1 Something 4 the Weekend
When Super Furry Animals’s first album, Fuzzy Logic, was released in 1996, it introduced a Britpop-enthralled audience to a band who had only the loosest interest in being part of the rock movement of the moment. They were more concerned with producing a demented cocktail of warped psychedelic dreaminess, Beach Boys melodies and gonzo glam rock. It was a patchy debut, but all the ingredients are here – the mischief, the melodies and taste for cultural havoc (this was a band who modified an army tank into a rave sound system as well as celebrating Howard Marks on Fuzzy Logic and its cover). It’s also chock full of singles, from the fizzy punch of God! Show Me Magic to the darkly gorgeous psychedelia of Hometown Unicorn. But it was Something 4 the Weekend that hit the sweet spot between the two and showcased SFA as the fantastic singles band they were to become. The George Foreman-quoting verses lectured on the perils of drugs. “George Foreman was asked, ‘What did you spend all your money on?’ and he said ‘Slow horses and fast women’. It’s about the downside. There’s too many songs celebrating the upside of sex and drugs,” explained Gruff Rhys. But when that spine-tingling chorus hits it’s the best legal high you could wish for.
Stickers on the front of this single stated “Warning! This track contains the word ****! 50 times”, (it’s 52 to be exact). It remains the ultimate Super Furries statement; an epic, spaced-out protest song. It nearly never happened, though: Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen initially refused the band permission to use the sample from Showbiz Kids. He eventually relented, but demanded 95% of the track’s proceeds, a situation Rhys accepted, realising a song with 52 swearwords in was unlikely to pick up much radio play. Thank God he did: for this rambling, dishevelled, hissing track became a defining moment for the band, showcasing their subversive political side. Rhys claimed it was a “protest song for our time” and during the Iraq war they started to play it with projected images of George W Bush and Tony Blair. Live, the outro would often extend to 10 or 20 minutes and a 23-minute version recorded at Hammersmith Apollo was released as a single in 2004 with the word “fuck” used approximately 100 times – a super-sweary record.
3 Demons
If there is a better opening line to a song than “Clarity just confuses me” then I’ve yet to hear it. A meditation on dealing with paranoia dealt with in the most poetic and droll of ways (see also “Sunny days in January leave spaces in my diary”), Demons is one of the band’s most enduring songs. For a group more famed for their singles than as an album band, Radiator stands out as their defining work and it’s Demons (together with Mountain People) which is its mariachi-flavoured beating heart, a sombre yet beautiful anthem driven by mordant trumpets, banjos and Rhys doing his best Bowie impression as the track builds to a spine-tingling climax. The story of the video – documented in Ric Rawlins’ new book on the band – is fascinating. They went to Colombia, and ended up in a jungle the size of Wales, full of warring militia factions and only realised later that the locals had been bribed not to hassle them as they got drunk. As Dafydd Ieuan said: “Gringos in the village normally don’t last … they strip you naked.”
4 Hermann Loves Pauline
Hermann Loves Pauline is gloriously, idiosyncratically Super Furry Animals. From its post-techno opening through to its buzzing Krautrock stomp and Rhys’s wry, barmy lyric “Marie Curie was Polish-born but French-bred. Ha! FRENCH BREAD” it seems to capture everything that makes them so singular. History and science fans will know Hermann and Pauline are, of course, the parents of Albert Einstein. The song also mentions Marie Curie and Ernesto Guevera. But it’s actually about Gruff buying cheap biographies about them from motorway service stations in the late 90s. The song proved difficult to play live and the band stopped doing so altogether until the Phantom Power tour. Huw “Bunf” Bunford explained: “We used to have an eight-track doing the backing clicks for it, a timecode thing, which basically messed it all up for us. We’d never played it for three years, thinking we couldn’t. We get into that sort of situation a lot.”
5 Ice Hockey Hair
Or everyone’s favourite song named after a mullet. Except perhaps the band’s. They originally named it The Naff Song as they thought it “had so many naff, cheesy things about it”. It was only after a Swedish footballer said that having “ice hockey hair” was a really naff thing to do in Scandinavia that they renamed it. Despite the band’s reservations, it remains a fantastically madcap song: a “Badfinger-style power ballad” (according to Rhys) and a combination of Queen-style guitars, ELO whimsy, the best drum solo in an indie song and a skyscraping outro as Rhys offers: “Now that you’re here, tell me you’re a non-believer.” All the ridiculousness levels out so that you’re left with a wonderfully baffling thing of epic proportions.
6 Northern Lites
For me Northern Lites, with its steel drums, Beach Boys harmonies, calypso stylings and er, doubts about the existence of God, has always been the sound of sunshine and the summer, despite being a song that was inspired by coverage of the El Niño climate pattern. It nearly sounded quite different – Rhys originally wrote the melody several years before and the band had experimented with reggae and “dirgy rock” styles. The band only decided on a calypso style after Gruff wrote the Latin American–tinged lyrics. Keyboardist Cian Ciaran also added steel drums on the spur of the moment after they saw them “lying around” the studio. But the stylistic shifting didn’t stop there: years later the band took to playing it in different styles and at Glastonbury 2007 did it in the style of Big Star. And the lyrics? Although Rhys had said that the song is “about asking Jesus if he decides to seek his revenge on us, to get it over with as soon as possible” he has also stated that it’s really “just a song about the weather”.
7 Dacw Hi
Mwng (Mane in English) was the first Welsh language album to go into the top 20 of the UK album charts. It’s also, more surprisingly, SFA’s best-selling album in America. It was also praised in an early day motion in the House of Commons for its significant part in promoting the language and culture of Wales. So, what could have been commercial suicide turned into a triumph. It remains their darkest, yet most coherent album and, according to Rhys, saw the band “sieving off” their influences to sound like themselves for the first time. It’s the laidback west coast groove of Dacw Hi, which Rhys had actually written 13 years earlier in 1987, that stands out. It means “There she is” and it’s your typical story about a teacher from his school who claimed she had eyes in the back of her head. “I brought an egg to school and I was going to break it on her desk when she wasn’t facing me. And she caught me,” he said.
8 Juxtaposed with U
Juxtaposed with U, yet another brilliant single, was possibly the most “pop” SFA ever sounded. Not pop enough, unfortunately, to convince either Brian Harvey or Bobby Brown to duet on the song – both turned down the opportunity, meaning Rhys duetted with himself using a vocoder. The sound was another surprising turn from a band who had made a career out of the unexpected. For Rhys it was a subversive statement in the face of all the laddish guitar music that dominated the charts in 2001: “There’s a lot of macho music going around which has become a bit tiresome, and it’s a statement almost.” Rhys claimed he wanted to create something similar to Ebony and Ivory and the Philadelphia soul sound seemed to suit them down to the ground. Who can’t relate to a chorus with the lyrics “You’ve got to tolerate all those people that you hate/ I’m not in love with you but I won’t hold that against you”? As Rhys explained: “It’s as close to a soul song as a load of atheists can get.”
9 Receptacle for the Respectable
The song where they completely went with their “silly streak” which means a multi-part track with a section that sounds like Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head and Paul McCartney chewing celery. Sir Paul is credited in the liner notes as providing “celery and carrot” (a nod to the band’s love of the Beach Boys for whom he’d performed a similar role during the Smile session). “We figured we already had a bass and singers so we really didn’t need any more musicians. So we figured he could crunch vegetables,” explained Bunford. Things don’t get any less strange thereafter. The song shifts wildly through genres: starting out as bright breezy harmonica-led west coast hymn, morphs into a prog-Beach Boys harmony piece, before the vegetable chewing comes in, only to be drowned out by a pantomime death-metal crescendo. A fifth, hip-hop, section was discussed but the band decided against it, reasoning that “if you’re going to do a fifth bit, you’d probably do a sixth, and before you know where you are, you’re doing a concept album made up of nothing but bits.”
10 Slow Life
If the closing track on Phantom Power sounds like two magnificently huge songs melded together, that’s because it is. The techno part was composed by Ciaran years before but, unsatisfied, he asked the band to jam over it. The band obliged and the song was chopped up, strings were added and, hey presto, you had this beast: seven minutes of throbbing, anti-capitalist, mindrattling techno, which I’m sure says “I think we need more lemons.” The track veers between the two styles but never feels like it’s coming apart as Rhys sings “Buy and sell you/ Terrorise you/ Mass destruct you.” “It’s me regurgitating what we hear on the news, recycled, vomiting them all back,” he explained.
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