Fuzz and frenzy
Some songs walk into a room. Smiling as the mayhem develops, Richard III kicks the door off its hinges and hurls a pint across the floor. By the time Supergrass released this beast in 1997, already shed their “cheeky chappies” image from I Should Coco. Gone were the parkas and pogoing; this was a slimmer, darker beast powered by fuzz pedals, basement echoes, and whatever they had been breathing during those Oxford nights.
With a riff that seems like it has been scooped right off the garage floor, greasy, rough, and totally uncompromising, the track comes out of the gate. Gaz Coombes screams through closed teeth; his voice wavers somewhere between glam panache and total psychotic attack. It’s heavy, sure, but not lumbering; this is speed-psych, punk-drunk Sabbath in a hurry. A song that appears as though it is about to crash into itself somehow manages to swerve just in time.
Oddly (or ingeniously), the title barely has anything to do with Shakespeare. There is no hump, horse, or monologue. Possibly just a subtle nod to evil or maybe they just liked the sound of it. Supergrass were never interested in following the regulations; even when flirting with the mainstream, they had a tendency to hurl sand in the eyes of expectation. Richard III is a great example: a single loud enough to shatter teeth, dropped in the middle of the hangover period of Britpop, when most artists were either playing it safe or playing it sad.
The band liked the reference to the king Richard III and the Shakespeare play Richard III in which the king is depicted as a dark and evil character, as it matched the menacing toneof the song.
(1997)
John Cornfield and the band themselves provided the production, lean and powerful; this was no glossy, label-led affair. In a mosh-pit kind of way, it was raw, visceral, and strangely danceable. Listen carefully and you will hear echoes of T. Rex, The Stooges, even a tiny early Queens of the Stone Age, except all filtered through that particular English humor Supergrass never quite lost.
Richard III eventually ensured you were paying attention instead of only declared Supergrass 2.0. The track struck No. 2 in the UK charts (their highest placement ever), shows you could still be loud, be strange, and top 10 in the late 90s. It was a sonic middle finger concealed as a hit single. Decades later, it still snarles with that same crazy appeal: a track that defies conformity and is all the better for it.
