A cold cottage first. Portmeirion came after the chart
Danny Goffey’s parents kept a knackered piano in a cottage where the heating had given up. Supergrass, still an Oxford gang barely out of their teens, bashed the staccato chords, walked to the pub, and had a lyric in about ten minutes. Gaz Coombes was remembering 13 or 14, not issuing a speech. Mick Quinn came up with “keep our teeth nice and clean” and later called the song a throwaway, closer to a toothpaste advert than a plan. He also stared at the two-inch tape of the backing track and decided it was bulletproof.
They cut it at Sawmills, the residential studio on the River Fowey at Golant, during the I Should Coco sessions of 1994. Producer Sam Williams and engineer John Cornfield wanted the demo’s out-of-tune pub piano, so they detuned the studio Rönisch grand, pulling two of the three strings on the notes until the chord wobbled. The studio was not pleased about putting it back in tune. Gaz sang and played the piano, Mick played bass, Danny played drums. On the middle eight Quinn shifted the song to G, Gaz answered with a rock and roll solo, then a Peter Green-style bend with a harmony on top. Three minutes, and finished.
Parlophone released the single on 3 July 1995, catalogue CDR 6413, with Time as the other A-side, a cover of Kenny Rogers’ Just Dropped In retitled Condition, and a short instrumental, Je suis votre papa sucre. The 7-inch followed on 10 July. The Official Chart of 15 July put Alright/Time at number two. It stayed inside the top three for a month and lasted ten weeks. Ireland took Alright to eight, France to 30, Iceland to six. The same summer it sat on the Clueless soundtrack. Dom and Nic filmed the band at Portmeirion in North Wales, the village from The Prisoner: bicycles, a bed on wheels, a Carry On reading of 1960s television. Gaz was 19. Steven Spielberg saw the clip and offered a Monkees-style series. The band said no.
It wasn’t written as an anthem. It isn’t supposed to be a rally cry for our generation. The stuff about ‘We are young, we run green’ isn’t about being 19, but really 13 or 14, and just discovering girls and drinking. It’s meant to be lighthearted and a bit of a laugh, not at all a rebellious call to arms.
(Gaz Coombes, Q, October 1995)
James Masterton, in his weekly chart note, wrote that if every band has a masterpiece, this was the one for Supergrass, a cross between the Small Faces and Duran Duran. Steve Sutherland in NME reached for Satisfaction, My Generation and Lazy Sunday. Paul Mathur in Melody Maker heard The Rutles and “the most brilliantly dumb lyrics you could ever hope to hear”. School-leavers wanted it all summer. It also became the shadow. Quinn told The Guardian in 2015 that Alright turned into a millstone, and that Going Out and Richard III were partly a way of saying there was more to the group than the grin.
In 1999 Coombes joked that they did not play it anymore, and that if they did it should be in a minor key and in the past tense. They played it again. The BPI has since certified the single double platinum. Travie McCoy sampled it in 2010 for We’ll Be Alright. The piano is still what starts the room: detuned on purpose, obvious from the first bar, and done before the chorus has asked anyone to feel alright.
