June 1997, and the chorus is built to be shouted back
Sun Hits the Sky opens on a fuzz riff from Gaz Coombes, not a piano and not a joke. Rob Coombes answers on organ. Mick Quinn and Danny Goffey play big, and the chorus is the wide part: he knows a place where the sun hits the sky. The track runs 4:55, long for a Supergrass single. After the second chorus Rob takes a synthesizer solo that keeps going the way a prog solo keeps going, except the band never turns it into a costume. Percussionist Satin Singh is on the album credit. The coda drops to bass, organ and bongos. Three months after Richard III had stopped at number two, this was the daylight follow-up.
In It for the Money was already out, on 21 April 1997, recorded at Sawmills and produced by the band with John Cornfield. Sun Hits the Sky was the third single, after Going Out and Richard III, released 9 June 1997 on Parlophone, catalogue CDR 6469. The Official Chart of 21 June shows it at number ten. It lasted four weeks. Scotland had it at seven, Iceland at 16, the Netherlands at 81. The B-side is a cover of the Smiths’ Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others, which is a very Supergrass way of spending the extra track: one eye on British pop of the previous decade, the other on a chorus that wants a field. Songwriting credit includes Rob, all over this record even before he was a full member on the sleeve.
Dom and Nic directed the video, as they had since Mansize Rooster. Nic is Danny Goffey’s brother, and by 1997 the pair had a run of Supergrass clips the band trusted. This one does not repeat the Portmeirion caper or the Fuller’s earth basement. It matches a song whose lyric keeps pointing up and whose arrangement keeps adding instruments instead of stripping them. On the album it sits with Late in the Day and Going Out, the songs that proved the second record was not a louder copy of I Should Coco. NME had given the album 8/10. This single is the one you can hear across a crowd.
On In It for the Money we were on our own. We had no producer, even though we were only 18 or 19. We just went for it in the studio. It was a really, really exciting time.
(Gaz Coombes, interview with Robert Collins, 2004)
The self-production is the point of the quote, and you can hear it in the length. A label producer might have shaved the synthesizer solo. Cornfield and the band left it in, then let the song fall apart into bongos instead of a last shouted chorus. That is a choice, not an accident. Richard III had been the door slam. Sun Hits the Sky is the same room with the windows open: still loud, still Oxford, but the organ is doing as much work as the guitar.
It did not match the number two of the spring, and it did not need to. Number ten in June, a Smiths song on the flip, and a chorus you can sing without knowing the verses, was enough to keep the second album in the shops through the summer. If you want the Supergrass of 1997 without the devil’s chord, start here. The fuzz riff is the handshake. The organ is why you stay.
