The incredible journey
Gruff Rhys Babelsberg
AS BEFITS a man for whom the words ‘singular’ and eccentric’ may have been minted, Gruff Rhys’s post-Super Furry Animals career has taken him to some truly weird and wonderful places. First there was Neon Neon, his ’80s electro-pop project conducted on-stage from a chair; more recently the immersive multi-sensual theatre experience (with app) of his Candylion album, and American Interior, for which Rhys followed in the footsteps of distant ancestor John Evans in search of a lost, Welsh-speaking tribe in Missouri. Now, in 2018, he’s arrived in Babelsberg – in real life the name of the film studio near Berlin, but in the Welshman’s fervent imagination a new Babylon on the brink of apocalypse, dominated by an evil Trump Tower-style edifice. With typical perversity, however, the musical soundtrack to this disturbed über-reality isn’t dark and futuristic; instead, it’s a 10-song trip of charmingly bonkers ’60s-stye orchestral pop, in which Rhys restates himself as a kind of Welsh Lee Hazlewood, corny and suave on the outside, really quite odd on the inside. Curiously, Babelsberg’s most overtly political tracks – Architecture Of Amnesia, Drones In The City, Negative Vibes – were written before the EU referendum and Trump’s victory, the album’s vocals and backing tracks recorded in 2016 in a threeday binge at producer Ali Chant’s soon-tobe-knocked-down Toybox studio in Bristol. It was another 18 months before the orchestral score, by award-winning composer Stephen McNeff, was recorded by the National Orchestra Of Wales, and final mixing completed in the Californian desert. The opener, Frontier Man, with its lush string arrangements, bouncy countrypop groove and duet with 9Bach vocalist Lisa Jen, sets the tone: Nancy & Lee cruising down the M4 on a balmy summer’s day. Lyrically, as ever, much of the record is joyously unfathomable, whether Rhys is singing about being thrown to hammerhead sharks, coughing up blood on an American tour, hovercraft, or solar systems’ transactions in the sky. The music, though, is nothing but warm and inviting, often borrowing familiar melodies – from Gorillaz, Crosby, Stills & Nash, ELO – and reaching its seductive apotheosis in delightful closer Selfies In The Sunset, featuring a duet with modelturned-actress Lily Cole. Babelsberg is, without doubt, one of the finest expressions so far of Rhys’s talent – and the perfect destination for this year’s summer break.
Pat Gilbert takes a mini-break in the erstwhile Super Furry Animal’s latest vision.