Super Furry Animals

Before we talk to the Super Furry Animals about their new album and impending visit to Laois, I’d like to extend an official hotpress apology to Gruff Rhys for a terrible wrong that was done to him five years ago in Dublin Zoo.

Thinking it would be a wizard wheeze to pair the band up with some of their relatives, ace HP snapper Mick Quinn arranged for all of us to go into the lemur house at feeding time. It started off well enough with loads of ooh-ing and aaa-ing at the ickle animals, but went disastrously wrong when one of the mascara-eyed mammals did a big runny poo down the £200 jacket Gruff had blagged the previous week from Admiral.
“A lemur’s poo to body size ratio is extremely high,” the singer observes, recalling the severity of the dry cleaning bill. “You would have big shits too, though, if all you did all day was eat fruit.”
Quite. Happily our trip to the zoo wasn’t all bad, with hotpress witnessing a piece of Super Furries history.
“I saw my first South American tapir, which is an animal that just looks so wrong,” explains our budding David Attenborough. “They’re related to the horse and the rhinoceros and have a sort of all-in-one nose and mouth which is like a little elephant trunk.
“We had another memorable one in Bristol Zoo when they asked us to pose in front of a tiger which promptly got its ass as close as it could to the lens and started shitting. That was quite a punk rock tiger moment.”
From punk rock tigers to freedom fighting German Shepherds – would Gruff care to reprise the wonderful Free Wales Army story he told HP a while back?
“(Giggles) They were like a really bad version of the IRA which existed for a while during the ‘60s. They were on manoeuvres in the mountains when one of them chucked a grenade towards a lake and this Alsatian, which was their mascot, picked it up and started running back. They were running themselves in the opposite direction when boooom! the dog exploded. It’s all in a book I’ve got called To Dream Of Freedom.”
With the Free Wales Army very sensibly decommissioning, it’s fallen on the Super Furry Animals to continue the armed struggle.
“Wanting some war sounds to go on Phantom Power, we arranged to have an Uzi and a Kalashnikov brought round the studio,” he reveals. “We called the police to warn them that if anybody reported gun shots in rural Wales that afternoon it was us. You’d expect them to want a few more details, but they just went, ‘Oh, that’s fine’ and put the phone down.”
Never mind hiding in caves, if Osama Bin Laden wants to go about his terrorist business undetected, all he has to do is form his own leftfield rock band.
When they haven’t been tooling themselves up with semi-automatics, the Super Furries have been engaged in other more love-oriented activities, namely helping to soundtrack porn movies.
“It’s a film called Nine Songs which the director, Michael Winterbottom, sold to us as a love story,” he explains. “I hadn’t realised there was real fucking in it until a headline about it being the most explicit British film ever made appeared in the paper above a picture of me. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on!’
Are they actually making the beast with two backs to an SFA song?
“No, we let them film one of the non-sex scenes in our gig.”
Asked whether Nine Songs is the strangest place one of their tunes has turned up, Gruff’s normally cheery demeanor evaporates faster than a one-goal England lead in Lisbon. Not so, apparently.
“We’ve turned down every advert we’ve been offered, but some people can technically use your music without your permission,” he fumes. “The worst was when I rang up to complain about my mobile phone bill and heard myself singing, ‘You’ve got to tolerate all those people that you hate’, while I was on hold. I know you’re supposed to laugh at ironies, but them choosing ‘Juxtapose With You’ as a song to calm people down really pissed me off!”
On a more upbeat note, the Super Furries are looking suitably bronzed and Adonis-like after spending the past few months in Salvador Dali’s hometown, Figueres, in the north of Spain. In between lapping up all that Catalunyan sunshine, they found time to dash off a new album.
“It was an incredible experience, an adventure sonically and otherwise,” Gruff enthuses. “It’s the most collaborative thing we’ve done in terms of everybody contributing and singing songs. There’s a Bunf groove to a lot of it which is, er, interesting.”
Any guest vegetable chompers on this record?
“No, that was a once off,” he says referring to the fact that they got Paul McCartney to chew celery and carrots on Rings Around The World. “Getting him to sing or play guitar would have been too predictable and, anyway, we were drunk. It was around the same time that the Manic Street Preachers went to Cuba, so we needed a headline-grabbing story of our own.
“Actually, the real reason is that he did it back in the ‘60s on a Beach Boys song called ‘Vegetables’ and we thought, ‘If it’s good enough for Brian Wilson, it’s good enough for us!’”
While it won’t be in the shops until next February, fans will get a sneak preview of the new SFA album at the Electric Picnic. Hopefully it’ll prove to be less controversial than their opening night slot at the Brecon Jazz Festival, which caused a somewhat negative reaction.
“The petition’s still running,” Gruff confesses. “After the first couple of days there were over a hundred signatures, which is good for such a small area. I’m glad there’s some dialogue going on in the jazz world.”
The locals should think themselves lucky it’s the Super Furries who are playing, and not their South Wales chums Goldie Lookin’ Chain.
“Before they’d released a record they were selling-out theatres in Newport because of their website. We did a few shows with them last year and a track, ‘Motherfucker’, which you can find on www.placidcasual.com. It’s a song about alien abduction in South Wales.”
Would he like to recite us a couplet or two?
“They came in their spaceship, gave me intimate massage/You smiled and walked with a discharge/That’s the problem with a close encounter/You know you get a blowie but you don’t get to mount her.”
Sheer poetry! The Electric Picnic promises to be a highly civilised affair, but they must have had some festival experiences they’d rather forget.
“One that sticks in the mind is the time we supported (ex-Fleetwood Mac man) Peter Green in Estonia,” he reminisces none too fondly. “We were really excited because he had Cozy Powell playing drums with him, but the month before we went, the economy there went bust and instead of the usual 120,000 people they had about 400 who’d paid the equivalent of six months’ wages for their tickets. The moment we went on, this huge storm with thunder and lightning erupted, which meant that in addition to the stage sinking, we were in danger of being electrocuted. We played the set twice as fast as normal so we could get off.”
Before we let him go, is there anything else that Gruff’s itching to tell hotpress readers?
“Me and Daddy G from Massive Attack have got the longest feet in pop music.”
Have they compared shoe size?
“No, I was told by somebody in a shop. How significant it is in the grand scheme of things I’m not sure, but I thought you should know.”

• Super Furry Animals release Songbook - The Singles Volume One through Sony on October 4, with a new studio album to follow in February 2005.