This song embodies the spirit of youth, when we're free to hang out, see the sights, and write goofy lines like this one:
We run green
Keep our teeth nice and clean
Supergrass lead singer Gaz Coombes was still a teenager when the song was released on their first album, I Should Coco, in 1995.
Supergrass is a British band that was part of the Britpop scene in the '90s. "Alright" was a big hit in the UK, but most Americans know it from the 1995 movie Clueless, where it plays in a scene where Cher (Alicia Silverstone) takes pictures of her friends in front of a fountain. The song also shows up in the 2000 movie On The Edge.
The video shows the band larking about on bicycles and a giant flying bed. It was directed by the team of Dom and Nic, who did all of the early Supergrass videos and later directed "
Ava Adore" for Smashing Pumpkins.
According to
Spin magazine, the video attracted Stephen Spielberg's interest and he offered the group a Monkees-type TV show, but they turned him down.
The song was a UK hit in July and August, 1995, but it was written in the dead of winter. Gaz Coombes told the story to Q magazine April 2011: "It started at Danny (Goffey, drummer)'s house, where his parents had this knackered piano. 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, but we got back from our first tour of the States and suddenly old ladies were recognizing us on the street."
"Alright" was released as a double A-side single with "Time."
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Bassist Mick Quinn told Uncut magazine about his contribution to the song. "I think Danny and Gaz cooked up the verse and the chorus - they'll always argue about who came up with that piano," he recalled. "Then I came along and said, well, you need a middle 8. And I took it to G and Gaz did that very rock-and-roll solo over the top, and then I came up with the idea of doing that Peter Green bending solo, and Gaz came up with a harmony for that. We always wrote a lot of lyrics in the pub as we were recording."
Mick Quinn identified this as a hit from the moment the band recorded the instrumentation. He recalled to Q: "I knew the backing track for 'Alright' was bulletproof. I've got a distinct memory of staring at the two-inch turning around while that backing track was playing and thinking, that's a bulletproof backing track, that's gonna be enormous. That's gonna light people up. Even when we had it as a demo, there was something about it. It was so simplistic and stuck in your head."