The crazy tale of the time Steven Spielberg wanted to make a TV show with Supergrass

Spielberg and Supergrass - what could've been — (Image credit: Mark Sennet/Getty Images, Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images)

Supergrass had the sort of whirlwind success around their 1995 debut I Should Coco that can do funny things to your brain. Gaz Coombes, Mick Quinn and Danny Goffey, three teenagers from Oxford, went from zero to Britpop heroes and it wasn’t just in the UK that the trio were in much demand. As Coombes told recounted to me a few years ago, there was excitement about Supergrass building in the US too. “I remember being 17 and going to California and play the Troubadour,” recalled the singer. “That was mental.”

Crazier things were about to happen, though. In between their first and second records, the group were contacted by Steven Spielberg because the superstar director wanted to make a TV show with Supergrass as the main players. “It was basically due to the success of Alright through that summer and our videos and how inspired they were,” Coombes said, adding that it was Spielberg’s kids who had alerted him to these cheeky scamps making buoyant indie anthems on the other side of the Atlantic. “First off, it was a call through from his people to see if we were up for discussing some ideas, then they asked us if we wanted to go over and meet him at his offices at Universal Studios. We took our girlfriends and [video directors] Nick and Dom and went to meet him, went and had a meeting at his ranch. We were welcomed by Bunny, his assistant, and it was quite mad. When we first met, we shook hands and stuff and I sat down next to him and I got on to talking about the old Twilight Zones, going ‘I love that one…’ and we bonded really immediately on 50s Twilight Zone, which was cool or maybe that was me trying to anticipate the inevitable cheesy approach that was going to be suggested, the band living in a house together like The Monkees…”

In the end, Supergrass said thanks but no thanks. Supergrass said no to Steven Spielberg. “It was flattering and really cool, great to meet him, but really obvious to all of us that we didn’t want to do it and take that shortcut, fast track it through the States. You could end up dying in a hotel room or something, or then the production just wants one of us for the next series. It was just quite funny, respectfully very funny.”

Perhaps in a sarcastic nod to the instant fame they’d just turned down, Supergrass titled their next record In It For The Money. The three-piece petered out in the late-00s, with Coombes embarking on a successful solo career, but they reunited for a series of successful reunion shows over the past few years, with Billie Eilish watching their Glastonbury performance from the side of the stage.

Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, Champions Journal, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleague Ted Kessler. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he's interviewed some of the world's biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Radiohead, Liam and Noel Gallagher, Florence + The Machine, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more.