Northern Lites
Jams in a North Wales studio lead to ambitious third album Guerrilla and this gem of colourful calypso about El Niño
“IDON’T know if anyone would be allowed to make a record like that again,” marvels Guto Pryce, “especially at someone else’s expense. But Creation weren’t that concerned about commercial success – Oasis were paying the bills.”
In the summer of 1998, Super Furry Animals entered one of the country’s most luxurious studios, Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Box, near Bath; there, only pausing to watch Argentina’s World Cup matches, learn taekwondo and raid Gabriel’s wine cellar, they recorded their ambitious third album, Guerrilla, set for deluxe reissue this October. “The control room in Real World was like the starship Enterprise,” remembers Cian Ciaran, “the console was all around you rather than being long and flat. It had a sunken floor, with a glass wall and a small pond at the same level. It was like nothing we’d ever had before, and we stayed there for something stupid like nine weeks.”
Producing themselves, the group created a set of shiny, strange and subversive pop, incorporating influences from leftfield hip-hop, drum and bass and Tropicália. The latter was best showcased on the first single, “Northern Lites”, a kaleidoscopic calypso written by singer Gruff Rhys about the El Niño weather phenomenon and its sister effect, La Niña.
“I remember writing the lyrics for Guerrilla feeling very optimistic,” explains Rhys. “We wanted to make a bright-sounding, uplifting album but I don’t think we felt constrained in any way to make something commercial. We kind of felt that, if it got played on the radio enough, that anything could be popular. It was a real joy to get to make, it was an amazing time.” TOM PINNOCK
GRUFF RHYS: We were supposed to tour all over South America, opening up for Echo & The Bunnymen. We were really excited. I felt that I was just gonna go out there and stay there for ages. But a fortnight before the tour, the promoter took all the money and disappeared and the gigs were cancelled. So we booked a studio in Ewloe in north Wales for a week or so, and just went and jammed loads of new songs – that’s how Guerilla started to take shape.
GUTO PRYCE: We were in an outhouse, and there was an old ruined castle in the grounds. The whole place was owned by a guy called Sandy, who was quite a character, this hippie playboy guy.
RHYS: He came from a dynasty of Welsh harp players – I think his aunt was one of the greatest harpists ever. He looked like Braveheart, and he was a Welsh archery champion. Elton John’s brother lived in a caravan in the forest, just round the corner. He built electric harps, so we put an order in for one, but we never got it. We’re still waiting – it’s been 21 years now. But maybe that’s a good thing, the album would have taken a different direction.
PRYCE: We were pushing against the Britpop guitar-based winkle-picker type music that was going on at the time. We were listening to drum and bass, things like that. So it was our way of pushing against what people thought we were.
HUW BUNFORD: We didn’t have any issues with coming up with songs, the difficulty was pulling these disparate ideas together.
RHYS: “Northern Lites” was a song I had lying around, but I was kind of trying to figure out ways of arranging it that made it unique. It’s about El Niño, yeah, and La Niña, I was writing about the climate as a relationship, that was the idea.
BUNFORD: We probably heard a demo of it first while we were in Ewloe – it might just have been an acoustic guitar with unfinished words, some gobbledygook. I think Gruff had an idea for the brass. So it all probably developed from an instinctive feel Gruff had in his head.
CIAN CIARAN: Some of the songs he brought in would be an inkling of an idea, some would have been further down the line. “Northern Lites” was one of them, where Gruff had already sussed out the structure, almost instinctively it was obvious where it was gonna go. I’m not sure if Gruff had the calypso thing going on, though.
PRYCE: We’d done [1997’s] Radiator up in Gorwel Owen’s house in Anglesey, which was great. We loved working with Gorwel, he was right up our street – he was listening to krautrock from right back in the day, and into synth music in the ’70s and ’80s. We always looked up to him, and he understood how these things worked. But he didn’t turn up [ for Guerrilla] for some reason, I’m not quite sure why. So we carried on, as we had the studio booked.
RHYS: It was insane – we ended up producing it ourselves at the last minute, like the day before. I felt a massive responsibility, because we were in the most expensive studio around, so I stopped drinking for the entire time. I wanted to make sure we didn’t fuck it up!
PRYCE: Real World is a bit like a James Bond baddie’s lair – the control room itself is bigger than most studios.
BUNFORD: Real World? Fantasy world, more like. It was in a lovely area, it was quiet – apart from the London-cardiff train whizzing past every hour at top speed. We should have sampled that. The way we recorded each song was very different, like chalk and cheese. Some of the songs Cian would build up on samplers, then it would be bounced over to tape – we always liked using tape. Then something like “The Turning Tide” was quite traditional, probably us all playing together to get a vibe, with Gruff doing a rough vocal over the top.
PRYCE: We basically had three studios working at the same time, this huge control room, another live room, and a studio where we set up turntables and samplers. We used every inch of that place.
RHYS: We all had analogue synthesisers, and we formed an alter ego synth band. Peter Gabriel left instruments lying around, and if you used them he’d add them to the bill!
BUNFORD: We’d see him around, eating his muesli in the morning. The evenings were just work really, it was quite intense. But I think we went through about five grand of wine from Peter Gabriel’s wine cellar, living like The Police in Montserrat or something.
RHYS: I don’t think we realised, it didn’t have prices on the wine list, they just told us to help ourselves. But I wasn’t drinking so I was just bouncing off the walls. I went into Bath one day and bought a book, Teach Yourself Taekwondo In Seven Days, so I started doing that. I had no idea what I was doing and I’ve never done anything like it before or since. I was bouncing off the walls, recording continuously, but so was everyone. It was a creative time.
BUNFORD; I remember being in the studio really late at night, and me and Gruff did an Elton John pisstake, something to do with Lady Diana and minefields… “Minefields In The Sky”, that was it. It could have been career suicide! Everything was in its infancy – Protools cost about a million quid, all this technology you have now that you can just download, you had hardware to try and work out. Cian actually read the manuals, which no-one else did.
RHYS: I recorded the vocals for “Northern Lites” outdoors. I was in a field, singing away. We put an intense wah-wah pedal on the congas. We were obsessed by recording details – on “You Sexy Thing” by Hot Chocolate there’s an intense wah-wah on the congas, so we were trying to replicate that effect. Kris Jenkins came down from Cardiff to play the percussion.
“We’d see Peter Gabriel around in the morning, eating his muesli…” HUW BUNFORD
CIARAN: We had three steel drums and four bass steel drums, but I can’t remember if we hired them in to do “Northern Lites” or if we just hired them for a laugh. You don’t have to be prodigious to play them, you just have to learn one thing. There was no improvisation involved – you got the melody in your head, learn it and then push ‘record’.
BUNFORD: I remember being in the live room for a good while, me, Guto and Daf, tracking the drums and bass, with Gruff maybe in a booth. Daf felt that you get a better feel to the drums with more people playing along. Then we’d overdub other bits – I remember coming up with the end riff when I was in with Daf and Guto, and that kind of thing would affect what Daf was doing. The lead guitar sound? That was Santana I was trying to go for, a Proco RAT on full whack, with loads of compression on it to get a smooth fuzz. I remember doing my guitars again in the huge control room on a sunny day, which was good. The World Cup was on, and we were kind of supporting Argentina, much to the shock of all the staff. Whenever there was an Argentinean game on, we’d set up and make music as the game went on. I don’t think Peter was too happy.
RHYS: There was enough for a double album, we recorded well over 20 songs. Chris Shaw mixed the album, and that was the first time we ever used Protools, so that was completely new to us. He gave Guerrilla a kind of sheen which we didn’t know was possible. PRYCE: We could have made a rock record – there were songs like “Rabid Dog” – but we were determined to be a futuristic, forward-looking band, and try and make something that we’d not heard before.
CIARAN: It was great to know every B-side was a potential album contender. I don’t remember how we narrowed it down.
RHYS: There were loads of big songs on Guerrilla. We’d played songs like “Fire In My Heart” live, and people were excited about that. There were weird things like “Nite Vision”, that was requested to be used in a Levi’s advert a few months after the record came out, so I suppose that could have made it really popular, but we turned it down.
BUNFORD: I think “Northern Lites” was always intended as the first single – it had everything with bells on. “The Turning Tide” was considered as well, but it was maybe a bit too laidback.
PRYCE: We never got the video sorted – it ended up being an uncommercial video.
RHYS: Creation were going to hire this American director, everything was set up and organised for it to be an MTV hit or something. Then the director got offered a Red Stripe advert where he was going to hang out on a beach in Jamaica for two weeks of filming. We thought, ‘Yeah, fair enough, we’d probably do the same.’ At the very last minute, we didn’t have a video so we had to cobble something together ourselves. We bought the rights to two TV programmes, one on the making of this stone used in curling, and another about this sport, road bowling, which is played in county Cork, and areas of Holland and Germany. You throw a cannonball on a 13-mile course, along public roads, and then where it lands you have to throw it again. It’s the person who does the least throws on this 13-mile walk who wins. So we bought the rights to those programmes and we sat with our friend Martin Mccarthy and edited it together. I really like the video, but it wasn’t a generic MTV video, that plan went out the window.
CIARAN: We got an email 15 years later from a lady who’d seen the video and noticed her father or grandfather who’s since passed away. She was wondering if she could get a copy of the footage, but I don’t have a fucking clue where it is. I hope she’s tracked it down.
PRYCE: “Northern Lites” never sounded great live when we tried to do it in that Tropicália way. It was before computers came into the picture – now you’d have it all on a backing track. Back then we just couldn’t play it properly.
CIARAN: It was a nightmare to mic up the steel drums due to ambient noise onstage. I stopped using them after a few gos.
BUNFORD: From where I was standing on stage, it wasn’t what it was supposed to sound like! It was really hard, especially at a festival. Sometimes the only way I’d get through it was to close my eyes and count.
PRYCE: Later we were doing a gig with Teenage Fanclub at some ice-cream festival, and we played a new version of it as a tip of the hat [to them].
RHYS: I doubt we recouped on Guerrilla
– but I think record deals are designed so you didn’t recoup anyway. My only regret with “Northern Lites” is that it’s too repetitive at the end. I wish I’d written more lyrics for the end section, or we’d muted the vocals, because it goes on and on. Bunf’s guitar solo’s great, so we should have cut to that sooner and taken the vocals off. But other than that I really like it. Cian’s steel drums make it unique.
PRYCE: We always wanted to sound a bit otherworldly, and “Northern Lites” is one of my favourite Furries singles. I thought that should have been No 1 all over the world. It wasn’t. Although No 11 isn’t bad for that time – you still had to sell a lot of records to get to No 11. Super Furry Animals’ deluxe Guerrilla is out on October 25 through BMG
“There was enough for a double album, we recorded well over 20 songs…” GRUFF RHYS