Super Furry Animals - London Kentish Town Forum - 30/6/01
5/5
By: Toby L
Set-List: '(A) Touch Sensitive', 'Ice Hockey Hair', '(Drawing) Rings Around the World', 'Play It Cool', 'Receptacle For the Respectable', 'No Sympathy', 'Demons', 'Nythod Cacwn', 'It's Not The End of the World?', 'Run! Christian! Run!', Northern Lites', Juxtapozed With U', 'Do or Die', 'Calimero', 'God! Show Me Magic', 'Nightvision', 'The Man Don't Give a F**k', 'Gwreiddiau Dwfn Mawrth Eer Ar Y Blaned Neifion'.
When you're left dumbfounded by a band's incredible last tour and attend a show on their next jaunt to promote a new album, an understandable nervous tension builds up inside your head: 'Will they be as good as last time,' you ask yourself. Sadly - more or often than not - the act in question will let you down by refusing to play your favourite song or - more simply - just look too old to care about the music anymore. However, let it be known across all the lands of the world and all the seas of the globe and all the planets in the universe that the Super Furry Animals can't disappoint... Ever.
Maybe it's in their supremely Welsh production and formatting which switches them into robots of music that are forced to always write good songs and always perform a live set that makes you want to gather around every member of the group and bow down to them at their feet. Whatever makes them so special, though - let's just hope that it doesn't ever fade away.
The Forum venue this evening is tightly packed to say the least, but a sold-out and expectant crowd waits for their heroes in the best of onstage company - delivered in the form of the delightful Human Beatbox. This man's talent lies in the ability to produce bass rhythms and percussive beats simply by using his mouth, whether it be via him covering the classic dance-anthem 'Back to Life' or just his knack at exciting the audience into frolicking in amazement. However, after just ten or so minutes, the man is whisked from the stage and the lights dim. It's the moment that's been building up in our lives since we last saw them live: your experience a cross between hope, in the sense that you want to them to dazzle you, and excitement, because these five boys know how to party.
And they sure know the art of getting the spectators on their side from the outset - done so in the form of playing the precious 'Ice Hockey Hair' as their opening number (after a short, new instrumental). It's soon clear what the four huge projectors and over ten TV monitors are here for; they're part of the stage-set, broadcasting images of both an arousing and intriguing nature, whilst spectacular strobes and blaring lights flash into your face. Also - what's that sound we're hearing; surely, that can't be just any PA-system? You're right - it isn't, for, once again, SFA have resurrected the surround sound system for tonight's concert, with every guitar chord, piano-strike and drum-tap floating around our heads as we stare on in a hypnotic daze to the front of the room.
Despite such a plush arrangement, the Super Furries still give it everything they've got, with new tracks, such as '(Drawing) Rings Around The World' - which starts sounding as if Status Quo had broken into the building and plugged in their amps and guitars - and 'Receptacle For The Respectable', where lead-singer Gruff-Rhys' chews celery into the microphone, proving truly unmissable. But - then - here come the hits: the tuneful pop and hand-clap chorus of 'Play It Cool' and the anything but demonic 'Demons', which manages to gain epic status as time goes by, the aid of the brass tonight further adding to its dramatic splendour and appeal.
Sticking on the mellow tip for a few tracks, including the sublime 'Run! Christian! Run!', whose accompanying visuals posed questions to the audience of a trivial religious context and served as a contrasting preparation to the calypso-tinged paradise of 'Northern Lites'. You think that it'll all return to the swaying subtlety of the rest of the show seen thus far once new single 'Juxtaposed With U' sets in, with all of its vocoder-voiced seediness and string-samples, but you're wrong for being so presumptuous because - indeed - from here on in, it goes a bit manic. From the crash-course of old faves, 'Do Or Die', 'God! Show Me Magic', 'Calimero' and 'Nightvision', the much famed insane light-show goes doolalley, threatening to abduct us on to the stage, with the projections further getting faster and faster, weirder and weirder and the sound louder and louder.
Which serves us up a treat for 'The Man Don't Give A F**k' - the balcony shakes as people jump and dance, whilst the downstairs area pogos up and down at a power that must have rivalled 7.0 on the Richter Scale: never before has such an offensive song possessed the most beautiful of reactions. When 'Mwng' masterpiece 'Gwyreddiau Dwfn' arrives - complete with Gruff's rope-swinging antics - never before has bliss been more forthcoming in a musical composition... At least that can be said until it metamorphosises into a twenty-five minute, pre-programmed rave, where the band leave the stage, bar keyboardist-supremo, Cian Ciaran. All that remains afterwards is a set of whizzing sound-speakers, visuals on the screens showing images of the 'Terminator' himself, Arnie, repeating a sentence over and over - which sounded like further profanities - until it all comes to a halt and the lights of the room return. Wow. They've done it again - yet another triumph.
Luckily, this is reassurance that exceptional ability breeds quality content - something that the SFA will long be doing until the day they decide to pack it all in, which will be a very sad moment for Welsh, nay, all... guitar pop.
Artists in this article: Super Furry Animals
Your Feedback
Login to post your comment