Super Furry Animals: ‘Any more years for the Conservative party and it’s going to be disastrous’
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Version 0 of 1. At the back of the storage unit the photographer’s assistant holds up a silver space helmet. “Is this theirs?” she asks. We are at the Musicbox, a hub for the Cardiff music scene, where Super Furry Animals have long rehearsed – and where they keep the accumulated clutter of more than 20 years’ worth of tours. The assistant, on the hunt for props, stands knee-deep in the band’s stage paraphernalia: 40ft inflatable bears, stage sets, costumes, bits of an inflatable character named Candylion gathering dust. In the kitchen Gruff Rhys, the band’s singer, is busy making coffee, and discussing the imminent arrival of his third child, due at approximately the time the band set off on a reunion tour after a hiatus of six years. He is a warm-hearted figure, slowly and softly spoken, his face given to lighting up with sudden enthusiasm. “I remember in ’96, when Fuzzy Logic first came out,” says Mark Foley, Musicbox’s co-owner. “Gruff came in here and gave me it on vinyl and CD and cassette. That’s how excited he was.” “We’ll take the scenic route,” says Rhys, folding his long frame somehow intp the back seat of guitarist Huw Bunford’s three-door car. We watch the city unfold through the car windscreen. “This was Tiger Bay, but they renamed it Cardiff Bay,” he says. “And that pub up there is where Shirley Bassey was discovered.” Related: Super Furry Animals: 10 of the best We arrive at an editing suite near the Coal Exchange, where two men sit in the gloom, deep in the final stages of making a television documentary about the band. There is more Furries-related regalia here too – a puppet of the 18th-century explorer John Evans, from Rhys’s solo project American Interior, is propped against the wall, and there are boxes full of artist Pete Fowler’s original sketches for the band’s album artwork. “He has so much energy, he’s so prolific, he sends us so many drawings for each record,” Rhys says, and fishes out a folder for their 2000 album Mwng, full of variations on a black and white horse mask. “I think he felt it was quite a serious album,” he says, “and so he went a bit more austere.” We stand in the dark – Rhys, Bunford, bassist Guto Pryce and I (keyboardist Cian Ciarán and drummer Dafydd Ieuan have headed off to attend to pre-tour matters and feed their children) – and watch clips from the band’s career dance across the screen: Cardiff in the early 90s and the techno scene from which they emerged, the signing to Creation Records, scenes from rehearsals and gigs, their first appearance on Top of the Pops, Glastonbury 1999, a press conference in Taiwan, and a golf buggy driving on to a stage. There is the sense of gradually accumulating success – the audiences growing, the horizons widening. “Super Furry Animals are the nearest thing in Wales to rock superstars,” states a BBC announcer over footage of the band clambering over a model tank, then there’s Chris Evans on TFI Friday declaring them “the most Welsh group in the world”. Next, we see Jools Holland, making the band’s introduction on Later… with a sweeping: “I love the Welsh language – it is the language of poets!” And then two baffled-looking Americans vox-popped after a performance at the Sasquatch! music festival in Washington: “If I could understand the lyrics,” says one, “I would like them a lot more.” On the one hand, the story of Super Furry Animals is not so very different from the story of any other great rock’n’roll band; they are a group celebrated not only for their exceptional songwriting, their eclectic pop-rock and spectacular live shows, but also for their sheer creativity and imagination. And yet what they represent beyond this is more complex, more heartfelt – a story of Welsh identity, language and belonging. This week sees the reissue of the band’s fourth album, Mwng, 15 years after it was first released. Mwng was a defining moment in the band’s career – recorded on the heels of 1999’s bold and inventive top 10 album Guerrilla, it was a quieter offering. Lo-fi and quickly set down, it was also their first album to be written entirely in the Welsh language, and reached No 11 in the UK charts – the first Welsh language record ever to make the top 20. In the House of Commons Elfyn Llwyd, MP for Meirionnydd Nany Conwy, described Mwng as a celebration of “a new wave of confidence in the Welsh nation”. “We’ve been trying to get it together to rerelease it since its 10th anniversary,” says Rhys. “And then we didn’t get around to it – we forgot.” We have relocated once again, this time to a tapas restaurant on the waterfront, where we are the only customers and a Gipsy Kings album spills across the empty tables. Rhys mimes playing a small, Spanish guitar as he speaks. “We released Mwng ourselves the first time, and it’s been out of print – it’s never been released digitally,” he adds. “And it was also our 20th anniversary as a band and people were offering us lots of gigs. This seemed a good time to celebrate.” Related: American Interior review – a Super Furry Animal heads for the frontier Mwng means “mane” in Welsh, and the album turned much of its gaze inwards on the Welsh nation: its lyrics concerned hard times, the decimation of rural communities, sleaze, land, Roman roads and the ostracism the band had felt from the Welsh music community when they made the decision to sing in English. “Mwng is the most minimal thing we’ve ever done,” says Rhys, “and the most difficult to pinpoint when it was made – our other records are maybe more influenced by the technology of the day. But we wanted to make a very stark record, after Guerrilla, and after spending months and months making big pop records, or records that were quite ambitious, we reacted to that, to make a very simple record. Bringing it down to earth.” They took their cue from a cover of a track, Y Teimlad, by experimental Welsh punk band Datblygu. “Ah, it’s an amazing song,” Rhys says. “The lyrics are incredibly profound, incredibly simple. The band were very experimental, but beneath those textures there’s some incredible songs and we wanted to pull that song out and pay homage in a way to the songs we grew up listening to.” We were stood by the side of the road in America, in a forest, miles from anywhere “Datblygu were one of the first bands that actually had a pop at Welsh culture,” says Pryce. “In a very sharp sense of humour type of way.” Rhys nods. “Just having digs at the Welsh establishment,” he explains. “There was a Welsh language scene in the 1980s who were anarchist in background rather than nationalist, using the Welsh language because it was their first language, and being radical in their first language. It wasn’t about flag-waving, it was about sentimentality, experimenting and using the Welsh language as a modernist language. Musically, we reacted against it, because they were punk rockers, experimentalists, so we responded by classic rock, because punk had become dull by that point. But they resonated, politically, for us as a band. They’d have a pop at BT or something, or Thatcher, but it definitely caught the mood – not just in Wales but for all the people who were having a really hard time.” The era in which Mwng’s is being rereleased is not much easier – that the band have chosen International Workers’ Day as its release date is no coincidence; the band have a long history of activism (Ciarán, for instance, once played in a wind turbine in protest against the government’s plans for nuclear expansion, and earlier this year recorded a protest album with ex-Beta Band frontman Steve Mason). It also falls a week before the general election – could this be seen as an effort to galvanise the voting public? “It’s an horrific election in many ways,” says Rhys. “There’s a severe threat to the social fabric; any more years for the Conservative party and it’s going to be disastrous. The quality of life is going to go downhill very fast if they get in again. The cuts are getting serious now – and the cuts imposed on Wales are horrific. They’re closing birth units. People are going to start dying.” (In a recent NME interview he described this election as “a battle for civilisation”.) Rhys, whose father campaigned for Welsh independence, finds his own perspective on the issue more complicated, muddied by his firm allegiance to the concept of the European Union. “It would be horrible,” he says, “if everyone sleep-walked out of the EU.” Buford states his intention to vote (“we’ll be on tour, so postal or by proxy”) but sees that many might be perplexed by the political options before them. “There’s so many disenfranchised people now,” he says. “It’s not just the young, it’s everyone. So I don’t know, people might even not vote. Not because they’re not arsed, but just because they don’t know who to vote for.” Returning to Mwng, and the language question, Rhys says that writing in English and singing in Welsh don’t feel much different. “They’re both fantastic languages; it’s just a load of sound coming out of your head.” But the songs for Mwng felt different. “They feel slightly less throwaway; the songs for Mwng were a bit more emotional.” Welsh poet and writer Menna Elfyn says: “There is a lyric intensity to the songs on Mwng – you could almost look at them in a post-colonial way. There’s so much about being on the periphery and banishment and leaving heritage, connecting with those who have been displaced.” Elfyn is a fan of Rhys’s writing. “His great gift is wordplay,” she says. “The mischievous element to his writing, the surreal element. Just under the surface, the subliminal message may be a very strident one, but it’s always delivered in such a tender and palatable way, with so many clever echoes of things that are so intrinsically Welsh – from chapel hymns to singing competitions. The language is a crucial element, but the mood allows it to reach out and be accessible to non-Welsh speakers too.” Fifteen years ago, the band made the somewhat unexpected decision not to perform Mwng in Wales. “It would have been too emotional,” says Rhys. “For us, but also because people could have turned out like at rugby matches, with people dressed up as red dragons and leeks. So we decided only to tour it in America and Japan.” In America, the band had at first been swept under the umbrella of Britpop. “But then when Mwng came out it was like, ‘Oh right, they’re not Oasis then’,” recalls Bunford. “They didn’t really understand it from the start,” says Pryce. Their abiding memory of that tour occurred several miles out of Woodstock, when the husband-and-wife team driving their bus decided to throw the band out and leave them by the side of the road. “It was quite an extreme tour, and they thought we’d been disrespecting the bus,” Rhys explains. “And we simply hated them,” adds Bunford. “They were horrible. Racists.” “And then they drove off with some of our stuff still in the van,” Rhys continues. “We were just stood by the side of the road, in the forest, miles from anywhere in the middle of the USA.” They did not see their belongings again, he recalls dimly. “I lost a record deck. Bunf got off with one shoe. What did you do for shoes?” Bunford thinks for a moment. “I had one shoe. I think most of my clothes went away. I remember the last 10 minutes just before we got kicked off. I was in a haze, an amazing haze, and actually just coming out with just one shoe it just felt really normal. And I think I was the only one who was smiling.” Pryce and Rhys laugh. “And that,” Rhys says solemnly, “was the end of the Mwng tour.” Since they went on hiatus six years ago, the band have been busy with various other projects, including Ieuan’s band the Peth, with Pryce, actor (and former Super Furries singer) Rhys Ifans, and numerous others; and Gulp, Pryce’s band with his partner, the Scottish keyboardist Lindsey Leven. Rhys, meanwhile, has pursued a number of other projects, among them Neon Neon, a collaboration with the producer Boom Bip dating from 2006, and, most recently, a concept album and film, American Interior, about the life of Welsh explorer John Evans. To be back together again “feels quite normal, because we spend so much time together”, Rhys says (the band’s line-up has remained unchanged since they formed in 1993). “We’re like an asteroid belt – it’s like a cosmos of bands. We go out in orbit and then there are moments when we’re squashed back together.” The reunion shows this year will not only draw upon Mwng but the band’s entire nine-album back catalogue. As might be expected from a band who have dressed as yetis and once faked their own deaths with (malfunctioning) blood packs on stage at Hammersmith Apollo, they have some fairly ambitious plans for these performances. “We’re going to try and visually feed back as people,” says Rhys, neatly. Pryce looks at him quizzically. “Are we?” he asks. Rhys nods. “That’s the plan,” he says. “We contacted the most extreme lighting person we’ve ever met, and he’s worked out a system where through multiple projections we can appear like we’re feeding back ourselves.” “I had no idea about this,” says Bunford. “This is the first I’ve heard about it. All I knew was that we were wearing some painter and decorator overalls. Is that part of it? Is that why?” Pryce smiles. “Is this is a game-changer?” he asks and Bunford shakes his head. “No, I’m just trying to get my head round it. How would you do it?” Rhys will not be drawn on technical details. “That’s the thrill of trying out ideas. We consider ourselves a public service of trying things out, and some things work and some things don’t.” Several things, he concedes, have not worked. “The tracksuits we once used that were covered with little bulbs weren’t particularly bright, but we tried them, we gave it 100%. We thought we were going to be like Blackpool.” Pryce looks a little sad. “I thought we were gonna look like Tron,” he says. “I thought we were going to look like the future, but we looked like Teletubbies. And they were the second lot, because we got one set made and they were too small.” After a warm-up gig just over the border in Gloucestershire, the reunion shows will begin in Cardiff with a three-night sold-out run. “We feel we’re ready to reveal the Mwng songs!” says Rhys. “It will be very emotional.” Pryce agrees: “But it’s going to be an enjoyment,” he says. “There’s a lot of water that’s gone under the bridge since Mwng was released. Time, time, time… everything becomes a bit more nostalgic with time. And lots of Welsh bands have come and gone since then – it’s become normal for bands to come from Wales.” He stops, contemplates the empty restaurant and the Gipsy Kings. “But I don’t know,” he says after a moment or two. “I’m sure there will be moments where possibly a guy jumps on stage dressed as a leek.” The Super Furries play Gloucester Guildhall on Tuesday, Cardiff University Students’ Union (1, 2, 3 May) and further dates throughout May. The deluxe edition of Mwng is out on Domino on Friday |