Supergrass’ debut single, Caught by the Fuzz, was released 29 years ago today, which seems as good a reason as any to trot out lead singer Gaz Coombes’ anecdote about meeting Cliff Richard at a record label party in late 1994.
Gaz was introduced as a young man who’d “just had his first hit single at the age of 18”. Cliff, being Cliff, went full Cliff and said
Well, of course, you know I had my first hit single when I was just 17.
Gaz:
Yeah, but I bet it wasn’t about snorting coke, was it?
There seem to be different versions of this story. It looks like it first turned up in Melody Maker the following February — according to Uncut, anyway:
…although they seem to have Radiohead introducing Coombes to The Peter Pan Of Pop, whereas when the story turned up in the Grauniad weekend magazine in the mid-90s (where I saw it), it was a Parlophone executive who did the introducing.
I can’t find a reference to the Grauniad story anywhere, and Uncut suggest it may be apocryphal — and, fact fans, Caught by the Fuzz is about being done for possession of cannabis at the age of 15.
I can believe that if Radiohead and Supergrass were at the same party, one might introduce the other to Cliff for a laugh, and the detail of his words is entirely in character. (In fact, he probably said “…the first of over 100 hit singles I’ve had over five decades…”)
But I wonder if it really happened. I like to believe it’s true — making it the second funniest thing anyone’s said to Sir Toothy Cliff.
