Remember me
“Say it.” Say what? “Go on, say it.” What do you want me to say? “You know. That Welsh word. That town. The really long one…”
Every Welsh person who has spent much time among the English has lived through this moment at least once. There was a time when, at any house party, any social situation, you could bet all your worldy possessions that it was coming. Tick, tick, tick.
Depending on how much of a performing monkey or people-pleaser you felt like being, you’d either mutter “Oh, fuck off” or, obligingly, just say the word (possibly while thinking ‘Oh, fuck off’). And we’re overwhelmingly people-pleasers, the Welsh. It’s one of our national frailties. So you’d take a deep breath and, using your withheld sigh as slow-release propellant, trot it out. Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyndrobwllantysiliogogogoch. You’d do it knowing full well that the supposed longest place name in Europe was actually concocted in Victorian times for the amusement of tourists. But nobody wants to be told that, any more than the Welsh themselves want to be told that the pile of rocks in a field in Beddgelert isn’t really the resting place of a heroic dog from the pan-European folk tale, and is instead a ruse dreamt up by an enterprising hotelier.
Llanfair PG has probably been supplanted now as the English go-to reference for Welshness by fucking ‘cwtch’, by fucking ‘hiraeth’ (which is ‘cwtch’ with A-levels), by “Whose coat is that jacket?”, or by popty-fucking-ping. (And some of the Welsh are, to a massive extent, complicit.) But, back in the Nineties, that railway station on the North Wales Coast Line on Ynys Môn (Anglesey) was still the one thing that would always be brought up when anyone from one side of Offa’s Dyke found out you were from the other.
So, any Welsh person back in June 1995 would have immediately understood why Super Furry Animals called their debut record Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyndrobwllantysiliogogogochynygofod (In Space) – the supposed longest EP title in history – and nodded with wry recognition. It’s essentially saying, ‘OK, that’s what you think we are, is it? Cute little Hobbit folk, the Mountain People, from that rugged, rocky pig’s head to the west. Fine. If that’s what you want from us. But know that we’re freakier than you even realise.” It’s like calling it Pobol y Cwm… But On Acid!!!, or whatever. SFA were speaking for all of us.
The four tracks of the Llanfair EP, and four more from its follow-up Moog Droog, (a reference to the classic synthesizer and A Clockwork Orange, but also, in a classic bit of Furries bilingual stoner humour, phonetically, “mwg drwg” means cannabis, literally translating as “naughty smoke” in Welsh) form the basis of the vinyl version of Precreation Percolation, a compilation of early material released this May on their own Strangetown Records label. Further SFA rarities and demos from their pre-Creation era (hence the title) appear on the 31-track CD version. Although they’re in many ways rough sketches and early drafts for what came later when more money was available (for recording, but also for military tanks to drive around in, for mad Pete Fowler video animations, for custom Yeti-like golden retriever suits, for getting Paul McCartney to chew vegetables on tape), these recordings offer a vivid sense of how important SFA would become to the culture they’re from.
Ronald Reagan, famously, once described The Beach Boys as “America’s Band”. Super Furry Animals are Wales’ band. The band of Wales. It isn’t just that they are the greatest. (Oh, come on. All the others know this to be true.) They’re the band who, geographically and linguistically, unite the disparate tribes of Y Cymry: the Gogs (North Walians/Welsh speakers) and the Hwntws (South Walians/English speakers). Gruff was born in Haverfordwest in the south-west corner – inside that Pembrokeshire enclave of Englishness known as ‘Little England beyond Wales’ – but raised on the edge of Eryri (Snowdonia) way up north. Daf and his younger brother Cian grew up in the coastal university town of Bangor, six miles up the road. Guto and Bunf are from Cardiff, way down south. The predominantly English-speaking capital is where the band, all bilingual and all considering Welsh their first language, formed. Basically, the Furries have got the whole nation covered, cambrophone and anglophone, city and country.
The ‘country’ is crucial. Now, the first thing to know about rural Wales is that it is fairly fucking mental. The first thing to know about rural north Wales is that it is completely fucking mental. By that metric, the childhood of Gruffudd Maredudd Bowen Rhys in the slate-quarrying town of Bethesda was not an especially abnormal one. (These things are relative. His father was a druid and his mother a poet.) He grew up in a household where diverse musical forms were hitting his ears: Wagner, reggae, Welsh pop, and whatever was playing on Irish stations from across the sea. As recounted in Ric Rawlins’ excellent Rise Of The Super Furry Animals, his older brother was a huge influence.
Dafydd Rhys had been in a band called Chwd Poeth – ‘Hot Puke’ – who were banned from playing at the school after vomiting on the audience, and managed local heroes Maffia Mr Huws. At some point, Dafydd got hold of a pirate radio transmitter, which he and Gruff would hide on nearby mountain tops and broadcast mad mash-ups of musical jingles and comedy sketches. It all went tits-up when it turned out they’d been using the local police frequency – a story which made the Welsh TV news – so they switched their attention to CB radio instead. (Gruff’s handle was Goblin.) Perhaps most importantly, Gruff learned to play right-handed on his brother’s left-handed guitar, a style which he maintains to this day.
Gruff began attending a local youth club which had musical instruments and music lessons, where he met Dafydd Ieuan for the first time. The first band he formed, with Gruff on drums, were Machlud (Sunset), who had one track, ‘Eryr Gloyw’ (‘Bright Eagle’) released by Anhrefn Records, the label of Rhys Mwyn from pioneering Welsh language punk band Anhrefn (for whom Dafydd Ieuan would later serve a stint on drums), on the 1985 compilation Cam o’r Tywyllwch (also featuring such Welsh luminaries as Y Cyrff, Datblygu, and Anhrefn themselves).
Gruff got serious – again, ‘serious’ is relative – when he and Dafydd ‘Daf’ Ieuan formed another band with schoolmates Rhodri Puw and Dewi Emlyn. Ffa Coffi Pawb (literally ‘Everybody’s Coffee Beans’ in Welsh, but phonetically ‘Fuck Off Everyone’ in Wenglish). Their early efforts involved pissing about with tape recorders, saxophones and a drum machine on the ZX Spectrum, with Gruff playing an electric drill. By all accounts, it was an unlistenable racket.
This all changed when they attended a Pop Positif meeting (coaching, mentoring and discussion sessions for Welsh language bands) held by Rhys Mwyn. The Anhrefn frontman introduced FCP to producer Gorwel Owen, who coaxed a decent-sounding demo out of them at his Stiwdio Ofn on Ynys Môn (Anglesey), which was played on BBC Radio Cymru when the band were still only 15 years old. (Owen would go on to produce all FCP’s recordings and several Super Furry Animals albums.)
According to the brilliant Ffa Coffi Pawb documentary on the iPlayer (don’t be scared, subtitles are available), their inspirations included hearing Hüsker Dü on the John Peel show, and the standard issue alternative rock of the 80s Joy Division / New Order, The Jesus And Mary Chain (there’s footage of Gruff and Rhodri looking like the Reid brothers, who are audibly an influence) and The Cure (at another point in the doc, Gruff has Robert Smith hair).
Early Pawb activities were haphazard: the claim, possibly not entirely serious, is made that band members had to communicate via letter because not all of them had phones. But, after one cassette-only album (Octapws, 1988), the weird turned pro. A proper record label came calling.
Ankst Records was founded at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth by Alun Llwyd, Emyr Glyn Williams and Gruffudd Jones, and lasted for ten years, during which time it released three albums by Ffa Coffi Pawb. Ankst’s policy, originally, was Welsh language only (which changed when they signed Carmarthen band Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, whose speech and lyrics flowed naturally back and forth between English and Welsh). Their focus, too, was initially on Wales. This began to shift when they sent albums to the London-based music press. There’s footage of them stuffing a copy of Ffa Coffi Pawb’s third album, Hei Vidal, into a Jiffy bag addressed to me c/o Melody Maker. (I received it, loved it, reviewed it.)
Like a lot of people from English-speaking south Wales, I had grown up viewing Welsh language music as a bit embarrassing and lame. Earnest folk singers, and pop acts with desperately outdated styles. It took Ankst Records, and in particular the 1995 compilation Triskedekaphilia (featuring Gorky’s, Catatonia and the first-ever release by Super Furry Animals) to tip me off that something far more interesting and radical had been going on right under my nose, making me kick myself for missing out.
A typical accusation made by the English media was that Welsh bands were parochial and lacking in ambition if they only sang in their mother tongue. In the Ffa Coffi Pawb doc, a TV interviewer’s entire line of questioning to Maffia Mr Huws is, “Why don’t you sing in English?” The same thing happened when Anhrefn appeared on Whistle Test, with Andy Kershaw charging them with restricting their potential audience. “There is no reason why we should have to sing in another language,” replied Sion Sebon. “We are Welsh. There’s no reason why we should have to justify it…”
The language issue is always a weird one. Nobody had a problem with Pavarotti singing ‘Nessun Dorma’ in Italian. Or Jonssi from Sigur Ros singing in Hopelandic, a language he made up himself. Or endless Death Metal bands where the singer could be growling pretty much anything. And nobody would dream of telling African artists they ought to sing in English. For some reason, only Welsh-speaking bands got beaten with that stick.
Whatever the likes of Kershaw may have thought, it was actually perfectly possible in the Eighties and Nineties for Welsh language acts to forge a successful music career within Wales itself. Coverage in England was rare – there was that Whistle Test appearance for Anhrefn, and John Peel once introduced an item on Channel 4’s The Tube with Anhrefn, Datblygu (of whom, more shortly) and Y Cyrff – but it didn’t matter, because Wales had an enviable infrastructure of its own, as long as you siarad Cymraeg. (If you didn’t, you were fucked, which is why other bands, like Manic Street Preachers, looked to England.) Super Furry Animals, their precursor bands, and their peers all emerged from a strangely dichotomous ecosystem. On the one hand, they used underground, D.I.Y., samizdat methods to proliferate their art. On the other hand, they could rely upon well-funded state media (BBC Cymru and S4C) for coverage and encouragement.
Most of the bands played along nicely with the Welsh language establishment up to a point, and would appear at fundraising gigs for Welsh language campaign group Cymdeithas Yr Iaith Gymraeg. But there’s something a bit… Soviet about state-assisted art, and inevitably anyone with a bit of spirit about them rebelled and bit the hand that fed. Ankst Records put out a pair of EPs with the title S4C Makes Me Want To Smoke Crack (with bands like Catatonia, Melys and David Wrench). The Brighton-based band Traddodiad Ofnus, led by Gareth Potter (formerly best known for playing Harry the Communist agitator in EastEnders) released a record called Welsh Tourist Bored whose general vibe didn’t require a translator. And then there were Welsh language icons Datblygu, the band usually described in simple terms as ‘the Welsh Fall’. Haverfordwest-born, Carmarthen-raised broadcaster and comedian Elis James, quoted in Neil Collins’ International Velvet: How Wales Conquered The ’90s Charts, says, “What was so thrilling about [Datblygu frontman] David R Edwards was he didn’t seem to like Wales, Welsh people or Welsh culture… He had a big problem with the Welsh middle classes, and he had a go at Plaid Cymru. He also criticised BBC Radio Cymru and S4C, who were the only people who would play him other than John Peel.”
Meanwhile, Ffa Coffi Pawb were starting to look beyond Wales, at least for their education. Daf and Gruff went to Manchester University in time to catch the arse-end of Madchester, and FCP recorded Acid-inspired tunes during this period (again, there’s footage, and by this point Gruff has grown cute little dreadlocks).
Increasingly, Pawb were leaning towards tunefulness. “In the early 90s we rebelled against experimental music in a way,” says Gruff in the documentary. “We wanted to make colourful, melodic songs. We felt there wasn’t enough pop singing in Welsh.” (One of FCP’s most melodic songs, ‘Dacw Hi’, went unrecorded, but resurfaced on SFA’s Welsh language album Mwng.)
By 1993, Ffa Coffi Pawb had run its course. Rhodri Puw had a baby, and bowed out. Their final gig was at the Builth Wells Eisteddfod in 1993, supported by Gorky’s (whom Rhodri would later join). Gruff Rhys stayed behind in Manchester, and a disillusioned Dafydd Ieuan hitchhiked to Cardiff, where he lived in a house share, and initially joined Catatonia, who had formed from the ashes of Y Cyrff (who had broken up at around the same time as Ffa Coffi Pawb). One of Daf’s housemates was a bleach-mohicanned berserker called Rhys Ifans whom he and Gruff had first encountered when Ifans gave them a copy of his fanzine Poen Mefwl (Brain Pain) at a festival in Bethesda organised by Gruff’s big bro. Also born in Haverfordwest but transplanted north to Ruthin, Ifans had earned a reputation as ‘The Wildest Man In North Wales’ (which is no meagre claim).
Daf had also got to know members of Cardiff-based Welsh language punk / space rock band U Thant, whose guitarist Huw ‘Bunf’ Bunford, a schoolteacher from Pontypridd, had coincidentally bonded with Gruff on the roof of a moving narrow gauge steam train in mid-Wales while trafficking crates of beer to a party. (I told you rural Wales is mental.) The loose membership of the nascent Super Furry Animals, with Rhys Ifans on vocals but not yet any involvement from Gruff, was coming together. U Thant bassist Guto Pryce who, crucially for the future sound of SFA, was inspired equally by The Damned and ELO, also joined. So did Daf’s brother, Cian Ciaran, a synthesizer wizard and acid house freak who was down the road in Newport studying film and making music under the name Wwzz.
The first Super Furry Animals sessions in July 1993 were characterised by Ifans getting pissed and falling asleep on the studio floor. He clearly had the charisma for a rock frontman, but lacked the commitment. Meanwhile, his acting career was starting to gather momentum (and would soon properly blow up with Twin Town in 1997), so he drifted away as Gruff returned to Wales and joined up with his old friend Daf as SFA’s singer-guitarist. (Rhys Ifans would, many years later, scratch his rock singer itch by reconvening with Daf and Guto in The Peth.)
In their earliest days, Super Furry Animals operated more as a soundsystem than a band. Shifting configurations would turn up at parties and festivals with samplers and synths. They toured Britanny as a techno act supporting Anhrefn. Then they listened to Surf’s Up by The Beach Boys at the insistence of Gorky’s singer Euros Childs at a rave, and a lightbulb went on. Super Furry Animals, for the rest of their existence, would blend benign, Brian Wilson-inflected melodic pop with electro-psychedelic strangeness.
Two Super Furry Animals demo tracks, ‘Dim Brys, Dim Chwys’ and ‘Blerwytirhwng’?(‘Interspersed?’) were aired by Nia Melville on BBC Radio Cymru, and Ankst came knocking again, signing up the Furries for those two 1995 EPs. Hooking up with Gorwel Owen again in Llanfaelog was a no-brainer.
Those sessions with Owen were enormously significant, delivering an early version of perhaps their best-known song, ‘The Man Don’t Give A Fuck’ (basically just the Steely Dan sample looped over and over, before the verses had been written), and ‘Of No Fixed Identity’, the first song Gruff Rhys wrote in English.
The decision to become a lyrically bilingual band was as momentous as the decision to move from techno to rock. It was a major statement (one which Catatonia also made), and not without controversy within the scene that birthed them, prompting finger-wagging headlines in the Welsh language media. (Bilingualism is still a contentious issue in the Welsh scene. Three years ago, Penygroes rapper Sage Todz was barred from performing at the National Eisteddfod for including English elements in his rhymes.)
The confluence of those two decisions bore fruit in early 1995. SFA played their first gig as a rock band at the students’ union in Lampeter (billed as ‘Super Fury Animals’). The following night in Aberystwyth was witnessed by Welsh A&R man Mark Bowen of Creation Records, who encouraged them to play London and booked them in to support Thee Hypnotics at the Water Rats on 19 May, a show which was reviewed by Iestyn George of NME.
There’s a famous story, recounted in David Cavanagh’s history of Creation Records My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize, about SFA’s second London show, at the Monarch in Camden, which was attended by Creation boss Alan McGee in the company of Mark Bowen. “After they played, McGee pointed out to them that their songs would sound even better if they were sung in English. They looked at him curiously. ‘They were in English,’ one of them replied.”
SFA signed to Creation (but didn’t sever their ties with Ankst entirely, as Alun Llwyd carried on managing them), and the rest is Cool Cymru history. Somehow, this group of gloriously unconventional thinkers (with a knack, nonetheless, for brilliantly conventional melody) chimed with the public beyond Wales.
I often cite the evolutionary phenomenon of Island Gigantism when making sense of the effortless strangeness of Super Furry Animals, a band who will, at the drop of a hat, write a rock & roll banger about mythical goat-killing bats of Latin America or a lavish ballad imagining the inner emotional landscape of Boris Yeltsin. Geographical isolation causes creatures, unaffected by the general herd, to mutate into bizarre shapes and sizes. The same applies to pop (or did in the pre-internet age). Super Furry Animals may have signed to the label of Oasis, but they had fuck-all to do with Britpop. They played guitars, took Class As and weren’t averse to wearing a cagoule, but that’s where the similarity ended.
Their debut album sold Gold and was rapturously received by critics. They went on to score four Top 10 albums and eighteen Top 40 singles. And, after ten years away, they’re back together this summer for a series of gigs and festivals. The residual affection for the band, and especially for Fuzzy Logic, remains immense.
But Precreation Percolation offers an opportunity to deep-dive the pre-Fuzzy Furries. The album splits more-or-less evenly between English, Welsh and instrumental. It begins with the Llanfair… section, kicking off with ‘Organ Yn Dy Geg’, which prominently features a mouth organ, and translates as ‘an organ in your mouth’ – you see what they did there? ‘Fix Idris’ is in many ways a dry run for ‘Herman Loves Pauline’. ‘Blerwytirhwng?’ (‘Interspersed’) is Furries in mellow mode. And ‘Crys Ti’ sounds like Elvis beyond the grave having a kung fu fight with a Theremin.
The Moog Droog section begins with the steady psych-pop of ‘PamV?’, a song of love and lust whose title is another bit of cross-linguistic punning (‘Pam fi?’ means ‘Why me?’ Named after a popular series of children’s books, the 2000 TV adaptation of which, coincidentally, would be narrated by Rhys Ifans), ‘Sali Mali’ proceeds at a blissed-out, leisurely pace, and features some lovely lyrics from Gruff about someone who causes him heartache but, when the end of the world comes / the sky comes down / the world comes to an end, “Dwisho bod hefo ti” (I want to be with you). And ‘Focus Pocus / Debiel’ starts off as a headfirst punk-pop thrash before switching to sky-with-diamonds slow psych in a way that anyone familiar with ‘Arnofio / Glo In The Dark’ will recognise.
Beyond those two EPs, the main selling point for SFA completists will be the long-rumoured existence of a handful of tracks with Rhys Ifans on vocals. On the English-language ‘Choking On Your Lust’, ‘Pocket Sam’ and ‘AK Serenade’, he’s a surprisingly competent singer. He might lack the warmth, depth and texture of Gruff (which is a high bar, as Gruff Rhys has one of the loveliest voices known to humanity), but has good pitch and a certain swagger which would have made him a decent indie rock frontman. It’s one of the big what-ifs of Welsh music: how would SFA have fared if Gruff stayed in Manchester, and Rhys Ifans binned off the acting and carried on with them? On this evidence, they’d probably have done alright, actually, but maybe not become the force they are. Although the three Ifans tracks are recognisably Furries, it’s almost a different band, like Mercury Rev when David Baker was fronting them.
Numerous songs here became part of the big, famous, mainstream-facing Super Furry Animals, like the aforementioned ‘The Man Don’t Give A Fuck’ and ‘God! Show Me Magic’ (twice). ‘Hanging With Howard Marks’, their tribute to the famous Welsh drug smuggler who they befriended, turned up on Fuzzy Logic, but you’ll be waiting a long time for the opening line “You, me and the guy from Sparks”, because the version here is an instrumental. The same applies to other Fuzzy Logic tracks like ‘Frisbee’, ‘Fuzzy Birds’ and the second ‘God! Show Me Magic’ (a gorgeous, slowed-down instrumental version). And ‘Something Came From Nothing’ is the thinnest of electronic sketches towards ‘Some Things Come From Nothing’ on third album Guerilla.
Several songs here have previously appeared, in more slickly-recorded forms, on B-sides, deluxe reissues, and / or the 1998 odds-and-ends compilation Out Spaced. Of these, ‘Don’t Be A Fool Billy’, an arm around the shoulder to someone who is losing hope and possibly considering suicide, is perhaps the best, while ‘Of No Fixed Identity’, which ended up on the Hometown Unicorn EP under the name ‘Lazy Life’, is the most historic, for reasons already explained. The one Gruff-sung number which doesn’t appear to have cropped up anywhere at all is the shuddering, heavily-phased ‘Bulletproof’.
One thing that’s striking throughout is that the wow and flutter of Cian Ciaran’s synthesizers is really high in the mix, splashing electronic Action Painting across even the most traditional of songs. And, on the outright instrumentals (as opposed to pre-vocal demo tracks), he’s given an even freer rein. These include ‘Trk05a’ and ‘Trk05b’ (two versions of the same sultry tropical techno track), the psychedelic ‘Quest’, the Teenage Fanclubby, Bandwagonesque-esque ‘Rise ‘N’ Shine’, ‘Dim Brys, Dim Chwys’ (‘No Hurry, No Sweat’), the Triskedekaphilia track which is instrumental apart from some inaudible chatter near the end, and ‘Fine Time’, which is not unreminiscent of its Ibiza-inspired New Order namesake. The closing ‘Tetrachromacy’ sounds like one of those improvised acid freakouts with which Cian would finish SFA gigs at the peak of their Nineties fame, bewildering and terrifying the Britpop kids who’d come to see them unaware of what they were dealing with.
A lot has changed since then. For one thing, you can switch on BBC 6Music and hear Adwaith, and nobody’s asking them why they don’t sing in English. (Although, as Sage Todz found out, there will always be someone asking why he does.) The Welsh language is no longer perceived as an archaic and insular relic. And it was five indie rock stoners (or six, on Precreation Percolation), hailing from all four corners of the pig’s head, who genuinely had more to do with that shift than any number of sensible Senedd initiatives.
Meanwhile, if anyone asks you to say the word, take a breath and think: What would Super Furry Animals do?
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