The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers

It is hardly a surprise to learn that the fifth Super Furry Animals’ album was due to be christened Text Messaging Is Killing The Pub Quiz As We Know It. The Welsh wizards have never been shy of plunging straight into the chaotic depths that creative technology can offer, resurfacing on the other side to produce some of the most entertaining experimental pop ever made for the consumption of human ears. Over a dazzlingly prolific three-year recording career on the sadly demised Creation Records imprint, they have embraced just about every facet of leftfield production and sought inspiration from just about every trajectory and sonic twist to be found on Planet Pop – from the Beach Boys to Captain Beefheart to Aphex Twin and back again, stopping off for a little assistance from Howard Marks, a techno-tank and two 40-foot high inflatable bears.

And now eight years into a gloriously baffling career, SFA are about to attempt their most ambitious project yet – poised to unleash the world’s first simultaneous stereo album and Digital Visual Disc (DVD) in an attempt to capture the quadraphonic experience of their current live show (due to touch down in Ireland for the very first time on Witnness weekend). For Gruff Rhys and bassist Guto Preece, this marks the realisation of a typically spontaneous ambition to make multimedia history.

“We did a quadraphonic surround sound gig in Cardiff in December 1999 and we mixed it for radio in 5.1 surround sound,” explains Gruff Rhys. “We just wanted to cram as much as we could onto it, because as well as being an album you can put on and listen to, it is something you can come back to and dip into at your leisure. DVDs are usually very shoddily put together with a very basic menu page and a small selection of predictable options. This is more like a website with a lot more to it. You can spend a few weeks in there!

“I’d like to think that it is going to be quite sociable activity. If you know someone who has got a home cinema system, you can take your copy of Rings Around The World around and have your friends over. People usually listen to music on their own, so we’d like to think we are making a communal experience you can share with your friends.

“With this album, we wanted to make sounds that couldn’t placed as a simple emotion. For example, how do you describe Paul McCartney chewing celery and the sound coming out of different speakers? But we’ve always used stereo to its full capacity.”

Just in case you thought your eyes were deceiving you – this rather incredible fact is worth repeating. Paul McCartney, the same Paul McCartney who is Sir Paul McCartney, Mr. Beatle and bona fide living legend, chews carrots and celery on the new SFA track ‘Receptacle for the Respectable’. How in the name of Sergeant Pepper, Revolver, The White Album and Abbey Road did this astounding collaboration come about?

“It was just one of those things where the opportunity came along and we just had to grab it,” answers Gruff. “Cian befriended him a couple of years ago at the NME Awards. He was quite plastered and he pestered poor Paul McCartney. But McCartney took a shine to Cian and started phoning him up and even sent flowers to his girlfriend. Then he posted us three boxes of old Beatles masters to remix for the Peter Blake installation in the Tate Gallery in Liverpool. That was a very surreal moment. We were working away in our offices in Cardiff and then all these old boxes arrive. There were versions of ‘

Eleanor Rigby’ and all sorts of stuff that wasn’t even on the Anthology series. It was really strange.

“So we asked him to return the favour and do something on our own album, so he dropped in and chewed some celery. In the ’60s, they used to hang out and chew celery on each other’s albums. When they were recording ‘Vegetables’ (from Smile by The Beach Boys), they used to have this pile of vegetables in the corner for the ‘vibe’ coming off the veg. Paul McCartney ended up chewing celery on that track, but we got him to chew carrots as well so I think we are really pushing the boundaries! I’m sure he was relieved not to do ‘Come Together’ for the millionth time. It was a refreshing change for him. It must be hard to be Paul McCartney.”

Guto still seems a bit shell-shocked by the collaboration.

“It was one of those twists and turns of life where it something you could never, ever imagine happening happened,” he offers. “They’re always the more interesting things. It would have been completely unimaginable that two years ago we’d have Paul McCartney chewing celery on this album. It’s just… amazing!”

But in the world of Furry Sound and Vision, anything is possible. While recording Rings Around The World, the Welsh quintet encountered even more weirdness than they’d bargained for.

“We toured Mwng in America and went to Bearville in Woodstock to record for three weeks in the forest where The Band and Bob Dylan recorded,” Gruff explains. “It is run by Sally Grossman, who is the wife of Dylan’s manager and the person who is on the cover of the Bringing it All Back Home album. She posted us pots of maple syrup for Christmas. So I put the album on and put the sleeve up on the table. I made a pancake and put maple syrup on it sent to me by the woman who is on the cover! That would have been unimaginable a year ago. We are lucky to be in the position where we can do these kind of things.”

“None of these things are contrived, which is the best thing about it,” Guto enthuses. “They just happen. We could have done a jam with McCartney but it would have been hideous. He has done that a million times before.”

Guto’s face lights up as a typically strange thought hits him.

“There will be all these bearded fifty-year- old ex-Beatles fans in America buying the album so they can check it out! The McCartney completists will be sitting by the speakers going ‘it’s really quiet isn’t it?’. It only really comes out in the surround system version. We could have lied but I assure people it’s true. We wouldn’t have even have tried to make up that lie!”

Another album highlight features a certain Welshman who answers to the name John Cale.

“He came to Cardiff to do a film called Beautiful Mistake,” Gruff begins. “They got twelve bands from around Cardiff to play with Cale as a welcome back do. They asked us to get involved which was great because he has been a hero of mine since I was a child. He is just the coolest Welsh speaker ever! He hadn’t rehearsed in Welsh since he was 16, so we had to give him a hand. We thought we’d use the opportunity to ask him to arrange some strings ‘cos of all the work he’d done with Nick Drake, The Stooges, The Mondays and Patti Smith and all those incredible albums he has recorded.

“So we went down and asked him to arrange the strings. We were asking him how he usually arranges strings and he said ‘Usually I just hum the strings to a sting arranger and he writes it down and gives it to a string quartet’. So he told us that that was what exactly he’d do with us so there was no point in doing it. So instead he just played piano in his leather trousers. That’s another sort of peripheral role by an ex-member of a famous band. We felt we should get them on for luck – an ex member of the Velvets and ex member of the Beatles.”

Do the Super Furries feel lucky that they can indulge in such fabulous whims that few acts in pop are allowed to?

“Yes, totally,” answers Gruff. “It is the luxury of not being a hugely successful band commercially even though we are doing very well. I’m sure a lot of bands release a record, tour around the world for a year and do all sorts of things like interviews and promotion that aren’t involved directly with making music. Plus, we’ve never had the heavy shit deal that plenty of big bands have. It means we’ve had much more freedom to do what we want.

“People tell us that we should leave more of a gap between albums so we can build up momentum for the press. That’s not why we do it. We don’t care! I can’t understand a band waiting and lying about for a year just to build momentum, or believing that you can’t do the same TV programme twice in a year because it’s bad or something. Fucking hell! Just get into the studio and get on with it!

Did they ever encounter any resistance from the more ‘industry’ minded?

“Sony were remarkably open minded about it all,” Guto replies. “It was quite a pleasant surprise for a major label to let us get on with things. Maybe it’s because we had done three albums on Creation and one on our own label so they trusted our instincts.”

“It’s also because we’ve got a safety net because we spent a year re-negotiating,” adds Gruff. “We didn’t want to sign a deal blindly. Our deal means we can record albums without their permission and release them on any other label outside our contract. We did that because some of our music is going to be populist, big tunes that will be listened to by a lot of people. But some projects we do aren’t going to be suitable for mass consumption or whatever they call it. We didn’t want to be in the situation where we’d be signed to a major label and we’ll deliver an album which we’d think would be fucking amazing, but they’ll think it is a pile of crap and refuse to put it out and stick it in a vault for ten years. We don’t want to spend ten years in court, so we made up a clause letting us record for any other label anywhere in the world”

Amazingly, in the world of Super Furry Animals, the stranger their ideas, the more successful they become. Last year’s Welsh album Mwng managed to dent the charts with absolutely no promotion.

“That was great because there was such a contrast with Guerilla where we did lots of TV appearances and there were a lot of adverts. There weren’t many interviews, hardly any advertising and we didn’t even release any singles, but it went to number eleven! And we got to keep all the money, as it was purely our record (on the SFA label Placid Casual). Creation predicted it would only sell 5,000. Again, hopefully it is down to the idea that if you have a good piece of music with good songs it is irrelevant how fancy you package them or how much you hype them.”

Although their latest multimedia extravaganza is packaged as no album has ever been packaged before, Rings Around The World functions perfectly as a ‘conventional’ (in the SFA sense of the word) stereo album to be played on ordinary CD players.

“Basically there is no one theme to it except that it is a mess created by five people,” Gruff explains, attempting to sum up the state of the Furries’ Fuzzy Logic in 2001. “The core of it is that even the most isolated person in the world is exposed to all kinds of shit. It’s just observing the world around us from a victim’s outlook rather than some kind of social commentary. ‘Justapozed with U’ (first single with the chorus “you’ve got to tolerate all the people that you hate”) is definitely some kind of social commentary, but from the viewpoint of; ‘“I’m just a guy in a rock band. You might as well talk to the taxi driver’. This doesn’t give me a license to preach anymore than anyone else. I’ve got a soapbox onstage now but it has got five eyes and horns just to make sure that people won’t take me seriously. Like we take our music totally seriously and are really passionate about it and I’m very serious about my lyrics… but I don’t want to sound like some arsehole….”

“…Like Sting!”, Guto cheekily concludes.

But Gruff can sleep soundly at night safe in the knowledge that he thankfully isn’t remotely like Sting in either song or sentiment. For lovers of experimental leftfield pop, Rings Around The World is destined to be a landmark album for a confused digital age. A luxurious visual and aural treat fused by five Welsh nutbags who appreciate life in all its strange, sad, funny, cruel and outrageous complexity.

The Super Furry Mothership is due to touch down on our planet any day now, and you’ll be a fool (or Sting), if you don’t want to get on

board. b

Rings Around The World will be released on Monday 23rd July. Super Furry Animals headline the Witnness Rising stage on Sunday August 4th