Supergrass, Glasgow review: 'still big kids at heart'

Anyone who’s alarmed and disorientated to hear that Supergrass’s debut album I Should Coco – possibly the Britpop era’s purest expression of youthful abandon – is now 30 years old can take comfort in the band themselves, freshly reunited to tour the record in full.

While there’s less of the frantic physical energy of their earliest days, Gaz Coombes, Danny Goffey and Mick Quinn – plus Coombes’ keyboard-playing brother Rob, an accomplice since the beginning and a full member since 2002 – are well-preserved middle-aged gents. They don’t look or sound out of place revisiting simple, punky songs about being a 15-year-old getting busted for drug possession (Caught By the Fuzz) or about being young and endlessly carefree (Alright, still their signature and joint-biggest hit).

Playing against a backdrop of large prints of their cheeky young airbrushed faces, taken from the album’s cover, at this first of two Barrowland nights, the Oxford quartet happily recreated this music with the same volume and energy it had way back when. That’s an essential requirement on, for example, the jittery outsider anthem I’d Like to Know, its bristling, sulky, satisfyingly heavy companion piece Strange Ones and the toytown glam of Mansize Rooster.

None of these are songs you enter into performing lightly if you aren’t a teen or early twentysomething, but Supergrass carried them off with style, as Coombes and Goffey’s matey hellos reinforced the sense they remain big kids at heart. Meanwhile, the back end of the album – from the complex, adrenalised Lenny to the swaying groove of Time and chucking-out anthem Time to Go – pointed towards the serious, acclaimed rock of Coombes’ solo years.

Without leaving the stage they dived into a flurry of later greatest hits, which really emphasised how I Should Coco was a series of precocious beginner steps in comparison to this band’s later great leaps, from the fiery urgency of Richard III and Grace to the effortless pop perfection of Sun Hits the Sky and Pumping On Your Stereo. Nostalgia is fun, but the grown-up years were the best part of the set.

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