 OCEAN Colour Scene once rode high on the crest of the rock wave. After the album Moseley Shoals, which stayed at No 2 in the charts for six months and sold more than a million copies, they could do no wrong. Hits like Day We Caught The Train and The Riverboat Song were the fodder of car adverts and summer anthems, slapped onto compilation CDs from here to Timbuktu. The next album, Marchin' Already, knocked Oasis off the No 1 spot and the band received a letter of congratulations from Noel Gallagher who sent OCS a plaque with "To The Second Best Band In Britain" engraved on it. They have dropped off the radar a bit since then, but OCS are coming back kicking. They may have lost a band member and frontman Simon Fowler may have ditched his beard, but this time they're touring with a slicker outlook on life and fame. The next stage of their career sees the band coming back with a brand spanking new album and a springtime tour. Oh, and they've had a little help from a friend, or three. The album Hyperactive Workout For the Flying Squad, out in March, will feature Jools Holland, Paul Weller and Carleen Andersen. Simon says: "Obviously Jools - he can't half play the piano. And Paul's a good friend, he's always around. There's five of us now in the live set up. I think that we are just much more sure of ourselves. "One of our big influences is the Stone Roses and you can hear that in our music still. "After the first bit of success we had in the early 90s we found ourselves on the dole for three to four years and every day we would go to the studio and write and record and learn how to be a group so, by 1996, we were more sure of how we wanted to play." | 
