Rise of The Super Furry Animals
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Copyright
The Friday Project
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Published by The Friday Project 2015
Copyright © Ric Rawlins
Ric Rawlins asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008105235
Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780008113377
Version: 2015-01-16
Dedication
To Marianne and Acorn
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Dramatis Personae
Prologue
Chapter One: Mountain lessons / Hot Puke / The pirates of Bethesda / Citizens band
Chapter Two: Festival time / The wildest man in North Wales / Heavy metal hoax / Ffa Coffi Pawb
Chapter Three: Ankst Records / Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci / Why aren’t we making techno? / The long walk home
Chapter Four: The teacher / Rock and squat / Cardiff in the sun / The rave
Chapter Five: SFA Soundsystem / The man don’t give a dub / Rhys says adios / Into space
Chapter Six: Birth of a ringtone / London turns on / Moog Droog / The wisdom of Robert Plant / Outlaw aircraft carrier
Chapter Seven: Tour of Cornwall / The number 23 / Fuzzy Birds / Outlaw hunting / Something out of Killing Joke
Chapter Eight: Fired from a cannon / Hanging with Howard Marks / Meet the press / Baz
Chapter Nine: Turning Japanese / F-16 Jetstreams / Cian-do attitude / Off the map
Chapter Ten: Painting demons / Bouncy castle licence / S4C on the attack / Overtaken by a wheel
Chapter Eleven: Rise of the Shinto gods / Air panic / Gringos in the mist / Unbridled freedom
Chapter Twelve: Deep sleep earthquake / Big trouble in Bogotá / Death to the monarchy
Chapter Thirteen: William Hague’s letter / Ice hockey hootenanny / Britpop turbulence / Electric harps
Chapter Fourteen: Taekwondo music / Love letter to El Niño / Das Koolies
Chapter Fifteen: Placid Casual, Acid Casuals / Bear in a vice / Gods and monsters
Chapter Sixteen: Kamikaze at Glastonbury / Bouncy ghetto blaster / Mash it up / Creation goes down
Chapter Seventeen: Recovered histories / The Roman road / Smoking goats / Pop strike / America
Chapter Eighteen: East coast negotiations / Lost in time
Chapter Nineteen: Intermission / Experiments with earthquakes / The Skull God / Furrymania / Yeti psychosis
Chapter Twenty: Wasteland Gods / Travels in a space buggy / Pizza trippin’
Epilogue
Footnotes
SFA Mixtape
Song Title Translations
Thankyous
About the Publisher
AUTHOR’S NOTE
With the band’s consent – and hopefully not too much distress from anyone I’ve forgotten to ask – some of the sections in this book have been ‘cinematised’: that is to say, scripted up and CGI’d into narrative-friendly shape. That said, everything you’re about to read is based on the subjective truth of interviews taken during the research process. It’s also worth noting that, although this is a book in the English language, many of the conversations replicated here – particularly those spoken by the band – would have originally taken place in what Gruff describes as a ‘cracked youthful version’ of the Welsh language.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
SUPER FURRY ANIMALS
Cian Ciaran
Dafydd Ieuan
Gruff Rhys
Guto Pryce
Huw Bunford
FFA COFFI PAWB
Gruff Rhys
Dafydd Ieuan
Rhodri Puw
Dewi Emlyn
WALES MOVERS AND SHAKERS
Gorwel Owen
Record producer
Rhys Mwyn
Founder, Anhrefn and Recordiau Anhrefn
Dafydd Rhys
Brother of Gruff Rhys, founder of Pesda Roc festival
Emyr Williams
Co-founder, Ankst Records
Rhys Ifans
Actor, fanzine writer, Super Furry Animal
LONDON MOVERS AND SHAKERS
Brian Cannon
Photographer, filmmaker and creator of imagery
Alan McGee
The boss, Creation Records
John Andrews
Marketing manager, Creation Records
Dick Green
Super Furry Animals representative, Creation Records
Andy Saunders
Press officer, Creation Records
Ian Mahoney
SFA tour manager 1995–8
PROLOGUE
There, blinking in the darkness, were five shaggy-haired individuals in dressing gowns. The Super Furry Animals had woken up in a rural cottage at four in the morning, with only half-remembered instructions to help themselves to coffee. As they all sat around a large oak table, the one with dark hair suddenly flopped onto its surface with a primeval groan. He was shaken awake again.
A sixth man swaggered in wearing only boxer shorts, smoking a pipe and ticking off the final checklists from his notebook. His name was Ian Mahoney. He was the tour manager.
‘Right!’ clapped Mahoney, joining his comrades at the table. ‘This is where we are.’
He placed a cornflake over a small village in South Wales called Penybanc.
‘And John is waiting for us on the farm … over here.’
He placed another cornflake two centimetres below.
‘John has got the armed vehicle. We will rendezvous with him at 0600 hours – which gives us one hour – then we will mount the vehicle and drive across here …’ he slid the cornflake north, ‘and the festival is over here!’ It landed over a small village called Llandeilo. ‘Any questions?’
The singer tilted his head like a curious dog.
‘Good. Now let’s go! Go! Go!’
It was getting light as their car skidded up the muddy banks of the farm. The kitchen lights blinked on, then John Andrews of Creation Records stepped out of the cottage in a dressing gown, pulling it over his head to avoid the drizzle. He smiled into the headlights and waved the car along through a small flock of sheep.
The car finally parked in the corner of a field, twenty feet away from another vehicle: this one considerably larger, and covered by tarpaulins. John cackled to himself and threw some wellies on, then trudged over to greet the band.
‘Glad you could make it,’ he said, fist-pumping them one by one. ‘The beast is waiting patiently!’
‘Good to hear it, John! Do you think the media suspect anything?’ asked tour manager Ian.
‘I’ve not heard a whisper, Ian, and I don’t expect to – at least until we reach the A4.’ He suddenly looked quite thoughtful. ‘Then we will probably be arrested.’
Twenty miles away in a huge green field, the annual National Eisteddfod was creaking into action. Tents were being raised, harps were being tuned, and the sun was shimmering through the bright blue sky.
The Eisteddfod festival is said to have its origins in the druidic rites of the twelfth century, and its stated purpose is to turn artists into bards, under the judgement of the Arch Druid. Renowned as a patriotic event, the Eisteddfod enforces a Welsh-language-only policy for its artists, and on this particular day, it was enforcing the policy in the fields of Llandeilo.
Down by the side of the main stage, a television crew dressed in Hawaiian shirts were interviewing the festival’s spokesperson.
‘So what can we expect from today’s festivities?’ asked the young presenter, grinning through his sunglasses.
‘Well, as usual the Eisteddfod festival will be priding itself on the very best in Welsh-language arts and entertainment,’ said the spokesperson, ‘plus, hopefully we will be anointing some bards into the druidic order, which – as you know – dates back centuries.’
‘And what do you make of the controversial decision to invite the Super Furry Animals to play?’
The spokesperson’s eyes misted over, as if he had detected a subtle change in temperature. ‘The Super Furry Animals? Well, of course they are a matter of national pride too. And what’s more, we’re delighted to have them!’
‘But haven’t they been known to sing in English on occasion?’
The spokesperson folded his arms. ‘The Super Furries will be on their best, Welsh-speaking behaviour today. I can assure you of that!’
Eight miles away, the army tank rolled over the hill. Attached to its missile turret were twin speakers pumping out a steady techno groove. The tank had been painted bright psychedelic blue, with thick yellow letters spelling out a simple question above its headlights: ‘A OES HEDDWCH?’fn1
The manhole lid flipped open and Gruff appeared, squinting through the sun at the tents on the far horizon. The techno was loud up on top, and it seemed to phase left and right according to the direction of the wind. ‘Festival wind!’ he thought, making a mental note of this strange audio phenomenon.
Down below, his bandmate Cian was cueing up ‘Sail On Sailor’ by the Beach Boys on the decks, while Daf tapped his drumsticks against the gun controls, raising nervous eyebrows. The other band members sat in the darkness, dimly lit by flickering neon light.
‘It’s fucking dehumanising down here!’ shouted Guto over the tumbling noise of the engine.
‘What do you mean?’ yelled Daf.
‘Well, it’s pretty cramped, isn’t it? – I keep banging my head!’
Daf lit a cigar and leaned into Guto’s ear. ‘They are pretty cramped,’ he yelled, ‘but at least they scare the shit out of the other cars!’
John and Ian of Creation Records were in the front compartment – and feeling increasingly uneasy. In the far distance they’d noticed a police van parked by the festival gates, and John had begun impulsively stroking his chin.
‘Let’s not do anything to make them feel nervous,’ he said.
‘Such as driving up to them with a military-grade weapon?’ asked Ian.
‘Mmm,’ said John.
Ian stopped the tank, looked again at the map, then made an announcement. ‘Well I think we’re going the wrong way anyway. Take a look at this.’ He sprawled the map onto John’s knees and pointed at the festival region. It showed that although they were heading for the main gate, the artists’ field was significantly closer: two fields to their right.
‘That’s interesting,’ said John. ‘Can we turn around?’
Half a mile ahead, a small group of police officers were starting to hear traces of the Beach Boys in the air. One security officer stepped forwards, looked through a pair of binoculars, and began muttering obscenities.
‘I can’t turn around, John, there’s traffic all around us,’ said Ian.
‘Well … we’ll just have to drive up to the police then. Maybe they’ll be nice. In fact, I have definitely heard that the police are nice around here.’
As John said those last words, a strange smell began leaking into their compartment. Ian looked confused for a second, then suddenly terrified – as a trickle of smoke wafted up his nose. John jumped up and pulled back the curtains, but he couldn’t see the passengers: the dope smoke was too thick.
‘Holy mother of Moses,’ uttered John.
Up the road, the Celtic harp recital was just beginning. Lime cordial was being served, while the festival spokesperson stood to the side of the stage, preparing to make his final TV appearance of the day.
‘Ah, those lovely harps,’ he sighed. ‘Did you know that this festival dates back to the druidic ceremonies of the twelfth century?’
‘Yes, I had heard something about that,’ smiled the presenter. ‘Right – shall we begin the filming then?’
‘Hang on!’ interrupted the spokesperson. He narrowed his eyes, as if sensing a distant threat. Then he whispered: ‘What is that terrible noise?’
The rumble seemed to almost come from deep underground, but then it turned aggressive, feral. An old man sat in his deckchair began bleating and waving his stick in the air. The spokesperson chewed his fingernails. Then it dawned on him what the noise was: ‘The Beach Boys!’
The tank was rumbling downhill at quite a slow speed, but it was also shaking uncontrollably as it hit all the bumps in the field. Behind it was the brown gate. The brown gate was good. Ahead of it was the blue gate, though – and nobody quite knew what the blue gate was all about. Ian and John started babbling.
‘Look!’ shouted John. ‘A gap in the hedge – straight ahead!’
Ian squinted at the hedge. ‘That’s not a gap!’
‘It’s the field we need, Ian. Head towards it, just head towards it …’
He put one hand on the wheel.
‘Get off my wheel! Look at your eyes – you’ve got the eyes of a madman!’
They burst through the hedge, slammed up a steep incline, and stopped. The tank stood motionless for a few seconds, silent except for the sound of gently creaking metal and a cool breeze.
Inside, Cian lit a match. ‘Rats,’ he muttered, lifting a vinyl to the light and tracing a scratch with his finger. After a quick check to see if everyone was OK, Gruff lifted the hatch and peered out. Looking across the field, he could see a big tent at the far side, with the sign ‘ARTISTS’ ENTRANCE’ next to it. He looked back down into the tank, where the quiet sneeze of laughter had overcome his bandmates.
‘I think we’re in the correct field,’ he announced.
The rest of the day panned out well for the festival: bards were appointed, ale was drunk, eighteenth-century costumes were worn, and the tank finally found its home – in a field where teenagers could boogie to Cian’s techno.
Later in the evening, the festival spokesperson wandered down to the stage where Super Furry Animals were playing. He slurped on a ginger ale while tapping his feet and humming along. One thing seemed curious, however: the crowd were singing along to an instrumental performance. Stranger still, although some were singing in Welsh, others were singing in English and … was that even Japanese he heard? He walked into the audience and spotted a girl handing out lyric sheets.
‘Would you mind if I took a look at this?’ he smiled, grabbing a pamphlet. At the top of the first page was an illustration of a dragon screwing a man up the arse, while the lyrics below were printed in a variety of translations, a different one on each page. Finally, a simple instruction: ‘SING ALONG IN WHICHEVER LANGUAGE YOU LIKE’. The spokesperson put his quivering hand over his mouth, then looked back at the stage.
The contradiction of voices as they blended into one another made for an almighty sound – indecipherable, certainly – but also a strange kind of international language.
It was a misty morning in 1974, and four-year-old Gruff Rhys was being carried up the side of a mountain, perched on his dad’s shoulders. Once they’d reached a level where they could see the valley before them, his father put him down and pointed up to where the rocks hit the mist.
‘That, Gruff, is the peak of the mountain!’
Gruff nodded.
‘Unfortunately, my lad, the peak of the mountain is the most boring part. But! Take a look over there, at the dip between the rocks. Do you see?’
He pointed slightly further down, to where a pathway seemed to wind its way cryptically between the hills before disappearing round the corner.
‘Those are the passes – the gateways between the mountains!’
Gruff nodded.
‘It’s along those passes that you’ll find different peoples meeting and interacting with each other. Historically they are a link between cultures … a connection between the towns.’ He put his son back on his shoulders and set off again.
‘It’s not the peaks of the mountains that matter, lad,’ he announced. ‘It’s the gaps between them!’
Gruff’s family had recently moved to the slate-quarrying town of Bethesda from Cardiff. This had mainly been because Gruff’s dad had taken a job as county secretary in nearby Caernarfon, but Bethesda also appealed because it was a Welsh-speaking area.
‘My grandfather had lost the Welsh language by one generation,’ says Gruff today, ‘so my father spoke English with him and Welsh with his mother – and could never imagine speaking to either of them in any other language.’
By contrast, both Gruff’s parents spoke to him, his brother and his sister in Welsh: the family was going back to its roots.
Gruff’s father, Ioan Bowen Rees, had two main passions: he was a committed public servant, and he loved the Welsh mountains. The two themes came together in the books that he wrote, in which the freedom of the mountains provided a convenient metaphor for his political philosophy. Ioan was widely regarded as a fair man who could rise above petty political games, a left-wing internationalist who disregarded the obsessive self-worship of his country as insularism. His politics were forged during an era of social tension and cold war propaganda, and he shared his thoughts openly, telling one interviewer that ‘the battle for Wales is the battle for all small nations, all small communities, all individuals in the age of genocide’.
Gruff’s mother, Margaret, ran the local Welsh-language playgroup. She was also a teacher who shared her husband’s love of writing, and had composed a book of poems. According to Gruff, ‘She did one book, a book of sonnets. If I remember correctly most sonnets have fourteen lines, but she specialised in thirteen-line sonnets.’
At home, the music on the stereo was a curious mixture. Ioan was a record collector who despised pop, instead preferring the ‘proper music’ of composers such as Wagner, who’d be blasted from the speakers at full volume. And yet, strangely enough, reggae was deemed acceptable, as was Welsh-language pop. National radio stations such as Radio One were cut off by the mountains surrounding Bethesda, but Gruff and his siblings found other ways of discovering international pop music: the frequencies of Irish stations would occasionally travel across the sea, transmitting the disco hits of the 1970s alongside the occasional Celtic fiddle ballad.
At the age of six, Gruff learned that Planet Earth was about to come to an abrupt end. One day, he and his cousin returned home from messing about in the fields to discover a book that Gruff’s brother had left lying about. ‘TIME AND THE GALAXY’, boomed the title. Flicking through the pages, their curiosity turned to morbid horror as they came across an illustration of the sun crashing into Earth, melting human civilisation into a pool of lava in the process. Underneath was a simple caption: ‘The fate of the sun.’ Understandably, the kids were devastated.
‘At this time we hadn’t even realised that our parents were going to die,’ says Gruff, ‘so we were completely terrified at the thought of this massive event. Unfortunately we didn’t read the book any further, so we were oblivious to the fact that it wouldn’t happen for a really long time.’
FURRY FILE: GRUFF
BORN – Hwlffordd, 1970 (‘In the hospital’)
CHILDHOOD SUPERPOWER – Hallucination
CHILDHOOD SUPERWEAKNESS – Pasties
CHILDHOOD DISASTER – ‘I had a ticket to see Gary Moore and Phil Lynott at the Manchester Apollo, when I was thirteen. And my parents decided I shouldn’t go to Manchester on my own at thirteen to watch a heavy metal band … and then Phil Lynott died a few weeks after. That was a bit of a scar’
CHILDHOOD VICTORY – Discovering music (‘It was a defining change of pace’)
BAD BEHAVIOUR – Covering school books with cartoons. ‘I got a detention, then didn’t turn up to that, then I got detained for a whole term … based on a cartoon’
TEEN REBEL ICON – Lou Reed
TEEN GROOMING TIP – Not grooming
GEEKY PASSION – The Velvet Underground (‘From the age of thirteen that was my specialist Mastermind subject’)
FIRST SONGWRITING ATTEMPT – ‘Rydwi’n Mynd Yn Hén’ (‘It was about getting old … I was five’)
BEACH BOYS VALHALLA – ‘Feel Flows’
Rock and roll education came early. Gruff’s older brother Dafydd formed a band called Chwd Poeth, meaning ‘Hot Puke’, who were barred from performing at school after they’d apparently vomited on the audience at their first show. Inspired by such cavalier behaviour, Gruff began collecting plastic buckets to play the drums on, eventually finding one that sounded uncannily like a bass drum. Unfortunately the drummer from Chwd Poeth agreed, and stole it to use on stage himself.
One October morning, Gruff’s school announced that the world’s first Welsh-language horror film would be projected in the sports barn. Gwaed Ar Y Sêr (‘Blood on the Stars’) was about a group of choirboys who invited celebrities to their church then gruesomely slaughtered them. The nine-year-old kids screamed with delight at its gory scenes, although Gruff found himself more interested in the short film they screened afterwards to calm everyone down. It was a concert documentary about a popular 1970s Welsh group, called Edward H. Dafis. They were performing a grand farewell show – their last before breaking up for ever.
Gruff stared up at the flickering Super-8 images, and slowly grew more and more mesmerised by the peaceful acoustic meditations of the band. When the spool eventually ran out, he looked up and asked a teacher: ‘Which of the music players was Edward H. Dafis, miss?’
‘Ah, Gruff,’ smiled the teacher. ‘I don’t think any of them are called that. That’s just the name of the band!’
Impressed, Gruff decided that Edward H. Dafis were his favourite new band. However, this was to be short lived: the week after, they were replaced by another folk-rock group, Ac Eraill. ‘They were like a boy band, but a folk boy band with long hair,’ says Gruff today, describing them. The following week he discovered another band to add to his list of Great New Bands – and when he couldn’t find another the week after, it was clearly time to form one himself.
That Saturday, Gruff’s mum drove him to the youth club. A local teacher had come up with the idea of training kids to play rock, encouraging local groups to donate their old instruments in a co-operative scheme. The strategy was, at least in part, successful.
‘We’ve got five drum kits and, er … well, we’ve got five drum kits,’ said the man behind reception. ‘Shall I put you down for drum lessons?’