Gaz Coombes tells Tim Hughes he is delighted by the response to his homegrown new album - but warned his friends to stay away from the stage at his Oxford gig!

Gaz Coombes is having a busy day. Heck, he’s having a busy year.

Five years after the break-up of Supergrass, and almost three years since the release of his debut solo album, he is back with a record so fine it’s got everyone excited all over again.

So hectic is life for Wheatley’s greatest son, he barely has time to breath – let alone sit and talk. One of many things to love about Gaz, though, is that he has never lost sight of his roots. Very far from it. So when we asked him for a chat, he was, as usual, only too happy to oblige.

“It’s another busy day!” he laughs over the phone, while driving up the M40 for a session with BBC 6Music.

“I’m on the motorway to London, but we’ve got a long way to go, so we can have a good chat.”

The reaction to his new album Matador – the follow up to the acclaimed Here Comes the Bombs – has been excitable to say the least, with fans and critics alike falling for its genre-bending beauty, technical brilliance and sense of space. It this week debuted in the album charts at number 18. Gaz admits he is pleased by the reviews. “I’ve been blown away by the response,” he says. “I know what I like the sound of and I know what excites me musically, but whether everyone else agrees with me is something I’m never sure of. It’s dangerous to be too complacent, but the response has been amazing – and it’s from fans. It has been really humbling. It’s something I didn’t expect.”

It’s well over 20 years since the fresh-faced Gaz made his first noises in the music industry, initially with The Jennifers before forming Supergrass with bandmate Danny Goffey and friend Mick Quinn, whom he had met while working at a local Harvester.

The band, later joined by Gaz’s brother Rob, went on to become one of the biggest of the ‘90s, scoring six top 20 albums, three of them platinum – including the seminal I Should Coco, which was the biggest-selling debut for Parlophone since the Beatles released Please Please Me in 1963.

While his debut solo marked a clear departure, Matador takes Gaz in yet another direction. Still fresh faced and sporting those impressive trademark sideburns, he has made his mark as a groundbreaking singer-songwriter and technician.

Everything on the record was played by Gaz, with the exception of drumming on four of the tracks by Ride’s Loz Colbert, and synths on one track (Buffalo) by his brother Charly.

It was recorded at the home in Wheatley Gaz shares with his partner Jools and children Raya and Tiger, and at Courtyard Studios in Sutton Courtenay.

“It was a clean start,” he says. “It has to be. Each record has to be a reaction to the last one. There will always be things I’ll pick up on from the last record, but all ideas are new ideas.”

And what are his favourites? “It’s hard to do this ‘favourite’ thing,” he says. It changes day by day; week by week.

“What’s cool is playing them live. I love the way they take on a whole different attitude and character and assert themselves the more I play them. It’s a really exciting way of doing it.”

And how did he find the process of taking on practically every task himself?

“It was free and liberating doing it in our own studio – but sometimes I had to get out! I got cabin fever, which is why I spent some time at Courtyard to get a bit of time and space, and to work with Ian [Davenport] over there.

“That helped lighten the load and helped me mentally put a bit of freshness into it. The whole process was a mixture of self-doubt and confidence, and I bounced between the two.”

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Certainly the whole project has ‘made in Wheatley’ running through it like a stick of rock. Gaz agrees. “I didn’t plan it like that though,” he says. “At the moment my head is not in a place where I am up for a professional studio setting, and going in those places where everything is ready to go. I’ve always been really into the whole process of recording demos, and what they sound like, and I wanted to achieve that earthy spontaneity in my home studio, with things getting broken and that world of mess and happy accidents.

“Recording and doing parts on my own was more about getting ideas down. Though Loz helped with some amazing playing, and it was good to get some good drums going too.”

With the phone signal faltering as his car heads into the Chilterns, we struggle to hear each other. “We might get cut off in a bit,” he warns me. “We’re just about to go through the cutting.”

And with that he’s gone. Then back. Then gone again.

Safely into Buckinghamshire, and signal restored, I ask him if there was also an element of control freakery going on during recording? “It’s more about being picky and a slight perfectionist rather than being controlling,” he says. “I just like experimenting and playing with ideas – and what I enjoyed the most was pulling it all together into something coherent; making it all in my weird little world.”

So how does he now regard his years with the chart-topping Mercury, Brit and Ivor Novello award-winning band with which he made his name? “I am really proud of that time,” he says. “And it wouldn’t be going so well now, if I hadn’t spent all that time with Supergrass. They were the defining years of my life and I’m totally proud of it.

“But there’s no point living off a legacy, playing half Supergrass songs in the set, or stuffing it down people’s throats. I like to think people are more into hearing new stuff.”

We get a chance to hear that new stuff on Saturday when he returns to the O2 Academy Oxford – just up the road from his old house in Cowley Road. “It’s always a tough one playing your home town,” he laughs.

“There’s all the pressure and tension of having fans and friends – including those friends who insist on standing right at the front, in my line of vision. It’s more terrifying playing to a few of your friends than to 80,000 people at Glastonbury.

“I have to tell them to move!”

CHECK IT OUT
Gaz Coombes plays the O2 Academy Oxford on Saturday. Tickets are £16.87 from ticketweb.co.uk 
Matador is out now on Hot Fruit Recordings