Super Furry Animals
The tank-driving, melancholic psychedelic-power pop rave machine. By Keith Cameron.
“We were too idiosyncratic for mass appeal.” GRUFF RHYS
AMONG THE MANY priceless Super Furry fables, perhaps most revealing is the one about Creation Records’ Alan McGee checking out his label’s potential new signings at a north London pub gig. He thought they were good but advised singing in English. Puzzled, the band replied that they already were.
Otherworldliness came naturally to Super Furry Animals. Mustered in early-’90s Cardiff, guitarist Huw ‘Bunf’ Bunford, drummer Dafydd Ieuan, bassist Guto Price and singer-guitarist Gruff Rhys were mainstays of a Welsh language scene unable to satisfy their restless ambition. Rhys and Ieuan’s previous band, Ffa Coffi Pawb, released three albums on the Ankst label, thus learning the basics of recording technique, and once united with U Thant’s Bunford and Price they formulated SFA’s utopian design: classic rock and timeless melody reconditioned for the acid house generation. After two Ankst EPs in 1995, Ieuan’s younger brother Cian Ciaran joined on keyboards to effect the quantum leap into Furryworld that was 1996’s debut album Fuzzy Logic.
The band’s pent-up anarchic energy and Creation’s Oasis-enabled largesse made a happy marriage.
Instead of music press adverts for the single If You Don’t Want Me To
Destroy You, they bought a tank, which parked up at festivals and blasted ear-bleed techno to boggle-eyed ravers. “We were too idiosyncratic for mass appeal,”
Gruff Rhys later considered,
“but our theory was if people get bombarded with stuff, they’ll accept anything.”
A run of nine albums saw Super Furry Animals cavalierly surfing the trad/rad crosscurrents of their collective mind. Although Rings Around The World, a UK Number 3 and MOJO’s 2001 Album Of The Year, was a commercial peak, every SFA record has something to reward seekers of the sacred meeting space between sad balladry and punk aggro, sunshine harmonies and extreme frequencies, psychedelic hedonism and militant politics – sometimes all in the same song. Since 2009’s Dark Days/Light Years, the band has been dormant while Rhys concentrates on solo work, though 2016 saw them touring behind the
Zoom! best-of and Fuzzy Logic’s 20th anniversary reissue. In 2020, SFA minus Rhys released a single under the name Das Koolies. All would surely agree, however, that the world is a poorer place for the absence of Furryvision.
And the tank? Sold to Don Henley, who had it shipped to Texas. Now that’s fuzzy logic for you.