"All we try and do is tap into the human existence and the impossibility of dealing with it. That's why we don't have one set mood for the band. Sometimes people think we're being silly, but really we're just being honest." - Gruff Rhys
A politician once noted that all of man's fundamental liberties originate in breaches of the law. One instinctively suspects Super Furry Animals appreciate this. In the world of Super Furry Animals, 'no' translates as 'do'. It's this attitude, as permeated through their approach to the peripheral aspects of their music as well as the music itself, that has made them one of the few truly original and inspirational bands of recent times. Not to mention one of the best dressed.
It's not that Super Furry Animals feel particularly special about slashing their particular technological version of the Gordian knot. Far from it. They simply wonder why no-one else had bothered to do it before them. It was the same when they discovered that, contrary to popular myth, there is no legal requirement for CDs to be sold at a discount on British army bases. So the next time you stroll into a squaddie-friendly music emporium in Offenbach or Aldershot or Belize and wonder why the Super Furry Animals CDs are considerably more expensive than those by Phil Collins or Destiny's Child or Bob The Builder, it's because Super Furry Animals demanded that members of Her Majesty's forces pay full whack like the rest of us. Again, they don't think this is 'weird': they think other bands are weird for not doing likewise.
Perhaps you remember the Super Furry tank. At each festival the band played in 1996, the bright blue Super Furry tank would be there, playing techno for the masses and featuring the inscription "A OES HEDDWCH?" (thats Welsh for "IS THERE PEACE?"). Whenever you saw - or heard - the tank, solace was taken that the Super Furries were somewhere in the vicinity; eating noodles, perhaps, or wondering what time it was. A similar function was fulfilled the following year by a pair of 40-feet-tall inflatable bears. Wherever you saw the bears... ah, you get the idea.
As Gruff noted a couple of years ago: "There's certain ways the music industry works and people for some reason just accept it. And there is no reason. We took our local cafe on tour to do the catering. There's no REASON why you have to use rock music catering companies. You don't have to do things by the rule book."
FACT [noun]: "a truth verifiable from experience or observation". Some Super Furry Animals 'facts'. Super Furry Animals began during 1993, as various members of various groups decided to come together to see whether a techno band could actually make guitar music without being crap - and vice versa. Gruff and Daf had been in a band called Ffa Coffi Pawb; Cian in WWZZ; Bunf and Guto in U Thant. As Super Furry Animals, they released two EPs for the Ankst record label - 'Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyndrobw llantysiliogogogochynygofod (in space)' and 'Moog Droog', summoning the prospect of a band singing in Welsh storming the pop charts. Meanwhile, the fledgling band started experimenting with live performance. Their fourth gig was in London - it was also their first outside Wales - and saw them at a pub in King's Cross footing an illustrious bill also featuring Eddie Tenpole and Thee Hypnotics. But with their blend of West Coast harmonies, garage punk riffs and mid-'70s outsider cool, it was evident to the few people who saw them that here were stars.
After one more London gig - the one where Alan McGee advised that they'd better add some English language songs to the set, only to be told every song that night had been sung in English - Super Furry Animals signed a record deal with the now defunct Creation label. From 1996 until 1999 they released an album a year (that is, they did if we're including 1998's collection of B-sides and stuff called 'Out-Spaced', and we bloody well are). One of these, 1997's 'Radiator', is a hands-on-heart classic, showcasing the band's aptitude for both jive-hungry pop and desolate melancholia, with each extreme undercut by the impulse to subvert conventional wisdom at all times. While unable to quite match their middle sibling in terms of artistic coherence, both 'Fuzzy Logic', the Super Furries' 1996 debut, and 'Guerrilla' (1999) contain several rafts-worth of sublime songs: 'Something 4 The Weekend', 'Hometown Unicorn', 'If You Don't Want Me To Destroy You', 'Northern Lites', 'Night Vision', 'The Turning Tide'... Meanwhile, 'Out-Spaced' served as an invaluable collection of non-LP moments, most notably the early Ankst tracks, 1998's 'Smokin'', and 'The Man Don't Give A Fuck', one of the very earliest tracks the formative Furries had created, built around a sample of Steely Dan's 'Show Biz Kids', which holds the distinction of breaching the UK Top 25 despite featuring 52 instances of the word 'fuck'.
But as the year 2000 arrived, something was wrong. Well, of course, many things were wrong...but specifically in Furryworld, there was a major problem. "We were making popular records that weren't becoming popular," observed Gruff, wisely as ever. How could it be that a band with tunes as mighty and all-pervasive as they could fail to bestride the globe like a very colossal big thing? How indeed. So the Furries went on 'pop strike' and took a tactical step to the side. 'Mwng', the fourth Super Furry Animals album, was their first to be sung completely in Welsh, cost a fraction of the previous records and - following the closure of Creation - was released on the band's own Placid Casual label. Musically raw and beautiful, 'Mwng' (meaning "mane") seemed to focus the band's attention on the core elements of their sound. Perhaps they remembered something Gruff had said some years earlier: "Our ambition is to be the missing link between Abba and Anhrefn." In other words, tunes from heaven, politically conscious Welsh lyrics, sung and played by a bunch of exceptionally handsome blokes.
At the time of its release (May 2000), the band were already preparing its follow-up, which they declared would be an "absurdly ambitious" English-language pop classic, perhaps comparable only to, say, 'Thriller' by Michael Jackson. But better dressed. (Of course).
And now we know they were right. That album is 'Rings Around The World', and it's the best record the Super Furry Animals have ever made. Better realised, bigger sounding... in fact, it's positively wide. It's got the tunes of 'Fuzzy Logic' and 'Mwng', only they're more tuneful, the excessive arrangements of 'Guerrilla', only they're more excessive but better arranged, and the happy/sad intensity of 'Radiator', only simultaneously happier and sadder. I could sit here and tell you what each track's like, but frankly, you wouldn't believe me. On one song alone, I heard echoes of Buffalo Springfield, Jeff Lynne, Scott Walker and DJ Scud. Next time I played it, I couldn't hear any of them. Suffice to say that Paul McCartney is on there eating a carrot, and lest we forget, carrots are very good for you.
By the way, if you're worried that you don't have the requisite hardware to appreciate the niceties of 'Rings Around The World', the new album by Super Furry Animals, on 5.1 Surround Sound, fear not. Daf reckons it sounds even better in mono.
Keith Cameron
