"I never wanted to be a rock star. I just wanted to be in a band." Alright by Supergrass

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Alright by Supergrass, was seen as a teen anthem when it was released in 1995. The song, and especially the video was everywhere that summer.
 The song, with its upbeat lyrics and cheerful piano and Monkees-esque video, which always seemed to be playing on a music channel, (when they used to actually play music!) seemed to epitomise British youth culture at the time when Britpop was at its height. The band's youthful appearance, lead singer Gaz Coombes was 19 at the time of its release, added teeth (nice and clean) to the lyrics.

However, Coombes said in an interview around October 1995, "it wasn't written as an anthem. It isn't supposed to be a rally cry for our generation. The stuff about 'We are young/We run green...' isn't about being 19, but really 13 or 14. and just discovering girls and drinking."

"It's meant to be light-hearted and a bit of a laugh, not at all a rebellious call to arms." with Danny Goffey also saying: "It certainly wasn't written in a very summery vibe. It was written in a cottage where the heating had packed up, and we were trying to build fires to keep warm."

The band didn't anticipate the song's success, but it has become their signature track over the years. It was even used in the film Clueless, which boosted its profile worldwide.. 

“It started at Danny’s house, where his parents had this knackered piano,” Gaz Coombes told Q magazine in 2011. “One of us started bashing out those chords. We went to the pub and knocked out the lyrics in 10 minutes. The song became our calling card, but I don’t think it was calculated. We were a gang of teenagers, and this was us remembering the innocence of being 13 before we’d delved into the rock ‘n’ roll world. We didn’t know it would be a hit. We got back and suddenly every fucker was recognising us. I never wanted to be a rock star. I just wanted to be in a band."

Producer Sam Williams, who discovered the band and oversaw the making of their debut album I Should Coco, clearly remembers the day that he first encountered the trio in the street in Oxford in 1993.

"I was in a music shop and I came out and saw the boys standing on the pavement," he says. "It was one of those classic, surreal moments. I'd grown up with strong references to early Beatles and the Monkees and the cartoon kind of culture of larger-than-life '60s-looking bands. They didn't look like anything that you'd seen in real life for a long, long time. Danny was wearing a blue velvet suit with red Bowie hair and Gaz had the kind of Neil Young sideburns.

"The feeling was that it was just an immediate, magnetic attraction. Something in me just went, 'I don't know who that is. But I know that's a band and I know I'm going to produce them.'"

The song still sounds great today, in fact, that whole first album is just as impactful and jubilant now as it was then. 
My kids look at me strangely when I sing "We Are Young..." But surely, like The Who said about their lyric stating, they "hope we die before we get OLD..." it's about feeling and acting old, rather than being about age... surely... anybody? 

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