Track five on the first album that billed Rob Coombes
The lyric starts on a Sunday after a night or two of driving, looking out of the window, tired enough that another drink will do. It is not a single. It is track five of Life on Other Planets, 4:02, between Brecon Beacons and Evening of the Day. Gaz Coombes sings about living a story he heard on a 45, a highway, California coming into sight, then the refrain: he can’t get up, though he tries, standing in a forest of reasons. A later verse pulls in the news, blood on the streets, a moth and a flame. A contemporary review heard Gimme Shelter in the scale of it: blues-rock, not the Britpop sprint.
Life on Other Planets is the fourth Supergrass album and the first that lists Rob Coombes as a full member, on keyboards, beside Gaz, Mick Quinn and Danny Goffey. They had felt the self-titled third album, from 1999, lacked urgency, so they hired Tony Hoffer. Recording ran from October 2001 to March 2002 at Mayfair, Heliocentric and Rockfield. Hoffer produced. The band’s own notes credit Dave Sardy with the mix of Can’t Get Up. A Helioscentric demo survived and showed up on the 2023 remaster, about a minute shorter, which tells you the arrangement grew in the room rather than arriving finished.
The album reached the shops on 30 September 2002 via Parlophone and peaked at number nine in Britain. The singles were elsewhere: Never Done Nothing Like That Before, Grace, Seen the Light, Rush Hour Soul. Can’t Get Up stayed an album track, which suited it. The record’s other borrowings are louder. Gaz leans toward Marc Bolan on Seen the Light, there is an Elvis turn, and Evening of the Day nods at Spinal Tap. Can’t Get Up is the slower, Stones-shaped one, with the four of them finally a quartet on the sleeve. Before release they played new songs at the Meltdown festival David Bowie curated at the Royal Festival Hall on 28 June 2002. On 9 December they did Can’t Get Up at the Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam, a version that later landed on the deluxe edition, next to an XFM acoustic.
He helped us keep the takes quite short and sweet. We really didn’t mess around because he kept us moving. If we had done it on our own again, we’d just get really analytical and start crying and trying to mend things that weren’t broken.
(Danny Goffey on producer Tony Hoffer, 2002)
Hoffer’s job was pace. Left alone, the band had started editing themselves into corners. Here the song is allowed to be four minutes, long for them, but it does not wander. The chorus is one sentence. The forest of reasons is concrete enough: a band that had been famous at 19, writing about not being able to start the day. That is a different problem from Alright, and they do not pretend otherwise.
The 2023 remaster put the demo next to the finished take, which is the useful comparison. The demo is the Heliocentric sketch. The album version is what Sardy and Hoffer left standing. If you want the Supergrass of 2002 without the glam single, start here, then Grace. The forest is still the line that sticks, and the clock Hoffer was watching is why it sticks in four minutes instead of eight.
