Live Review + Gallery | Supergrass @ Bristol Sounds

Supergrass

Bristol Sounds

25th June 2025

Photography by Sam Wilson

Amelie Peters

Writer/designer and sub-editor for Epigram. If you wish to summon me, say something relatively pretentious about post punk music three times, click your heels and I’ll appear.

With support from Sports Team, Supergrass show Bristol’s crowd that they’ve still got it, with a setlist of Britpop classics

Opening the set with the ever classic “do you know what i mean, one, two, one, two, three four”, Gaz Coombes reminds us of one thing – he can in fact count to four. The glitzy riffs of ‘I’d Like To Know’ echo around the Bristol harbourside and immediately conjures up images of my Britpop-soundtracked childhood, transported in a grungy sticker-covered headphones second to the place where it all started – ‘I Should Coco’.

When the anouncement came, the revered reforming of the raucous Supergrass, all middle-aged dads cocked their ears. Flocking to the harborside with their cans of Bristol-brewed organic cider, the people of Bristol bowed to the regal vocals, jazzy energy and musical abstraction of day one of Bristol Sounds.

Opening for the band is Sports Team, performing a setlist overwhelmingly from their latest album ‘Boys These Days’. Witty and unabashedly sardonic, the Cambridge-formed band created a musical gravity field strong enough to pull Enid from Stroud away from the merch stand, and a ten quid pint her bank account will sigh at tomorrow.

The set is powerful, chaotic and charming. Despite the mysterious ramblings of frontman Alex Rice (“I was trying to roll back the years, traversing Bristol harbourside”), the crowd were enchanted. Pulled in by the sense of purpose and politically quippy verses, for many in the crowd this was an introduction to the band, and likely not one they shall forget.

The front runner of the set was ‘Maybe When We’re Thirty’, a stellar example of Sports Team‘s departure from their guitar-driven youthful chaos to a heavier incorporation of saxophone, keyboards and 80s influences. The song’s sardonic approach to the middle class and idealistic modern future looks like a hazy sunday dream.

Its stylistic humor suggests that it’s okay to want the mundane future in a world that feels so foreign: The future that is buying a house and heckling the Beckhams – one that was so easy for our parents’ generation but for us starts to buckle under the weight of dead-end pub jobs and the iterative phrase ‘you will never own a house’.

The laughable future, the one I used to belittle, is the future we have all started to crave. Whilst still maintaining the classic Sports Team humour, the content speaks to a development musically and personally that is lovely to see.

Entering the stage with a swagger that only comes from writing ‘Alright’ is Supergrass. Clad in bakerboy hat and eyeliner that playfully hasn’t improved since the 90s is Gaz Coombes, as spritefully youthful as ever – it’s safe to say my mother will still be lusting after him and his weirdly shaped goatee.

The feeling in the crowd is eclectic, people reminiscing about their Supergrass-soundtracked roots, people hearing their favourite band for the first time. Either way, the crowd were in awe and moving to the ecstatic hum of the riffs – with some owing thanks to titanium hip replacements.

‘Pumping On Your Stereo,‘ one of the final tracks of the night, is zingy and livening, but the lackluster repetitive lyrics leave the zingy appeal with a slightly sour aftertaste of mundanity. Whilst a crowd pleaser and the perfunctory answer to “Oh, what song would I know by Supergass?” I dare to utter the pretentious phrase: “I kinda prefer their more underground stuff”.

We all know ‘Alright’, we all know ‘Moving’ and ‘Richard III’ but ‘Sofa (Of My Lethargy)‘ is the song that sits like a maggot in my mind, burrowing deep, pressing emotional focal points like a rhythmic scalpel. Not the lyrics, nor the melody, but the harkening to a profound sense of inertia.

This lethargy and longing comes at a poignant time for me, with the passing of a close friend the week before; the words seemed to capture a malaise and struck a powerful chord. Whilst similarly incredibly prevalent to the current political climate, the introspective tone sends me into a melancholic revery. Infrequently played, the song is one of my favourites and displays the authorial prowess of the band.

Watching the sunset of the harbour, the air balloons pass in the gods, and hearing the melodic musings of ‘I Should Coco’, I feel a sense of peaceful bliss. Bristol Sounds and the sounds of Bristol hum by in a night of exquisite music, chaotic jams and smiling faces of a crowd that are going to miss their meals on wheels because of a Jubel-inspired hangover.