Furrymania

The acoustic concept is frequently sabotaged by that horrendous and deadly enemy; the wretched “unplugged” bogeyman. How often have you witnessed a top drawer act criminally strum away their credibility with bland barstool renderings that rob their songs of all venom, vigour and soul?.

Happily, the Super Furry approach is designed primararily to entertain and not to anally self-indulge. Hence, for some bizarre fuzzy logic reason we’re at a Sunday mid-afternoon acoustic-karaoke-raffle-bingo game that lets the legs elevenses loosely dictate a set of treasured b-side jewels, funny cover versions and ingeniously stupid sing-a-long ballads.

Album tracks ‘Fragile Happiness’ (Rings Around the World) and ‘The Turning Tide’ (Guerrilla) collide with miming to ‘Mario Man’ and a frenzied middle eight from ‘Chupacabras’, as they can’t do the rest.

An afternoon which put the session back into the acoustic session ends with ‘Foxy Music’ – a rare old b-side about Gruff’s ginger friend who got shot by a farmer because he was mistaken for a fox while his father had a sudden heart attack on finding him.

“But it all ended happily because they both survived,” beams Gruff, leaving us on a suitably animalistic note to indulge all our full-on furrymaniac fantasies later that evening.