RetroActive Baggage - Issue 20 - Interviews

playing it cool

Apathy only ruined me / Hanging round waiting for calamity
Ask anyone what they know about the Super Furry Animals, and chances are they’ll say: “Oh, aren’t they that strange Welsh band?”. Their Welshness is seen as such an issue that Gryff was asked to speak alongside politicians on Newsnight about the Welsh devolution issue. Which must’ve felt quite weird for a musician...
“Ah, it was really uncomfortable. I think devolution is really important, ‘cos everywhere should be devolved, y’know? I don’t think it should’ve gone to a referendum, ‘cos that in a way made it a Nationalist issue, which it wasn’t, because there’s not enough power to make it a Nationalist issue. I think they should’ve divided Britain up into seven bits straight away as well, just to take the power away from London. After they’d done it, if the vote hadn’t come through, I’d have been really guilty. I’m not in a representative position, I was really embarrassed. Maybe it put people off. But they were wankers, y’know? In suits. Opposing each other on telly, and then off screen they were shaking hands, eating biscuits together”.
It seems quite a rarity for musians to be involved in politics at all these days - the reactionary times of punk having died out long before the Sex Pistols reformed. But was it worth it? Or, to put it another way, will devolution actually make a difference?
“It’s a symbolic difference. It will make a difference anyway, because at the moment, if the Tories come back in at the next election, then under this present system there’d be a Conservative Secretary of State for Wales again, ruling seven million pounds, which hasn’t been voted for. There’s no Tory MPs in Wales, or even most of the North of England. It’s ridiculous that one Tory Minister has jurisdiction over Wales. He’s got the power to overturn any local council decision. If the local council makes a decision against someone, they can go to the Secretary of State for Wales and ask him to turn the tables, y’know? Ridiculous”.
It’s true, Gryff’s not a spokesperson for Wales any more than he is for the Guitar-Playing Frontman’s Union. The Super Furries are a band, who produce amazing, varied music. They just happen to have been born a bit to the west of Birmingham. And yet it’s something people always pick up on, especially when they write songs in Welsh - even though there’s no difference other than the actual words used.
“It’s a modern European language, y’know? Spoken by half a million people, which is small on a European level, but... it’s got it’s own TV station. You go home and talk to your parents in Welsh, you shop in Welsh, school was in Welsh, I did all my O-Levels in Welsh. We’ve all been in Welsh language bands since we were really young. I was involved in three albums before ‘Fuzzy Logic’, which were in the Welsh language. ‘Fuzzy Logic’ was the first time I sang in English, and it was all a bit experimental - there were about five different accents I had to try out, I didn’t know what an English singing voice was.
“What I hate is when people come up and say ‘I love your language, it’s so mystic’. We’re not doing it as an intellectual exercise, we’re not doing it to get back to our Celtic roots, we’re not even doing it ‘cos we’re Welsh, it’s just easier naturally for us, and that’s it, y’know?
“It’s nice giving people advice, but... I want to make it clear that we’re not a football team, we don’t represent Wales, we don’t fly flags. We’ve been putting the Colombian flag on stage as a joke”.
Animal 2

Animal 1 Every time I look around me everything seems so stationary / It just sends me the impulse to become reactionary
As part of becoming a critically-acclaimed, many records selling band, the SFA recently had the chance to play in Colombia. “Actually, we were there when Diana died. It’s like, ‘Where were you when Diana died?’ I was in a night-club in Bogotá, having the time of my life. It was very relaxed, and we’re doing a South American tour next March - Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia. We made a video out there. Brian Cannon did it - he’s done a few of our videos in the past, and we asked him to put a treatment in for this video. And all he said was ‘Oh, I know this guy who lives in Colombia...’ He’s got a big budget, about 30 grand, so we just thought “Let’s go out there and film for a week”. That was the plan. That’s what you see in the video, it’s just like a holiday video”. One of the best music videos of 1997 has to be ‘Play It Cool’. In the middle of playing ‘Actua Soccer II’, the band climb through their TV screen and 3D polygonal versions of them run around kicking 10ft footballs into the back of the net. “And we’re gonna have a team in the final game. It’s better than any other team as well. It’s a cheat team that wins every time... we’re supplemented by a team of revolutionaries. We gave them a list of 30 people, like, legendary musicians and revolutionaries... I think Nelson Mandela’s in goal”.
There are enough revolutionaries in the Super Furries back catalogue - from Valentine Strasser (coup leader from Sierra Leone, now a student at Warwick University), to intellectual change-makers like Albert Einstein. Oh, and Howard Marks...
“We wrote a song about him, and he was in the country, and he came to see us and he thought we were brilliant. He really likes being a celebrity. He was in jail for seven years, which is quite a long time. He’s very happy to be able to be himself at last. Very funny, and a good storyteller. Very charming and entertaining. And he’s got an irrepressible lust for life, y’know, which borders on craziness”.

The Electric Mistress always sounds so bold / She says I'm free to do anything I'm told
An Electric Mistress is a Flange / Filter Matrix guitar pedal. My guess is that the Super Furries have several, and make the most of them, along with banjos, strings, backwards rhodes and brass bits. All of which makes it rather hard to sum up their music in one coherent statement. “Our albums are collections of songs, y’know? We’re songwriters. And within those songs, we try to... push the sound. But that’s not a very concise description. Oh, I dunno. I think there’s about ten different directions in ‘Radiator’. It could go either way, y’know? It was the same with ‘Fuzzy Logic’. ‘Fuzzy Logic’ has got more widescreen songs, and this time we wanted to make a much stronger sounding album. Although we had lots of time, which was wicked - ‘Fuzzy Logic’ took six weeks to record the mix, whereas ‘Radiator’ took four months.
“We write all the time, and it’d be very frustrating not to release things all the time. If it comes easy, you should release it. If you have to sweat to write an album, you shouldn’t do it”.
Cup

Cup And we'll go down a different river / And we'll see where it carries us...
The Super Furry Animals don’t believe in doing things by halves - for example, taking a tank to festivals, and playing industrial-strength dance music from it. “We wanted an insuppressible sound system. A fuckin’ armour-plated sound system that couldn’t be confiscated by the Police. And it was louder than the NME stage, so we were quite chuffed with that. Miserable failure at Phoenix, though.
“It’s funny - we always fancied a tank, and then we were in the position for the first time ever to execute our dreams, y’know? If we sit around in a pub and come up with ideas we’re in a position to do them. It’s such a fuckin’ amazing, privileged position, and we want to take full advantage of it. And people don’t, bands don’t take advantage of the situations that make your life crazy, y’know? Not crazy, but fuckin’ interesting.
“Our motto for this tour was that it’s Christmas every day. Every day was your birthday and Christmas and Easter rolled into one.”
But is there a grand plan?
“Well... more or less. But with a little bit of a twist at the end.”

Gryff was talking to Dave, in November 1997.

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Ask anyone what they know about the Super Furry Animals, and chances are they’ll say: “Oh, aren’t they that strange Welsh band?”. Their Welshness is seen as such an issue that Gryff was asked to speak alongside politicians on Newsnight about the Welsh devolution issue. Which must’ve felt quite weird for a musician... “Ah, it was really uncomfortable. I think devolution is really important, ‘cos everywhere should be devolved, y’know? I don’t think it should’ve gone to a referendum, ‘cos that in a way made it a Nationalist issue, which it wasn’t, because there’s not enough power to make it a Nationalist issue. I think they should’ve divided Britain up into seven bits straight away as well, just to take the power away from London. After they’d done it, if the vote hadn’t come through, I’d have been really guilty. I’m not in a representative position, I was really embarrassed. Maybe it put people off. But they were wankers, y’know? In suits. Opposing each other on telly, and then off screen they were shaking hands, eating biscuits together”. It seems quite a rarity for musians to be involved in politics at all these days - the reactionary times of punk having died out long before the Sex Pistols reformed. But was it worth it? Or, to put it another way, will devolution actually make a difference? “It’s a symbolic difference. It will make a difference anyway, because at the moment, if the Tories come back in at the next election, then under this present system there’d be a Conservative Secretary of State for Wales again, ruling seven million pounds, which hasn’t been voted for. There’s no Tory MPs in Wales, or even most of the North of England. It’s ridiculous that one Tory Minister has jurisdiction over Wales. He’s got the power to overturn any local council decision. If the local council makes a decision against someone, they can go to the Secretary of State for Wales and ask him to turn the tables, y’know? Ridiculous”. It’s true, Gryff’s not a spokesperson for Wales any more than he is for the Guitar-Playing Frontman’s Union. The Super Furries are a band, who produce amazing, varied music. They just happen to have been born a bit to the west of Birmingham. And yet it’s something people always pick up on, especially when they write songs in Welsh - even though there’s no difference other than the actual words used. “It’s a modern European language, y’know? Spoken by half a million people, which is small on a European level, but... it’s got it’s own TV station. You go home and talk to your parents in Welsh, you shop in Welsh, school was in Welsh, I did all my O-Levels in Welsh. We’ve all been in Welsh language bands since we were really young. I was involved in three albums before ‘Fuzzy Logic’, which were in the Welsh language. ‘Fuzzy Logic’ was the first time I sang in English, and it was all a bit experimental - there were about five different accents I had to try out, I didn’t know what an English singing voice was. “What I hate is when people come up and say ‘I love your language, it’s so mystic’. We’re not doing it as an intellectual exercise, we’re not doing it to get back to our Celtic roots, we’re not even doing it ‘cos we’re Welsh, it’s just easier naturally for us, and that’s it, y’know? “It’s nice giving people advice, but... I want to make it clear that we’re not a football team, we don’t represent Wales, we don’t fly flags. We’ve been putting the Colombian flag on stage as a joke”.
	As part of becoming a critically-acclaimed, many records selling band, the SFA recently had the chance to play in Colombia. “Actually, we were there when Diana died. It’s like, ‘Where were you when Diana died?’ I was in a night-club in Bogotá, having the time of my life. It was very relaxed, and we’re doing a South American tour next March - Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia. We made a video out there. Brian Cannon did it - he’s done a few of our videos in the past, and we asked him to put a treatment in for this video. And all he said was ‘Oh, I know this guy who lives in Colombia...’ He’s got a big budget, about 30 grand, so we just thought “Let’s go out there and film for a week”. That was the plan. That’s what you see in the video, it’s just like a holiday video”. One of the best music videos of 1997 has to be ‘Play It Cool’. In the middle of playing ‘Actua Soccer II’, the band climb through their TV screen and 3D polygonal versions of them run around kicking 10ft footballs into the back of the net. “And we’re gonna have a team in the final game. It’s better than any other team as well. It’s a cheat team that wins every time... we’re supplemented by a team of revolutionaries. We gave them a list of 30 people, like, legendary musicians and revolutionaries... I think Nelson Mandela’s in goal”. There are enough revolutionaries in the Super Furries back catalogue - from Valentine Strasser (coup leader from Sierra Leone, now a student at Warwick University), to intellectual change-makers like Albert Einstein. Oh, and Howard Marks... “We wrote a song about him, and he was in the country, and he came to see us and he thought we were brilliant. He really likes being a celebrity. He was in jail for seven years, which is quite a long time. He’s very happy to be able to be himself at last. Very funny, and a good storyteller. Very charming and entertaining. And he’s got an irrepressible lust for life, y’know, which borders on craziness”.
An Electric Mistress is a Flange / Filter Matrix guitar pedal. My guess is that the Super Furries have several, and make the most of them, along with banjos, strings, backwards rhodes and brass bits. All of which makes it rather hard to sum up their music in one coherent statement. “Our albums are collections of songs, y’know? We’re songwriters. And within those songs, we try to... push the sound. But that’s not a very concise description. Oh, I dunno. I think there’s about ten different directions in ‘Radiator’. It could go either way, y’know? It was the same with ‘Fuzzy Logic’. ‘Fuzzy Logic’ has got more widescreen songs, and this time we wanted to make a much stronger sounding album. Although we had lots of time, which was wicked - ‘Fuzzy Logic’ took six weeks to record the mix, whereas ‘Radiator’ took four months. “We write all the time, and it’d be very frustrating not to release things all the time. If it comes easy, you should release it. If you have to sweat to write an album, you shouldn’t do it”.
	The Super Furry Animals don’t believe in doing things by halves - for example, taking a tank to festivals, and playing industrial-strength dance music from it. “We wanted an insuppressible sound system. A fuckin’ armour-plated sound system that couldn’t be confiscated by the Police. And it was louder than the NME stage, so we were quite chuffed with that. Miserable failure at Phoenix, though. “It’s funny - we always fancied a tank, and then we were in the position for the first time ever to execute our dreams, y’know? If we sit around in a pub and come up with ideas we’re in a position to do them. It’s such a fuckin’ amazing, privileged position, and we want to take full advantage of it. And people don’t, bands don’t take advantage of the situations that make your life crazy, y’know? Not crazy, but fuckin’ interesting. “Our motto for this tour was that it’s Christmas every day. Every day was your birthday and Christmas and Easter rolled into one.” But is there a grand plan? “Well... more or less. But with a little bit of a twist at the end.”