E-Mail This Article to a Friend Ten years strong Supergrass celebrate a decade of stargazing BY MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG

In the summer of 1994, Rob Coombes was a 22-year-old astrophysics scholar at Cardiff University setting up fiberoptic links between telescope and spectrograph so that he could better study the heavens. Meanwhile, back in his native Oxford, younger brother Gaz, just 18, was dreaming of the stars in a different way: the singer/guitarist had formed a band — initially dubbed Theodore Supergrass — with pals Danny Goffey on drums and Mickey Quinn on bass, and he was getting ready to unleash a debut single, "Caught by the Fuzz," a brash two-minute tune inspired by the group’s collective love of T. Rex, the Buzzcocks, the Kinks, and the Beatles.

The song was an instant British smash, and within months, the upstart trio were being courted as a next big thing. After Supergrass’s 1995 full-length bow, I Should Coco (Capitol), spawned the summer pop anthem "Alright," the band were ready for their first headlining tour. And that’s when the just-graduated Rob got the call to put his intended career on hold.

"They desperately needed someone to play the keyboards on ‘Alright,’ and anyway, it was only supposed to be for a year," he chuckles. "I had really enjoyed what I was doing at school and wanted to do that for a living, but Gaz was like, ‘Come on, I know you haven’t played piano since you were seven, but you can play on a couple songs, have a few beers, see a bit of the world.’ It was too good an offer to refuse, really. No one would have bet that any of it would last, but it just kept growing from there."

Indeed, it did. A string of British hit singles and three more acclaimed albums followed, Supergrass established themselves as one of England’s most dynamic live bands, and they developed a sturdy cult following in the US. After years of co-writing songs and touring with the band, Rob was finally made an official member in 2002.

Now, a decade after it all began, the band are celebrating their 10th anniversary with the CD/DVD set Supergrass Is 10: The Best of 94–04 (Capitol), a collection of hits, B-sides, and two new songs, "Kiss of Life" and "Bullet." To mark its release, they’ve embarked on a six-city US tour that comes to the Paradise tonight, September 30. "To be honest, I didn’t really think it was important to mark the anniversary until we started getting this album and DVD together," Rob admits. "Especially the DVD. We had thousands of hours of footage from friends, colleagues, crew, fans . . . basically anyone who’s had a video camera in their hands around us over the past 10 years. And when we had a chance to sit down and look back and put everything in perspective, it was really cool."

That Supergrass have made it this far is an accomplishment in itself. That they’re still as energetic and, well, relevant (last year’s Life on Other Planets was as exuberant and enjoyable an album as they’ve recorded) is pretty remarkable when you consider the fate of many of their Britpop brethren. It’s rare for next-big-things in Great Britain to last long enough to put out a second album, and the ones who are still around — Oasis and Blur are the two biggies — haven’t exactly been pumping out the hits of late. But Supergrass never engaged in stupid feuds with other bands, never succumbed to internal strife, and never made outrageous claims about their importance. They just wrote great songs and managed to maintain their enthusiasm when contemporaries like Radiohead didn’t.

Coombes admits that all of this anniversary business has given the band a more vigorous outlook on the next album, which they hope to have finished by the spring. "Just seeing the whole thing over 10 years makes me feel like we’ve done really well but that we can do even better and make something really, really special." And taking some time to reflect on all that Supergrass has accomplished, he says, assuages any regrets he has over choosing the band over astrophysics. "Sometimes I’ll watch the Discovery Channel and feel like I should have stuck to what I was doing 10 years ago, but then I would have missed out on so much, just being creative and seeing the world and playing music every night. Besides, I’ve destroyed so many brain cells since I joined this band that it’s probably too late now."

Supergrass headline tonight, September 30, at the Paradise, 967 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston; call (617) 228-6000.