Interview with Super Furry Animals from Issue 3 of Welsh Bands Weekly, Autumn 1997


Super Furry Animals
Come In Number Four

It’s a normal Saturday night in Cardiff. The pubs are full, people are merry, every takeaway has a huge queue for some disgustingly unhealthy late night snack or another, and the mood is good. Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff’s nightclub for Welsh speakers, is full and buzzing. Various members of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci are on the dancefloor, getting down to some serious dancing. Life is good.

Sunday morning. WBW wake up in a typical student house and enjoy a breakfast of whiskey and wacky baccy, a breakfast which lasts from 9am until 4pm when it’s time to jump on the bus and head for Cooper’s Field, where we shall be spending the day in the company of Super Furry Animals and 4,000 of their closest friends. Life is very good.

Our arrival at Cooper’s Field is met by a very unusual sight. A 40ft inflatable evil bear with devils’ horns appears to be floating in front of us. Is this for real? Perhaps the all-day breakfast wasn’t such a good idea after all… But no, other people stare and point at the apparition too, confirming that we are, indeed, quite sane (okay, we accept that’s a matter of opinion, but still…) and are not hallucinating. Life is very good indeed.

Inside the confines of the festival gates, we rub shoulders with other SFA-lovers who’ve come along to witness the spectacle: Llwybr Llaethog, Verona, Crac, Gorky’s, Ectogram – even Nicky Wire is here to witness the phenomenon that is Super Furry Animals. The weather’s fine, the vibe is electric, WBW are high as kites, and the whole of Cardiff is here, united in Super-Furriness. Life couldn’t be better.

Five days later

It’s a typical Friday night in Bangor. The fish and chip shops all closed at 6.15. The only nightclub in town closes at 12.30. Someone who closely resembles Meatloaf invites us out dancing. We politely refuse. We can think of better things to do than dancing ‘til 12.30 in Bangor. We decide that much more fun can be had from parking the car in the car park of Bangor Rugby Club, making the bed up in the boot of the car, and ‘entertaining’ ourselves therein. It’s amazing what fun you can have with a dictaphone.

An excerpt from WBW’s audio diary: “It’s 8pm on Friday and everything’s closed. We were going to park the car outside the DSS office and sleep there, but when we found out that the only nightclub in town shuts at 12.30 [hysterical laughter] we said ‘no fuckin’ way! We can have more fun on our own in the car park at Bangor Rugby Club!’ We’ve left piss stains on the floor of the car park ‘cos there’s no toilets, we got our car stuck in the gravel, and the mist is rolling down off the mountains… in fact, it looks like it’s about to roll the car over. The burger men have said they’ll give us breakfast in the morning, but I’m not quite sure what the exchange rate is… what do we do if we need a poo? I suppose we’ll have to do it in a crisp bag… we even had to use a cassette box to cut the quiche ‘cos we didn’t have a knife!”

At this point it might be an idea to share with you a useful bit of knowledge we picked up whilst sleeping in the car park of Bangor Rugby Club: the local youth use the area for joy riding. Have you ever tried to sleep in the boot of a Renault 5 with young twats driving past at 90mph? Nah, thought not. It’s not the easiest feat to achieve, which is why we woke up at 5am and, unable to get back to sleep, watched the sun rising over the mountains (recommended), pissed in the bushes (not recommended) and, stark naked, did exercises and had a wash using baby wipes amidst the morning dew and cold air (inadvisable).



Saturday, 8am, the centre of Bangor. Bloody hell! There’s an open café! Two milkshakes and a cup of tea each and things are looking up slightly, and by 9am we’re back at the rugby club and completely off our faces, having decided there’s nothing better to do. A quick glance at the rugby pitch confirms that the “good” bear has been fixed, and he floats proudly in the air with his evil twin. We remember why we’re here, and things start to look up. Maybe Bangor’s not such a bad place after all.


It’s now three days later and I’m safely back in London, and on the ‘phone to Gruff Rhys, the Super Furries’ singer. Following the success of the events, could Super Furry alternative eisteddfods become a regular thing?

“They were a great laugh,” says Gruff, “and we had good luck this time with the weather, but it’s boring to be stuck in the same treadmill as everybody else, just going from venue to venue and maybe the next tour you do is really predictable in a way, so it’s nice to stick up a tent in a field with trees and have 40ft bears and stuff. It was really worth it to everyone involved.”

Having been to both the Cardiff gig and the one in Bangor, we noticed there was a marked difference in atmosphere between each venue. In Cardiff the audience seemed to be there to watch Super Furry Animals play. In Bangor, the atmosphere seemed to be, ‘this is the biggest party North Wales has seen for bloody ages, let’s go along regardless’.

“Some people say that the Cardiff gig was better to see,” concedes Gruff. “I enjoyed both, but for different reasons. I was just completely freaked out for both of them because there was the crowd singing and stuff – Bangor completely freaked me out, it was really powerful. But capital city gigs in general are cooler, I dunno, London gigs are cooler somehow.”

In a brief chat with Select magazine earlier this year, Guto hinted mysteriously at the presence of a huge silver object this summer. What was that all about?

“Just bullshitting, y’know. We’re just winding people up. We’re not in competition with ourselves to come up with a crazier idea all the time, it’s just… it’s almost Spinal Tap, inflatable stuff… it could all go horribly wrong at some time, but we’ve just got to laugh at everything, y’know, don’t take it too seriously. Bands in general are so boring. We used some of our advertising budget to buy these inflatables; we could have bought something like a quarter of a page in the NME or something for the price of two 40ft inflatable bears, but they’re a better advert. I’m sure people will remember them; they’ll be a nice memory for people. It’s great as well, because they’ve come to represent us – like, the inflatables are going on tour to Japan in September, and we don’t have to go. We’re sending them, and getting them photographed in front of Mount Fuji. We’re thinking of getting photos done of the bears in various locations all around the world.”


Travelling to exotic locations around the world is something at which the Super Furries have become a bit of a dab hand over the past year – they’re getting bigger and bigger, and in terms of audience size, of all the Welsh bands, Super Furry Animals are second only to the Manics, it would appear. How does Gruff handle his fame?

“Ah yeah, it’s a bit freaky, y’know? We’ve been really taken seriously as well by the media, but there are so many good bands being practically ignored. Someone like Catatonia should be playing stadiums.”

Do you still find in the press that there’s a bit of a problem with the Welsh thing?

“Oh yeah, the Welsh press are just sensationalist and they’ll go with any negative story they can find. There’s brands of footwear and stuff that actively try to promote negative stories in the press so that they get seen as the bad boys and all that, and they sell shitloads of stuff.”


What about the English press though – are they still playing very much on the Welsh mushroom eating loony sort of thing?

“Well,” says Gruff, “we’ve never taken the music papers seriously. If we started to take it seriously, and worry whether they like us or not, our morale would be fucked so we try and concentrate on the records and tours.”

The English weeklies seem to really like the Super Furries though – you don’t often read anything negative about SFA – they may not treat the band’s Welshness particularly well, they say all this mad druid sort of crap, but generally they seem to go really mad for anything that Super Furry Animals do.

“It’s phenomenal,” says Gruff. “A lot of people seem to want to write about us in a really flowery style, in a pastoral style of writing, and it’s really getting a bit boring and predictable. They see us as five mountain goats roaming the lands playing flutes! It’s starting to wear thin now but I don’t think we’re that different to… we think we’re totally straight, y’know? And I think that basically those gigs in Cardiff and Bangor seemed to have a complete mix of people.”

And, of course, being the media stars that Super Furries have become over the past year, there had to be the odd occasion in which they act like superstars and reveal their rock ‘n’ roll ambitions. According to an article in Melody Maker last year, Daf’s ambition was to snort coke off models’ cleavages and get blow jobs in swimming pools.

Gruff: “He was off his head and I got really angry with him. I was spouting some pretentious shit probably, as usual, and Daf was getting really wound up and reacted by going for the most common ambition.”

Has he achieved these ambitions?

“I don’t want to disclose that sort of thing.”

Success has also meant an award at last year’s Brats for Best Band (voted by NME staff). It has to be asked – why was Cian clutching a bog roll?

“He’d drunk three bottles of wine before arriving, so God knows,” Gruff laughs. “He went on stage to get the award and didn’t know he was on stage! He didn’t know what was going on! It was a completely mad night. It was a really long train ride from Gorwel’s to London, and you’ve got to pass the time somehow. Nobody wanted to go, so me and Cian went in the end – we were told in advance we’d got the award, so we thought we might as well accept it.”

However, it’s not all about packing out 4,000 capacity tents and travelling to exotic locations. The night before the festival in Bangor, Super Furry Animals went back to their roots and performed a small, secret-ish gig in Bethesda, Gruff’s home town. What was that all about?

“These guys we know got the money together to buy an old chapel, and they’re going to open a studio there so that bands have got somewhere to play and record,” Gruff tells me. “There’s always been shitloads of bands in Bethesda for some reason, so basically we want to support that, people learning a bit. They got a grant to buy it, but haven’t got any money to pay for taxes, so that’s what the gig was for, to cover the tax and that.

“The gig was really weird – the venue was seated and it was like being in the Beatles; we got introduced and the curtains opened and we were on stage, all the kids jumping up onto their seats and screaming!

“We kept the gig pretty quiet, and then we did shitloads of TV and they all said that we were doing a gig in a chapel, so it sold out. There was a party in the rugby club after until 3 o’clock, so it was a real good night.”

It must be pretty weird though, playing and there’s people screaming and stuff like that?

“They seemed to be enjoying themselves and we were enjoying ourselves and it didn’t seem too heavy, y’know? Like, people were taking the piss out of us as well.”

Gruff tells me he’s just been to the Pete Fowler exhibition in London. If you get a chance, buy a Pete Fowler birthday card – they’re available from Waterstones and they’re ace. Plug plug. Anyway, Pete Fowler was at art college with Derrero, and now does the artwork for the covers of SFA’s records. The artwork is a total change in direction from the artwork on the singles from Fuzzy Logic.

Gruff explains: “Well, it was a bit fragmented. With Ankst we did our own sleeves and stuff, then we signed to Creation and found a new typeface and did a logo and didn’t have time any more ‘cos we were so busy touring. So the sleeves were just our name and a different colour ever time, so it took us ‘til this year to catch up with ourselves and regain control over everything, y’know? We’re involved in everything.”

So you want this time to have more control over what you do generally as well?

“Yeah, videos and stuff, we try anyway. We’re very particular, and turn loads of stuff down, like if we think something’s a bit shady we turn it down.”

Do you think perhaps that you might release a Welsh language single at any time?

“Yeah, I think we’re in a position now where we could do it. Our last single, “International Language of Screaming,” didn’t get playlisted by Radio 1 at all and we didn’t format it, but it still got to number 24 in the charts, so it seems that we can release things without any airplay at all. So yeah, I think it’s a good time to think that next year we’ll be in a position to do it, ‘cos if we release a Welsh single we want it to be really good, y’know, and it doesn’t matter if nobody understands the lyrics, but the song has to be so good that it won’t matter anyway. We want to get the maximum chart position.”

This is a subject that WBW have been raging on about since issue 1 – foreign language tracks chart all the time, like “Macarena” and that recent dance one by Sash that was sung in French. If you have the right tune and it’s the sort of thing that people like, they don’t really care about the language. Have you got any Welsh language tracks at the moment that you’d consider releasing? What about “Torra Fy Ngwallt Yn Hir”?

“I think that’s okay,” says Gruff, “but I don’t think it would be a belter of a song, but we’ve got it in our contract with Creation that we can release things independently as well, so we might just release it in Wales anyway as a single. I think it’s something we haven’t had enough time to manipulate enough really, releasing stuff independently. Like, we did ‘Nid Hon Yw’r Gân’ last year, but this time we’ll probably do something a bit different.”

Nid Hon Yw’r Gân Sy’n Mynd i Achub Yr Iaith was originally handed out free as a 7” single at gigs after SFA’s altercation at last year’s Eisteddfod with the organisers over the fact that Super Furry Animals have enjoyed success through the medium of the English language as well as Welsh. The Eisteddfod organisers were insistent that the band should not sing in English, but as most of their singles had been in English the band found their way around the problem by printing booklets containing the lyrics to their English songs and inviting the audience to sing on their behalf while the band hummed. The Welsh-only rule has this year led to Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci being forced to pull out of their Eisteddfod gig. What does Gruff think of the rule?

“Well, it’s disgusting with Gorky’s because they’ve been playing a bilingual set in the Eisteddfod for about five years, but nobody gives a shit, nobody fucking noticed, and now, they just wanted a sensationalist news story. We were asking for it in a way, but Gorky’s have been stuck in the centre of a storm, I think they’re completely innocent, and really they’re organically bilingual, y’know? Fucking hell, people should be jumping up and down in their seats that they’re doing so well, and doing so much for the language. We just want people to accept being bilingual as normal. We’re not doing it for any intellectual buzz, it’s what comes naturally. I think eventually people will get used to that.”

With the success of so many Welsh bands recently, there’s been an increase in the number of people learning Welsh – not only in Wales but in England and even as far afield as Japan. This is the result of bands like Super Furry Animals Super Furries and Gorky’s singing in Welsh outside of Wales, and must surely be very important in terms of keeping the language alive. There are a lot of people in Wales my age who missed out on learning Welsh in school and are now going back to evening classes or are learning from books and tapes.

Gruff: “If it’s thrust upon you at school and you’re forced to learn you’re not going to… you kind of rebel against it. It just seems like a perfectly normal thing to want to do. I think we’re promoting the normalisation of the Welsh language within Wales. I do have sympathy for all the people who are scared – my brother found it really awkward with us singing English songs at the Eisteddfod and I can relate to why he felt like that, I can sympathise with him because it is a really difficult situation, but I think we should really be sticking our necks out and having a go, and if it backfires we’ll try and do something about it.”

Though passionate about Wales, its language and people, Super Furry Animals don’t often wax too political. However, in a recent issue of Golwg the subject turned to the question of the referendum for a Welsh Assembly and… well, let Gruff explain:

“I was quoted in this strange accent! We were particularly inarticulate that day as well – it was after a very heavy night. I was making a joke about the different organisations saying ‘yes for Wales’. They’re all for the same aim, but… you know that bit in the Life of Brian? There’s the Peoples’ Front of Judea and the Judean Popular Front and the Judean Peoples’ Front? I was trying to make a point about the ‘yes for Wales’ campaign.”

Gruff being the wonderfully laid back character that he is, he’s completely unfazed when I tell him that in the Jurys Hotel in Cardiff there’s a bathroom door that creaks in his voice! Are there any other doors that Gruff admires? (When setting the questions for the interview, we’d had a feeling that Gruff’s answer would be something along the lines of, ‘Jim Morrison was pretty cool’, but unexpectedly, Gruff’s answer is somewhat more literal…)

“There’s an arch in Ystrad Llyr monastery, a beautiful archway that’s quite famous and stands on its own. I particularly like that arch, but I’m not sure about the door. There’s four doors in the Mabinogion, there’s this island with four doors, and if you open the fourth door all the evils are let into the rooms and all hell breaks loose. So I don’t like the fourth door, but 1, 2 and 3 are fine. Strangely, I’ve never lived in a house with a number 4 on it. I’ve lived in all kinds of numbers but never anything with a 4. That was just purely by accident, by the way – I don’t want anyone to look into it in case they live in a house with a 4 on it – I might give them a complex!”

So, considerate to the last, Gruff avoids corrupting the nation’s youth with the number 4.

But the nation’s youth do seem to be very interested in anything that SFA get up to, which includes the band’s well documented feat of training Stavros, Bunf’s (now deceased) hamster, to slide up chairs. Is there anything that Gruff would like to slide up?

“Air, I think,” Gruff muses. “I’d love to be able to fly. I could quite fancy one of those jet backs, you know, and just fly off wherever I want. That’d be cool.”

Super Furry Animals have also just recorded a track for Channel 4. It’s for a programme that’s part of a series about the seven deadly sins, and one episode features their old friend, Howard Marks. The track may be released as a single some time in the future.

So, how is Howard? We didn’t spot him at either of the festivals, which surprised us – Howard is a big fan of SFA and normally goes along to as many of their gigs as he can.

“He might be back in America, actually,” says Gruff. “I saw him on my birthday, 18 July. I’ve got the same birthday as Nelson Mandela, Nick Faldo, Hunter S Thompson, Richard Branson, WG Grace and John Gwyn, the astronaut.”

So you’re a Cancerian? Last time we were talking to you, at the aftershow party in Bangor, we were trying to figure out your birthsign. We were sure you’re a water sign – we said either Cancer or Pisces.

“A lot of my friends are pisceans,” says Gruff. “I’m not superstitious, though – I think I get on with anyone regardless of their sign.”

Without Super Furry Animals there would be no Welsh Bands Weekly. Fact! For those of you who don’t already know the story of how WBW came into being, let’s just explain.

In October 1996 we heard that SFA would be supporting Manic Street Preachers on a mini tour. In possession of tickets to three of the gigs, we were eager to gain aftershow party passes, so hatched a plot so cunning you could have given it a bushy tail and called it ‘fox’. The plan was this: bombard SFA’s record company, Creation, with letters full of reasons why we should have passes. The letters ranged from ‘we are all in a coma and only the promise of passes will awaken us’ to ‘we are professors of hamsterology and need to interview Bunf to discover how he trained his hamster to slide up chairs’. In total there were eight letters, one of which stated: ‘we are starting a magazine, Welsh Bands Weekly, and would like to do an interview with SFA. Can we have aftershow party passes please?’ Although starting as a joke, WBW became a reality when we realised there weren’t’ any bilingual magazines featuring only Welsh bands. There are Welsh fanzines and there are English fanzines, but to our knowledge we’re the only bilingual fanzine. Gruff: “I think that’s the one thing that we care for politically, is for seeing Wales as one, y’know? One bilingual country, one entity, and that people should have respect for both Welsh and English speaking communities.”

Are you aware that SFA, in a roundabout way, are responsible for the existence of WBW? Do you think you’ve unleashed a monster?

“I think it’s very good,” says Gruff. “Surreally good! I think it’s amazing – it shows the way. It’s mad that there’s a Welsh Bands Weekly but it’s from London. It probably says a lot about Wales as well.”

‘Surreally good’. Like it. Yeah, we do try to be surreal because… well, we are surreal, basically. We see life in a pretty surreal way and we’re very spontaneous. We didn’t think about starting a real magazine for months – I just woke up one day and said ‘I think I’ll do it’. We just get up and say ‘let’s not go to work next week, let’s fuck off to Wales for a few days,’ stuff like that, and if being surreal and spontaneous means we’re out having a drink and decide to get our tits out, well, so be it. And we like to share that with our readers and make them think it’s alright to be mad. It doesn’t matter! People don’t hate us for it.

Gruff: “It was like that when we got the tank. We were in the pub saying, ‘let’s get a tank’, then the next minute we had a tank!”

Life should be spontaneous like that, shouldn’t it? Like, let’s just do something stupid that’s going to really entertain us, that nobody else is going to understand, but we’re going to get heaps of pleasure out of seeing everyone else being totally confused. Life should be like that, it should have an element of spontaneity and a bit of madness. I think a bit of madness does anybody any harm. Besides, mad people are more interesting. If life gets too safe it gets boring; you’ve got to have some fun.

Apart from those eight letters, do you get weird stuff sent to you by fans?

“Aye. The Japanese are notorious anyway. They send some pretty freaky stuff.”

I read once that people were turning up to your gigs in lab technicians’ coats!

“There was a spate of people wearing helmets, which lasted quite a while. People coming to gigs in helmets because of the tank! And people turning up at gigs with hamsters! This guy in Cardiff made us this wooden machine and you turn this handle, like a mangle, and the “A” sort of flew up and down and there was a pile of 5p pieces glued onto it, a completely surreal machine that didn’t do anything. And people have sent little tanks to us. It’s really cool. The lab coat thing was completely mad!”

New Model Army fans used to go to gigs wearing clogs.

“As long as it keeps changing and evolving,” says Gruff, “and people don’t link us with any one particular thing, ‘cos that’s probably really offputting. But I think that people were really taking it seriously.”

I used to follow Dr and the Medics ten years ago. Don’t laugh, they’re a great band! They’re fucking brilliant – now there’s surrealism! You could always tell a Medics fan, because they always dressed like the backing singers, the Anadin Brothers, with long black hair and hippy clothes and psychedelic makeup.

Gruff: “I remember them ‘cos I like Norman Greenbaum. When they went to Number 1 with spirit In the Sky they had to find Norman Greenbaum to give him the royalties and they found him living in a shack!”

If anyone was going to do a cover version of one of your songs, which song would you want it to be, and who would do it?

“I dunno, someone really popular.”

Boyzone or someone?

“Yeah, someone really cheesy, really misinterpreting the song, missing the whole point of it.”

Like Boyzone doing Hometown Unicorn or something?

“Yeah, with a male voice choir!”

On Hometown Unicorn, who is it that does all the ghostly wailing?

“We all sing apart from Guto,” says Gruff, “but I found out recently that Guto used to be in a choir when he was younger. He’s apparently got a beautiful voice but he’s too shy. He likes being the one that plays bass. He’s the bass master, the Doctor of Low Frequencies.”

If Guto is Doctor of Low Frequencies, then Gruff is most definitely Wizard of Gentle Loveliness, Bunf is Professor of High Squeakiness, Cian is Creator of All Things Bleepy and Daf is Master of Grins Most Cheeky.

And Super Furry Animals collectively? Ooh, at the very least Band Of Most Brilliance. Nobody else even comes close.



Super Furry Facts
20 bits of useless info (most of which we’ve nicked from other publications)

1. SFA deliberately named their first EP ‘Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllantysiliogogogochynygofod(in space)’ to piss off journalists in London.
2. The band featured on Mark Radcliffe’s “We Love Us” quiz on Radio 1 earlier this year. Guto won with 4 points and is now the proud owner of a luxury foot spa.
3. The super Furries’ tank now lives with Don Henley from the Eagles.
4. When the band first started recording Radiator, its working title was Short Assed Skinhead Copper.
5. Gruff smokes Cuban cigars.
6. Cian fancies Michelle Pfeiffer.
7. The Man don’t Give A Fuck contains more fucks than any other song in history.
8. Gruff and Bunf met on the roof of a train.
9. Daf used to be in Catatonia.
10. The band insist that Something For the Weekend is about wine tasting.
11. SFA print little pearls of wisdom on every record sleeve. These include ‘Stuff Christmas, not the turkey,’ ‘there are many ways to get Wil to his bed’, and ‘one shares, the other chooses’.
12. Bunf went to school with William Hague’s girlfriend, Ffion Jenkins. Apparently she always fancied prematurely balding men.
13. The first album Gruff ever bought was ‘Father Abraham and the Smurfs’. He describes it as ‘the first ever techno album.’
14. Every member of SFA has at some point made a guest appearance with Land of My Mothers.
15. Guto’s favourite album of all time is ‘Forever Changes’ by Love.
16. Arnofio was the first piece of music that Cian wrote for the band.
17. Gruff is right handed but plays guitar with his left.
18. Daf shares a flat in London with Rhys Ifans, who played one of the Lewis Twins in Twin Town.
19. Welsh Bands Weekly got its first public mention in a Super Furry Animals interview with Gspot Magazine last November.
20. Gruff has been photographed wearing at least ten different pairs of sunglasses.
    

© 1997, Debs Prowse

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