Super Furry Animals - Bristol, UK, Winter 2003
By: Toby L
The clamorous, grating clatter of plates and forks is an infuriating one. We're in catering prior to a Super Furry Animals performance as part of a stealthy UK tour; it's a sight that belies the notion of just how tough touring-life is - three smiley dinner-ladies serving up dollop after dollop of fantastical mush on plates for the SFA road-crew and band themselves. Not so much rock 'n' roll as sausage-roll.
So we barely make eye-contact whilst sitting next to Furries' honcho Gruff-Rhys, our eyes magnetised by the hunks of roast beef and gravy simmering under his nose. It's a wonder the notoriously slowly composed interviewee is so fluent in face of such temptation. Mind you, he's got reason to enthuse - the band's grasp of near-ridiculous hi-tech kerfuffery has reached an all-time high on their present worldly jaunt.
'We have this kind of 'Matrix' system where Cian (keyboards; programming) is basically controlling the show from his laptop on the stage,' he states eagerly, eyes wildly dancing. 'He triggers some of the films, as well as some of the lights, and the surround-sound speakers - all from the stage. He has an incredible grasp of technology.'
Does that not scare you?
'No, it's very exciting to watch it grow,' he continues, nodding. 'With every tour, it's getting more and more crazy. We are touring in 5.1 surround-sound now. We used to have this old, quadraphonic thing - but it's getting more and more cinematic as it goes on.'
Now, rockfeedback doesn't profess to know much about anything, but isn't this whole business bloody expensive? Isn't major record-label Sony close to panic-attacks when viewing the tab for the latest SFA global exhibition?
Gruff gently huffs. 'Everyone goes on about money - but it's the creative aspect that's the difficult part, and that's free. People pay fifteen-quid to see us every night, and it's the best-selling tour we've ever done; you can spend just as much money on a shit sound-system.' He gleams. 'Good ideas are not expensive.'
Oh, he's a wise one, alright. But you wouldn't expect anything less from the head songwriter and frontman of one of the UK's most quietly consistent and popular acts of the last ten years.
Wales' Super Furry Animals are always set to be a band destined to be on the cusp of a massive commercial breakthrough, but never actually follow through - they're far too detached from everything else to fit in, too quirky to produce mass-scale hit-singles, and, well, as crass as the sentiment, too massively innovative to be embraced.
Need evidence? Let's look at that career in a snapshot: an indie-cum-techno-cum-whatever band that rose to prominence on Alan McGee's legendary Creation Records during the mid-90s, post-Britpop, with a succession of top-20 singles and cult albums, 'Fuzzy Logic' and 'Radiator'; a group that paraded around the festival-circuit in a hard house-blaring, multicolour tank; an act that released an LP, 'Mwng', solely sung in their native land's tongue (which went on to become the greatest-selling (Welsh) record of all time); and a quintet so prolific they have offloaded album after album almost every single year of their original inception. No, it's just too potent a blend for the supermarket CD shelf browsers.
'I'm sure we've made a hell of a lot of mistakes,' cites Gruff, looking back lightly over the band's history. 'I think the biggest achievement is that we're still going. Not many people are allowed to play in the same line-up as long as we have - we've been touring in this line-up for over eight years now. It's a luxury not many can achieve. And the more we play together, the better it's becoming. That's the biggest thrill in a way.'
And what fuels the band's oft furious creativity?
'I'm not sure, really,' he states, mid-mouthful. 'A lot of coffee. We've had the luck of not having too much success. We've not been a phenomenally successful band in terms of album-sales; with every record, we don't have to tour the world for three years on the back of a hit album - we make an album, we tour, we don't sell very much, then we get to record more or less straight away again.' He smiles. 'It's great.'
Yet, despite the comment, it was once stated that the band deeply craves a novelty hit-single - in fact, the release of the stupidly gimmick-ridden 'Wherever I Lay My Phone (That's My Home)' from '98's 'Guerilla' was predicted to be the band's potential smash... until another novelty hit-single of the concurrent period used the same sample, ruining the group's chance of widespread, kiddie notoriety. Damnation. Any comments?
'Well, Creation was in the process of collapsing,' he details. 'It was a frustrating time. If any of our albums could have been a novelty, massive album, it'd have been 'Guerilla'. But it coincided with our record-company winding down. They couldn't be arsed anymore; it was bad timing. And that's not a complaint at all - it's just one of those things.
'I thought it was very admirable what they (Creation) did, though - I'd rather a record-label shuts down rather than turns out shit. I thought it was a very dignified ending. They'd sold millions of records. And they were successful on every possible level - they put out a string of great records, both successfully artistically and sales-wise; they covered every post you can with a record-label.'
But whatever happened to white Rastafarian pop-type Mishka, signed to Creation?
Gruff shudders. 'He shaved his locks off and became Eminem. He was drastically overlooked for his part in '8 Mile'.'
Indeed.
'The current one ('Phantom Power') was a crazy record to record,' he goes on, reflectively, seemingly feeling an urge to explore the vast terrain of the band's efforts to date. 'We started off in Rockfield in little chunks, with Gorwel Owen producing, a very inspiring man, and recorded that pretty much live, then dumped it all on a computer, took it to our room in Cardiff, and overdubbed it at leisure across the summer. Then we had another stint with Tony Doogan in Monnow Valley to finish it off, another great producer who's done Mogwai, Belle & Sebastian, The Delgados, Arab Strap... I could go on. We did an incredible amount of work, and had fun.
'This one has been more about songs and songwriting than something like 'Guerilla'. With that, we wanted to make a throwaway record, in the sense that I didn't want the lyrics to refer to specific things. 'Guerilla' was a fun record, where we went to a house in North Wales, and jammed for weeks, and experimented with samplers, and did mad stuff - we wanted to make crazy shit, and see where we'd go with it, rather than 'here's a song - record it,' though there was some of that: for balance.
''Phantom Power' was more the other way round. We had a lot of songs in that style, and we selected songs that were fairly simple and that we could play together in a room; it meant that the production didn't need to be as ambitious. Something like 'Rings Around The World' (the group's fifth long-player), we were trying to make a blockbuster album - in the vein of 'Welcome To The Pleasuredome' by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. And it didn't quite work out. It was released as a double-album in America; I just think it was about excess, that album. We were mixing it in a film-suite. It was insane. We were watching 'Apollo 13' for reference-points to get the right sound - we were comparing the bass-sound to the scene when the shuttle took off to get the right Hz, so it hurt enough.
'This one is simpler, and the software is now available to mix surround-sound records at home, so Cian rigged up the five speakers to the computer and sorted out himself. His biggest part of the record was the engineering side - he did some incredible stuff.
'We've got loads more planned,' he concludes temporarily. 'We've got a Song Mountain down in Cardiff, in a warehouse outside the city centre, next to a large rubbish dump, and that's where we pile our songs. We have songs in every style in the world, and a hefty amount of electronic tracks. Bunf's (guitarist) even started to write too...'
The lure of more food sends him away to get another plate, as he trails off. When he returns, with all just discussed fresh in mind, we note our curiosity as to what even inspires a song in the SFA camp.
'Most of it's subconscious, but - occasionally - a weird sequence of words will start something off; I love car-stickers and names of shops,' he notes. 'That's the kind of stuff that excites me as a songwriter. I collect phrases, and when we start recordings, I'll get them on a wall in the studio; some of them are my own phrases, some are what I've heard people say, or some I've found in newspapers or street-signs, or anything. I usually fill a wall with random sentences and chunks of lyrics for songs. Usually, the melodies come first, and it's a matter of, there's a certain amount of syllables that form a melody, and you have to stick the words in and try and make them rhyme. That's how I write songs.
'I like people who write lyrics first and sing them randomly over guitar-chords - that's really nice. But I come more from a hymn-writing or Burt Bacharach background, where it's very structured. What I don't like is cliché; if there's any way of avoiding the cheese, I will. But sometimes you have to embrace the cheese; if there's a nice bit of cheddar lying around, you have to devour it and feel good about it. Some of the songs tread on thin ice - and that backs it up. But, generally, I like to do something 'original'... A song like 'Hermann Loves Pauline' (from 'Radiator'), I had ten sets of lyrics for... The only down-side about it is that there's not much narrative in the songs. I'm working on it.'
How do you wish people interpret your work?
'I'd like people to feel every possible emotion to it,' he slowly exhales, spending evident time considering his thoughts and how best to recite them. 'Not too much sentimentality... We try and keep a distance from that... Hopefully, there's a lot of really warm lyrics, lyrics that can reveal themselves over a period of time, and that aren't necessarily instant... And a lot of joy... Not too much torture... The sense that we make the sounds, we play them, and we let them go...
'We don't glorify ourselves as a band, or make it seem as if there's a mystical process involved. I've said this a lot, but a lot of bands separate themselves from the audience to a clinical point where they're superheroes standing on blocks of ice in the North Pole; 'We are amazing, you're shit; f**k off.' In a way, our dressing up in furry outfits is us taking the piss out of 'rock 'n' roll'. It's our way of demystifying it all.'
Relevantly, live, it actually seems the consensus is that the band acts as a mere soundtrack to the mad rush of whizzing lights, rave-like bass-palpitations, and all the highlighted technological madness - not 'the stars', as it were.
'We are just the engineers, you know,' he concedes. 'Having said that, some bands I love seeing with that charismatic edge - like The Hives, as a spectacle; I love watching something like that. But we can't do that. We're not getting any younger either. It's not something we want to do as a band, but if you can do it, it's amazing.'
Dessert is being served. We don't want to intrude any further (nor go through the pain of resisting a dollop for ourselves). Let's drop a final clanger. This far down the line, what's the prerogative for the band's time in music?
'It'd be nice to spawn at least two quality Super Furry Animal tribute-bands,' he grins distantly. 'We had one when we started off the first album, but they split up; I think it was because 'Radiator' was too complex for them to do as a bar-band.
'We were playing in Newport recently, and we were playing the first show by a real band that they'd had in the venue - it'd all been tribute-bands 'til then. Apparently, someone was asking outside, 'Who's playing tonight?' And the guy goes, 'Oh, it's the Super Furry Animals.' The fan responds, 'What - the real Super Furry Animals?!' He'd just presumed that it was the Australian version of us, probably.'
They may all try, but no-one could replace you, Gruff.
Artists in this article: Super Furry Animals