Do not feed the animals

Gruff Rhys and Huw Bunford of Super Furry Animals are tucking into a Mediterranean spread in Dublin’s Market Bar with the frantic enthusiasm of men who haven’t seen a square meal in days.
“We’ve been up since four,” explains Bunford, between mouthfuls of olives. “It was a nightmare, to be honest. Our cab driver was a bit of a fascist. He had a go at me because I wasn’t standing on the steps waiting for him. Then, we drove around to collect Gruff, and he had a pop at him, too.”
Presumably the Nazi cabbie didn’t realise he was in the company of Britrock cult heroes, a band who, for the past 12 years, have ridden the vagaries and vicissitudes of the music industry and, today, are stronger than ever.
“We’d put out four albums a year if we could get away with it,” says Rhys. “There’s so much we want to do that keeping it all under wraps can be a problem sometimes.”
Rather than issuing an LP every three months, the Super Furries must make do with putting one out every other year. They’ve just dropped their latest, a whimsical and rather sweet blast of psychedelic hooey called Hey, Venus!
“It’s a concept album that we wrote by accident,” explains Gruff, who, with wide eyes and tangled hair, has the air of a recently awoken teddy bear. “We’d put together all of these songs, when suddenly it occurred to us that there was a theme emerging. We still hadn’t come up with a name for the record. And the songs seemed united by this one character, whom we decided to call Venus. Hence the name.”
For the second LP in a row, the Super Furries forsook their native Wales in favour of somewhere more exotic. In 2005, they recorded LoveKraft north of Barcelona. This time, they decamped to a castle and vineyard in the south of France.
“It was a bit of an experience,” Bunford recalls. “A bat got into my bedroom one night and started going completely mad. It took hours to get him out. He was very bothered about something.”
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, the recording studio, they reveal, achieved a reputation as a bastion for ghastly FM rock.
“Roxette were there. So were Level 42 I think,” Rhys winces. “A lot of bands were there. So far as we’ve been able to work out, none of them were any good.”
Recording in a winery sounds like a fantastic perk. In fact, the Super Furries found it rather lonely.
“Yes, you can drink wine if you want to,” says Bunford. “What else are you going to do though? It gets a bit dull before too long. Which is good. You focus on the music.”
The Super Furries were born in the early ‘90s, when Huw, a figure on the Cardiff electronica scene, met Rhys, an aspiring singer-songwriter. Gruff was from a Welsh-speaking district of North Wales, while Bunford had gone to a Welsh language school – they bonded over their passion for the language. Settling on the name Super Furry Animals, they completed the line-up by recruiting Dafydd Ieuan and Guto Pryce (with whom Rhys had toured the north of France as a techno act) and Cian Ciaran (Bunford’s younger brother).
Today, the Super Furries are no longer plucky outsiders, but elder statesmen of the Welsh scene. It's a position they take increasingly seriously. Last month, for instance, the band issued a public letter urging the British government not to proceed with the planned construction of new nuclear power plants.
“You feel strongly about these things if they’re on your doorstep, don’t you?,” Huw reasons. “We don’t think the fact we’re in a band gives us an entitlement to speak out. As citizens, we’re entitled to be worried. Down the years, Wales has gotten more than its share of nuclear power stations. Our aim was to raise awareness of what's happening. Maybe start some discussion about the topic, before it’s too late.”
Breaking bread with rock stars is always a good opportunity to ask off-the-wall questions. As a Corkonian, your correspondent is unable to resist quizzing them about the video for 1999’s Northern Lights, which features flat-capped road bowlers from the Rebel County hurling metal lumps down back-country lanes.
“We were supposed to have a really expensive video. Then, the guy who was doing it rang us up the night before and said he was going to shoot a beer commercial in Barbados instead,” say Rhys. “So we decided to do a video that incorporated the two great Celtic sports of road bowling and curling. Friends had told us about bowling. And we came across curling during the 1998 Winter Olympics in Japan. Because of the way the time zones worked, the curling was on at 4am. which is, of course, the perfect time to watch something if you’re stoned.”

Hey, Venus! gets a live airing at the Savoy, Cork (October 15); Vicar St., Dublin (16); and Mandela Hall, Belfast (17)