Supergrass are still living down their most famous song, in various ways. The celebratory pubescent rallying call Alright, which chopper-biked this Oxford trio to the top of the charts in 1995 turned out to be an anthem for doomed youth.
Weary of the bouncy-teen stereotype, Supergrass crafted their "mature" second album, In it for the Money, while their singer, Gaz Coombes, was only 21. Last month's release, Supergrass, continues the process whereby, to lay to rest the ghost of their public adolescence, a band at the turn of their 20s dabble in dinosaur-rock and lyrical melancholy. At this rate of accelerated ageing, Coombes will be crooning in Vegas by the time he's 25.
But while the band's head and heart say "grow up", the feet say "can we still stomp?" The resulting identity crisis was much in evidence on the first of Supergrass's two nights at the Forum. The opening 10 minutes traced a schizophrenic trajectory from the new single Moving's "got a low, low feeling around me/ and a stone cold feeling inside", to the indestructible Alright refrain, "we are young, we run green/ keep our teeth, nice and clean".
The band are clearly developing noodly instincts: fretboards were fretted, keyboards surfaced brazenly above the sonic broth, and the more portentous material from the new album was staged in a positively sepulchral manner. Are Supergrass an embryonic Pink Floyd? Even the lights seemed to want to put on a show.
But the gig consistently returned from the brink of pomp and psychedelia. There seemed always to be another Space Hopper springalong - Caught by the Fuzz, Sun Hits the Sky, Going Out - up Supergrass's sleeve. And they do them so well. Until they acquire the swagger or sophistication of their more illustrious Britpop peers, Supergrass's USP will remain their youthful ebullience.
The show's strongest moments see the two sides of Supergrass's warring personality make peace. On Faraway, the band's new-found introspection hijacks the join-me-in-the-bouncy-castle seductiveness of cheeky-era Supergrass. Its success points to a rosy future for the still-maturing Supergrass, but both band and fans must first get those chopper-charged two-minute pop-songs out of their system, and they're all young enough to savour them for a while yet.
