Playlouder - Music is the Network

It takes a good handful of ambition (or perhaps just a sizeable chunk of chutzpah) for a band beloved for their string of summery smile-along smashes to tour a good half-a-dozen or so songs from an album that more or less no bugger has heard yet.

It’s easy enough to do if you’re Radiohead, and your fans are happy to put down any old tat you come out with as the product of experimental genius, but when you’re Supergrass and most of your followers want to make believe that it’s still 1995 and pogo all over the place, filling your set with unknowns risks making the assembled masses somewhat restless.

This is especially true when your last three albums have given a lot of people the impression that you’re simply going through the motions – mixing in the odd bouncing blockbuster amid an album full of quality, but largely forgettable, all-round more relaxed tunes than the ones produced as a bunch of hirsute happy-go-lucky teenagers well over a decade ago.

And, since the daft chaps in the Commons thought it’d be a jolly good idea if gig-goers could smell, not smoke but each other’s sweat, standing around with time to think and sniff, as opposed to going a bit mental in the moshpit can make the odd reveller rather irked.

Despite all this, and despite the slightly odd decision to fill in some of the gaps between the new stuff with more-beautiful-than-bonkers tunes like "St Petersburg" and something off Road to Rouen that Supergrass themselves probably struggle to recognise now and then, it works.

Supergrass have a knack of making the weird work (a good job for a band who’ve decided to call their new album Diamond Hoo Ha). They’re both the band you want to be in (who else sounds like they have so much fun making their music?) and the band your mum would want you to be in (playing with the nice young boys from Oxford, who don’t seem to swear too much and remind people of The Kinks).

There’s a welcome energy about the performance that flies around the Roundhouse walls, encircling a congregation collectively embracing the hairy howling emanating from the front.

Yet it’s not so much the energy that’s the key, so much as the ease with which it is delivered. There’s no manic headbanging or dancing around like a drunken Geordie in Benidorm. It’s simply effortless.

Supergrass could come on stage in a semi-comatose state and play their instruments by twitching their cheeks in some clever Stephen-Hawking-style way, and they’d still exude more energy than most bands the right side of Coldplay do in an entire tour. When Tom Smith of Editors tried to do energy at Ally Pally the other week, he looked like he might pass out under the strain.

It’s an effortlessness that’s reflected in every tune and allows Supergrass to segue straight from a cover of Sting’s "Next To You" to storming set-closer and perennial favourite "Caught By The Fuzz", without anyone wondering what's going on.

Set list:

New - Diamond Hoo Ha Man

New - ???

She’s so loose

New – Rebel in You

Richard III

New – Ghost of a Friend (Danny vocals)

Kiss of Life

New - ???

Brecon Beacons

St Petersburg

Road to Rouen

New - Outside

New - When I needed you (???)

Moving

Sun Hits the Sky

Pumping on your stereo

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Eon

Next To You (Sting cover)

Caught by the fuzz