2015 HAS some significance for singer-songwriter Gaz Coombes. It was 20 years ago this year his band Supergrass released their debut album I Should Coco - which become the fastest selling debut since The Beatles' Please Please Me - while this year saw the release of his second solo album Matador.
Coombes - who plays Strange Brew at the Róisín Dubh on Thursday December 3 at 8pm - has enjoyed a fair bit of success over the years. With Supergrass he enjoyed 10 Top 20 hits and six Top 20 albums, while solo, his cover of The Kinks ‘This Time Tomorrow’ was featured on a John Lewis advert in 2014, while Matador this year, went Top 20 and enjoyed positive reviews.
While, for many, Coombes is inextricably linked with Supergrass, Matador, like his 2012 solo debut, Here Come The Bombs, is about "creating some distance" between the artist and his previous band, hance a willingness to explore a diverse range of influences - Neu!, Disney musicals, Swedish psychedelicists Goat, modern classical composer Gyorgy Ligeti, and Brian Eno - without abandoning straight up rock.
"I didn’t want the record to sound like anything I’d done before," he says. “Lyrically I wanted to keep it very raw and emotive and the music reflects that. I’d start with a loop or a little riff then use this little blue box I’ve got to take it in various directions – whether it was using different time signatures, adding orchestral samples, or speeding songs up and slowing them down. It might sound arrogant, but I see it as similar to the way you create art - you have to feel it on the spot.”
That said, one of the most notable tracks, 'Detroit', recounts his time in Supergrass, when drugs were starting to take hold: “The poison, the powder and the lies/Better jump right in ‘cos the water’s fine.”
“There’s definitely a tenderness, darkness and uncertainty to the songs,” says Coombes of Matador, "but I think there’s a resilience and a confidence about being vulnerable, even though that sounds contradictory. Life is full of moments of fear, loss and longing, but it’s how you get through those things and triumph over them which define you. But there’s as much light as there is dark on this record; there’s beauty in both of those states and that has always intrigued me."
Tickets are available at www.roisindubh.net, the Ticket Desk at OMG Zhivago, Shop Street, and The Róisín Dubh.
