An Oxford arrest, then a Sawmills single John Peel kept
The story is not a pose. Gaz Coombes was 15 in Oxford, caught with hash, and the song runs the panic: the police, the station, his mother walking in. On record it lasts 2 minutes and 17 seconds, fast enough that the fright and the joke occupy the same bars. Gaz, Danny Goffey and Mick Quinn wrote it. They had come out of The Jennifers, still a three-piece, with Gaz’s voice high and the guitars distorted rather than cleaned up for radio. “Fuzz” is the old slang for the police. The title is the plot.
The first pressing was a Backbeat 7-inch in August 1994, Caught by the Fuzz on one side and Strange Ones on the other, a small run that sold through. Parlophone reissued it on 17 October 1994. It reached UK number 43 at the end of that month and stayed on the chart for two weeks. John Peel placed it at number five in his 1994 Festive 50. The recording was made at Sawmills Studio in Golant, Cornwall, with Sam Williams and John Cornfield producing. Williams had offered demo time after hearing the early singles. Those Sawmills tapes are what brought the labels in, before an A&R gig at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford sealed the Parlophone deal. The single that charted is already the version that would sit on the album, not a sketch they later replaced.
The video does not restage the arrest. Dom Hawley and Nic Goffey, billed as Dom and Nic, shot the band on Super 8, on stage and in between. It was their first music video. A US cut used footage from America instead, and that version later turned up in the Beavis and Butt-Head episode “Sprout” in 1996. The song waited until 2007 for another public life, on the soundtrack of Hot Fuzz. None of that is inside the 1994 recording. What is there is the speed: Mick’s bass runs, a snare that does not sit back, Gaz yelping the story as if he is still late for the conversation with his mum. The US sleeve almost used a mugshot of Hugh Grant. His lawyers complained, and the idea was dropped. The British sleeve stayed a black-and-white cartoon of a policeman pointing.
It’s all true, so it was easy to write. It wasn’t funny at the time. I was only 15 and shitting myself. The song has that disturbing energy. It’s comparable to your heart racing.
(Gaz Coombes, as quoted in a 2015 profile)
I Should Coco followed on 15 May 1995 and went to number one in the UK. It became the biggest-selling debut album on Parlophone since the Beatles. Mansize Rooster and then Alright were the next singles, and Alright is the one the decade kept, with the Chopper bikes and the grin. Caught by the Fuzz is the one that got them in the door, and it is meaner. The adrenaline Gaz compared to a racing heart is the arrangement: no intro to speak of, a chorus that is basically the title shouted, and a band that sounds as if it might fall over and does not. Peel heard that before the album existed.
Play the Parlophone version from I Should Coco, not a later anniversary campaign. Two minutes, Cornwall, three teenagers who had already been nicked for something small and had written it down before anyone asked them to sound like Britpop. The single stopped at 43. The next album did not. If you want the Supergrass people mean when they say the name, start here, then let Alright arrive as the second thought, not the first.
