew that there’d be that side of me which wasn’t necessarily fulfilled in a way and so writing was going to be a key part of that so I was going to write throughout the whole reunion.
It's funny because I keep wanting to call this your third solo record, forgetting about your solo debut, 2012’s Here Come The Bombs. For some reason, I always think of Matador as your proper debut.
Yeah… Here Come The Bombs was a transition record without particularly any forward thinking as to who I’m going to be or what am I, a record of discovery to a degree but still with a hangover of my previous band in there.
Looking back, where was your head at as you embarked on a solo career?
I think it was just uncertainty about my voice, not my literal voice, but what I’m gonna say, how to make the break away from having been in a band for so long and how defined the Supergrass sound was. On the first record, I felt a pressure to... I’m not sure how to say it, but to write songs in a certain way, or that delivered a certain something coming off the back of Supergrass, a bit of that pressure of ‘where should it sit?’. There was something about when I hit the writing for Matador, a couple of little lightbulb moments where I thought, ‘I’m just gonna go down to the studio and write some stuff without any concern that it might not be what people want to hear, or it might be too dark or it might be too moody’.
Has that informed everything you’ve done since?
I think it has, maybe more just psychologically, just knowing more towards the end of Matador when I was getting feedback and then on release as well, where I thought ‘oh, it worked, just letting go and being myself’, being freed up to be myself without any concerns of what I should be doing or what I could be doing, an opportunity to try and write bodies of work that are really interesting and true and from the heart. I think it just gave me just a load of confidence. This record, I started it in the same way and I kept the same team as the last two records, which I knew I wanted to do.
Was the bulk of it done in here?
Most of it was done in here, yeah. I built this in June of 2020, I got lucky that my neighbour is a builder. It wasn’t particularly defying lockdown necessarily, although we’re very cut off around here. I went over one day said, “Look, are you interested in helping me create a space?”, and he didn’t have any work on at all, so he and a couple of other guys did it in 10 weeks.
Making the record, did you keep hours, or just come in here as and when?
Not really, especially around the last couple of years, keeping hours went out the window, this place became somewhere really useful for my head to have an outlet. I made the most of it. I’d come in here a lot and just start by putting some mics up, playing with some sounds on the drums. I love things like that, it’s almost even before the writing stage, I love coming in and playing around with the sound, seeing what I can get and stumbling across something. Sonically, that’s really exciting. It’s a lot of experimenting. I’ve always loved that. I think it’s really exciting to experiment with sounds and to experiment with a space or putting a mad old movie on the projector and leaving that playing in the background, I found that interesting, also with the other guys in the band, putting something on, an old movie or something, changes the session in quite an interesting way.
So you’d stick films on and play along?
It gives you a visual accompaniment to what you’re doing, another creative element going in the background. There was a Christmas time a few of the guys came over and I think Gremlins was on, really chaotic and hectic, you’d be playing and look up and see it. I’m always really interested by the gathering of people, the thoughts and headspace and sounds and see what that creates. I think the last couple of records were a lot on my own recording everything, but we’ve evolved as a live band so much over the last 10 years. The touring we were doing in 2018 was some of the best shows I’ve done with my live band [Garo Nahoulakian, Nick Fowler and Piney Gir] and I wanted them to be as much a part of it.
I run on vibe, I always have. Even when I’m on my own, I need to create a vibe, whether that’s a glass of red wine and putting something on the screen or lighting a joss stick, just creating a feeling in the room, getting the lighting right, all that sort of stuff. It’s an extension of that, working with other people to bring in what they do really great as well. I liken it romantically in my mind to Neil Young nicking Crazy Horse, an existing band already at the time and doing great things and he saw something great, and was like, ‘do you want to come and join me onstage, join me on the record?’. That was exciting for me to know, the idea of getting them a bit more involved.
Was there any sense of the Supergrass being robbed of their reunion moment because of the pandemic that fed into the record?
Well, it freed up loads of time for me to make and to finish this record. As soon as I realised that, ‘shit, I’m gonna have a bit of time on my hands here,’ it was a jolt I needed, once I got over the initial uncertainty that everybody was probably feeling in early 2020, and then coinciding that with the building of the studio, everything just aligned perfectly, a moment of clarity just knowing that this is the time. It’s definitely an outlet emotionally, or if there’s a darkness, it’s definitely a positive outlet to have, but equally I need to be excited and I need to buzz off what I’m doing, so I think that’s when that’s when things really sort of moved up a gear.
There’s a lyric on the closing track Dance On that I feel really sums up your vibe as a solo artist – “There’s just some days you feel like going back, but the only way is straight ahead”. Do you agree?
I just feel satisfied when things are moving forward and the reunion has clashed with that approach at times. But at the beginning, I found a way of doing that that I felt good about, which is a live performance and transferring that energy to a crowd is a very raw experience, it doesn’t feel it as any repetition in there. It’s always very individual to the moment, those sort of moments.
What do you think this record says about where you are as an artist right now?
I think that will take shape as the record comes to life, when it gets out there and you start playing it live, and it becomes its own thing outside of the studio. It’s a record that I feel I’ve been building up to for the last six or seven years. There’s a lot of subject matter in there that that I’ve played with and maybe not managed to see through in the past, I’ve been more able to translate it on this one. I feel like I’ve got better at doing what I do and doing it confidently. I think that’s maybe where I’m at.
ND