When producer Sam Williams discovered Supergrass, he knew he had to capture the band's infectious energy on tape.

In the crowded field of mid-'90s Britpop bands, Supergrass stood out. For a start, they were surprisingly young — singer Gaz Coombes was only 18 when they released their 1994 debut single, 'Caught By The Fuzz'. They were also in possession of a strong, boyish retro rock–band look and a different set of influences from their peers: Ziggy Stardust–era Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop.

But it's for their UK number two single of 1995, the irrepressibly bouncy 'Alright', that Supergrass are best remembered. In the song's video, their image was frozen forever as a Monkees-styled trio capering around on bikes and in a bed on wheels rolling along a beach, as Coombes sang a cheeky lyric about peak teenage delinquency: smoking fags, sleeping around, crashing a car in a field.

However, at the time, the success of 'Alright' was both a blessing and a curse for the band — Gaz Coombes (vocals/guitar), Mick Quinn (bass/vocals) and Danny Goffey (drums). It made their singer in particular a reluctant household face in that summer of 1995. "When 'Alright' went mental, we were in America," Coombes remembered in an interview with this writer four years later. "We got back and suddenly every fucker was recognising you. I never wanted to be a rock star. I just wanted to be in a band."

Almost 10 years after they split — and in the wake of Gaz Coombes enjoying a successful and critically-acclaimed solo career — Supergrass have re–formed. 2020 will see them back on tour, in support of a new career retrospective box set, The Strange Ones. Producer Sam Williams, who discovered the band and oversaw the making of their debut album I Should Coco, clearly remembers the day that he first encountered the trio in the street in Oxford in 1993.

"I was in a music shop and I came out and saw the boys standing on the pavement," he says. "It was one of those classic, surreal moments. I'd grown up with strong references to early Beatles and the Monkees and the cartoon kind of culture of larger-than-life '60s-looking bands. They didn't look like anything that you'd seen in real life for a long, long time. Danny was wearing a blue velvet suit with red Bowie hair and Gaz had the kind of Neil Young sideburns.

"The feeling was that it was just an immediate, magnetic attraction. Something in me just went, 'I don't know who that is. But I know that's a band and I know I'm going to produce them.'"

First Impressions

As a musician and producer, Sam Williams shared many reference points with the young members of Supergrass, but by this stage in his career, he had gained much more experience in the music industry. As the son of Len Williams, founder of the London Guitar School, and the brother of guitarist John Williams — a member of classical rock band Sky and also a soloist, whose rendition of 'Cavatina' famously became the theme from The Deer Hunter and a worldwide hit in 1978 — Sam Williams had been in and out of recording studios since he was a teenager.

Growing up playing bass, sax, clarinet, piano, drums and then becoming a singer, Williams had joined his first band at 11 and, by 16, had played bass on 'International Language', the debut single by Richard Strange, formerly of proto-punk band Doctors Of Madness. "They were interviewing him on Radio 1 when the single came out," Williams remembers, "and he was saying, 'Oh yeah, I got this schoolboy called Sam Williams to play bass.' And I was thinking, 'Well, look, if this is possible, then anything is possible.'"

Living in Cornwall by this point (where his father had relocated to found a monkey sanctuary), Sam Williams began to visit his local recording studio, Sawmills. At 18, driven to become a producer, arranger and artist, he was employed by Sawmills as an assistant and moved into the remote, residential facility.

"It's in a place called Fowey on the southwest coast of Cornwall," he explains, "and only accessible by boat or by walking down a railway line. I moved into one of the cabins that was part of the residential thing. Sawmills was just a stunningly beautiful place. A complete sanctuary as well, because obviously it was quite remote. It was like my rock and roll university."

At Sawmills, Williams was trained in old school analogue engineering and to-tape recording. "The guy that owned Sawmills at that point, Simon Fraser, was a fantastic mentor and teacher of a lot of recording techniques," he says. "I quickly got a feel for mixing and rigging up a lot of tape delays. I also got a taste for editing, because a lot of what I wanted to do wasn't easily doable or possible on conventional tape recording. So, we were into the land of click tracks and two–inch tape, but I'd be chopping up two–inch tape to get the results that I wanted that would be closer to the way that we would sequence and loop now."

Obviously, for an engineer, taking a blade to a reel of two-inch tape during a session required a lot of nerve and confidence. "I tell you what, man, it was really scary," Williams laughs. "Even on a basic multitrack edit where you wanted verses and choruses from two or three takes, you'd have a lot of pieces of tape hanging around in the studio over different bits of furniture, waiting to be assembled. And if anybody walked in and said something, it could disrupt your concentration and you could be in hell. Some of that did happen on a little bit of editing in that period of the first Supergrass record."

By the time Williams met Supergrass, he was already a veteran of countless sessions at Sawmills and the frontman of his own band, the Mystics, who'd signed to Fontana Records. "Those were the recordings that I initially played to Supergrass when I met the boys," he recalls. "Just as a kind of calling card of... 'Well, this is what I've been doing.' To say, 'Look, this is how it'll sound if I produce and if we go to Sawmills.'"

At the time, comically, and almost like the Beatles in Help!, the three members of Supergrass were living virtually door–to–door to one another in a set of cottages in the village of Wheatley in Oxfordshire. Sam Williams first saw and heard them play in a local pub. "I was blown away," he enthuses, "because it was super tight and super hard and very visceral and incredibly connective. Danny's drumming was drawn from a lot of different things — Mitch Mitchell, Keith Moon, and from Charlie Watts for the groove-orientated thing as well. A very creative player, a really great feel player. But intense energy.

"They were playing very fast, so it didn't take them long to play eight songs. They had elements of the Buzzcocks and they had elements of the Pistols a little bit with the guitar sound. But again, none of it in particular in terms of an homage or a pastiche. And it was incredibly concise songwriting, a bit like the speed at which the material was delivered."

Williams first offered to help quickly nail down demos of the band's songs, recording them playing live on a Fostex Portastudio at Danny Goffey's cottage, after randomly placing microphones around the tiny room. "Literally what I call Lazy Miking," the producer laughs, "where you throw a mic on the floor. We were just capturing. I think we may have overdubbed some vocals.

"They would play in a room where you could just get them and me in, and they'd play at full volume. I thought, 'This is a really good indication as to how this record should sound and feel.' So, we used the four-track recordings to get to a place where we had a pretty comprehensive sketch of pre-production for six tracks. We had a good synopsis, if you like."

One of the six songs they demoed together was 'Alright', in its original, scrappy form, built around pumping, staccato piano chords. "That was done on a very out-of-tune piano at Danny's cottage," Williams remembers. "We'd done everything on a four-track format that we didn't care about, but that was good enough to make choices and decisions about the arrangements. To get a good sketch of everything down and an overview of the material that we wanted to cut."

Sawmills

In the spring of 1994, Sam Williams and Supergrass first travelled down to Sawmills for a five-day session agreed as part of a production deal with the studio's owners. "We took the boat with the gear in it down the river and they just loved the place," says Williams. "I could see they got it and it was the right environment for them. It wasn't going to be overwhelming or over-spec in any way. It was just right... the feeling of containment and kind of like a little bit of naughty isolation."

Together there the team began working with Sawmills' in-house engineer, John Cornfield. "My approach as a producer was to enable the making of a record the way I imagined Sam Phillips would work at Sun, or the way I imagined the culture would be at Stax or Motown," Williams explains. "It was an in-house feeling about it, especially in terms of collaborating.

"I was working with John Cornfield, who is a world-class engineer," he stresses. "And coming at it from a different point of view that was ideal as an old school team. It allowed me to have a relationship with the band that was fundamentally based on playing, arranging, having fun, and getting the energetic lines of the production right."

True to his original idea, Sam Williams wanted to recreate the intensely concentrated sound of Supergrass' four–track demos. "When I was in the cottages recording that immense racket in a small space," he says, "I knew how I needed to record I Should Coco, which was with the amps mainly in the same room. Because that's all the band had known.

"I also wanted some element of controlled bleed, even into drum mics. Which is not ideal, if you're looking for a kind of perfect, separated sound. But I knew it would help in that way that it had with some of the Spector things. I could hear the element of bleed that I liked."

Williams' approach had the band playing while wearing headphones, but at the same time still able to hear and feel the familiar blasts of sound from the drums and amps. "If you close a band off too soon when they're young and give them headphones," he argues, "they lose physical contact with the acoustic elements of the velocity and the transients and the way that they make contact with an instrument. John and I had a little chat about: 'OK, we're gonna do it this way.' We did spread [the amps out] a little bit as the record progressed, but not massively. The energy of the band was in their eye contact and volume."

The picturesque location of Sawmills certainly helped to create the right mood for the sessions, too. "It was not a big live room," says Williams. "A nice-sized room, but with an immensely cool, creative playing vibe. The windows looked out onto a completely isolated creek with swans swimming around on it, and with the woods on the other side.

"If a take was finished or half-finished, we'd get into canoes and row over to the other side of the creek and have a listen to a playback through the windows of the studio. Have a little smoke, go back again, do another take. It was that kind of atmosphere. They loved it."

The control room at Sawmills is centred around a Trident 80B console. "I just love the board," says Williams. "It's a transparent-sounding board. It's got immense mojo, but you also feel like it doesn't obscure the contact with the music. There's a monitor section on the 80B which has this different EQ from the main channels. John Cornfield said, 'Look, Sam, when you're gonna pop 3k on the guitars, do it there.'"

Monitors-wise, at the time of the recording of 'Alright' and I Should Coco, Sawmills offered the choice between Quested 212s and Yamaha NS10s. "The control room was small," says the producer. "A very shallow space. So, you're not looking at a textbook studio for monitoring. But I have to say, still one of my favourites for containment. The sound was very focused, very punchy. A bit like having a big pair of headphones on."

Tracking was done to the studio's Otari MTR-90 MkII 24-track two-inch. The evening before the five-day session was due to begin, Williams and Cornfield set up the facility's Premier drum kit and prepared a drum sound for the next day. "It was [AKG] 414s for overheads," says Williams, "and [Shure] 57s top and bottom on the snare. Probably Sennheiser 421s on the toms and the kick would have been an old school [AKG] D12. We were tracking pretty quickly the next day.

"My whole production ethos was about capturing it quickly, before it went off the boil. Because this was a young band and this was about capturing a kind of energy that does not hang around. You're not gonna benefit from spending two days getting a bass drum sound."

Straight To Tape

In keeping with this approach, the basic tracking for the six songs Sam Williams and Supergrass recorded that week at Sawmills — 'Caught By The Fuzz', 'Alright', 'Strange Ones', 'Sitting Up Straight', 'Mansize Rooster' and 'Lose It' — were cut with the minimum of takes. "When I'm rolling tape, I want to get it, if I can, inside one or two cuts," emphasises the producer.

"Danny was aware that it was down to him to deliver it in that time spec. In the worst-case scenario, I think with a difficult track like 'Lose It', we may have gone six cuts in a row. And he's sweating and dripping, because every time he's giving it up in that immensely physically demanding style that he drums in. But we would very rarely need to go more than two cuts and often they'd get it in one."

'Alright' was cut in the space of 10 minutes — two takes, first and second halves cut together from the two-inch tapes. That was it.

The team were similarly unfussy about the choices of guitars and amps. They simply went with the equipment that the band had at the time, namely, Gaz Coombes's Fender Telecaster or Epiphone SG played through a Sound City 2x12 combo amp and Mick Quinn's Carlsbro bass and amp. "His bass made a farting, blown-up sound which was very much key to the distortion," says Williams. "Same with the vocal sound on 'Lose It'. We had a [Shure] 58 going through a distortion pedal for Gaz to sing straight through the Sound City amp, and that was it."

As the live takes were being laid down, Sam Williams would typically be in the control room, directing the proceedings and trying to bottle the band's energy: "When they were delivering cuts as a power trio, I wanted to be making calls in the spirit of the three-hour sessions that I grew up with as a kid that don't go beyond that time zone. I wanted to have the confidence to stop a take when it was necessary and restart it. In other words, to optimise a cut while it's happening, so that they get the best that they can.

"But most of the time we didn't have to do that," he adds, "because they were playing great. 'Alright' was cut in the space of 10 minutes — two takes, first and second halves cut together from the two–inch tapes. That was it. Then overdubbed with piano and the other things."

To recreate the pub-ish piano sound that featured on the demo of 'Alright', Sam Williams took some liberties with the studio's Rönisch grand piano. "We nearly fell out with the studio there," he laughs. "I got in there with John Cornfield and I just detuned everything. Not randomly, because I knew what would cause that effect. I didn't need to destabilise the whole piano. I just needed to destabilise two out of three strings [of the chord]. So, if I went sharp and flat on both sides of a relatively accurate string, then you got that pub thing.

"The piano needed to sound inherently out-of-tune. But it didn't go down well with the studio because obviously you've got to put it all back in again. But it worked perfectly for 'Alright'. I think we may have tracked it in octaves, and it did give it a massive sound."

While a guide vocal was always committed to tape during live tracking sessions, typically Williams would re-record Gaz Coombes' lead vocals — and Mick Quinn's characterful falsetto BVs — after the fact, using either an AKG C12 or Neumann U87. "Sometimes guide elements were kept," the producer says. "But often we'd go and cut vocals properly. Mickey was doing incredible backing vocals that were like another personality in the band. Very difficult to record, at the extreme velocity and pitch he was using. But we'd get them right."

On the last of the five days at Sawmills, Williams mixed all six of the tracks that the team had recorded that week, including, of course, 'Alright'. Ahead of the mix session, John Cornfield had set Williams up with a variety of effects sends on the Trident, including to two Revox reel-to-reels used for tape echoes, an EMT 140 plate reverb, a Roland Dimension D stereo chorus, an Eventide DSP4500 harmoniser and a Universal Audio 176 valve limiter.

"The 176 was the original [Bill] Putnam thing which was on the Sinatra and Beach Boys records," Williams recalls. "John used to rig it for our parallel distortion on Gaz's vocal. There was always a tape slap running on every vocal. There was also an AMS [DMX 15-80S] delay but, most of the time, I'd use tape echo if I could.

"I'm used to getting very hands-on on that board," he adds. "So, John would always be amazing in setting me up with a session built on a great engineering basis. I could get in and do my thing as a mixer and cut and craft and shape sounds."

Round Two

As soon as they were completed, Sam Williams brought the first six Supergrass track masters to the attention of Radiohead's managers, Chris Hufford and Bryce Edge of ATC. Williams remembers, "Chris was pretty much like, 'Well, that's the first six singles laid out. Can you ringfence this? And we'll come back on it.'"

The result was Supergrass signing to Parlophone Records and then returning to Sawmills in the summer of 1994 to complete I Should Coco. "It was a golden summer that would never come again," says the producer, "and that's when we cut the rest of the record."

In this second half of the album's sessions, Williams and the band stretched out more in terms of playing and production. "I'd be starting to sit in on keyboards," says Williams. "On the second sessions we had a Vox Continental, so I would be in the room playing on 'I'd Like To Know'. We started using Wulitzer [electric piano] or other keyboards."

Another key track, the mid-paced, early Pink Floyd-y 'Sofa (Of My Lethargy)', featured much instrument-swapping between Williams and the group, the producer moving onto bass to connect with Goffey as a rhythm section, as Quinn changed over to guitar and Coombes to piano. "I was a kind of floating auxiliary player," says Williams. "So, it was a flexible musical thing that could move around very easily like that."

Varispeeding tape was a trick that Williams and the band began to use more during the second set of sessions. The two–inch master of propulsive rocker 'Lenny', for instance, was sped up to achieve the right feel for the track. "That track was 6 to 10 bpm slower," says Williams, "We'd got an accurate cut of 'Lenny' that was too slow, too rock, and we sped it up considerably. We erased the bass and the guitar, and Gaz and Mickey re-recorded them over a sped-up drum track which then had the exact tempo. Whatever it took, we would do it. There wasn't any kind of purist idea of how you do it."

On 'We're Not Supposed To', meanwhile, Williams took a four-track home demo the band had made, experimenting with tape-speed chipmunk-y voices, and embellished it at Sawmills. "That is so Danny and his sense of humour," he laughs. "I took all the crazy things that he'd done from the four-track cassette, spun it onto two-inch and then rebuilt the guitar, the bass, everything around it.

"Congas were overdubbed with that kind of early T Rex/Bolan thing as an influence. Two acoustic guitars, the left/right [panned] stereo thing, and an elastic band kind of bass sound. So, it's actually quite a polished production around a complete bit of lo-fi. It was all very arranged chaos and probably one of the most complex productions, actually, although some people would mistake it for a comedy track."

Elsewhere, two tracks from the original sessions, 'Mansize Rooster' and 'Sitting Up Straight', were re-recorded during this final stretch of making the album. "Because the songs were requesting an alternative approach to the production that wasn't benefitted by speed," says Williams. "You can hear that we've spent more than an hour [laughs] getting a drum sound. Not that it was bad in the first place, 'cause it suited it perfectly

"So, in other words, if you had the options open, cut everything at no-brainer speed to start with. Anything that doesn't make it with that methodology, then apply the remit of more expansive, more detailed production to it. But not the other way around. And that way you're never gonna miss energy, you're never gonna miss capture. You're only gonna expand naturally into things that require it."

Williams thinks that overall the rooms at Sawmills contributed hugely to the tight, fuzzy and energetic sound of I Should Coco: not just the live room playing space, but also the control room during the mixing. "I later noticed that people like Flood would mix in rooms that often didn't have a huge space," he says, "that were very flat and contained and based on that principle. I think, considering its limitations, it was one of the best-sounding, punchy, tight, controlled rooms to mix in."

Postscript

For Sam Williams, his main memories of working with Supergrass on their landmark debut album are of himself and the band laughing. "I've never laughed so much making a record," he says. "To the point where you actually had to stop recording. I'm very grateful and honoured that I've been lucky enough to connect with them."

The subsequent chart success of 'Alright', however, he only remembers as a blur. "It rushed by us like a high-speed train," he says. The producer however is in no doubt as to why the song was set to become regarded as a classic track. "It's incredibly positive," he reasons, "and, actually, it's got two sides to its coin. It's got a very British pub knees-up kind of energy. It's everything that teenage life is about — sex, drugs, rock & roll. It's saying something that you can only really know in that window of time when you're kind of leaving school and before the engagement of other issues becomes unavoidable as an adult.

"But, also, it's looking at identity. It's got a duality which is beautiful: 'Are we like you?/I can't be sure.' Because they were at that age, it was authentic. It was the real thing."

Ultimately, Williams is as thrilled as Supergrass' legions of fans are that the band have decided to reunite. "Yeah, I'm delighted," he states, "because they're a great live band. When I speak to people about Supergrass, I often get the same thing: 'God, weren't they great?'"

Supergrass: The Strange Ones 1994–2008 is out 24 January 2020 on BMG.