Why the Super Furry Animals are the Perfect Welsh Musical Act

t’s been over twenty years since the ‘Cool Cymru’ movement, and it’s nice to see that one of the central pillars of that time is still standing strong. The Super Furry Animals (featuring Gruff Rhys, Huw Bunford, Guto Pryce, Cian Ciaran, and Dafydd Ieuan) have been making hook happy rock music with a wild twist since 1993. 

Alongside Manic Street Preachers and Stereophonics, they are the big names of the alternative rock scene that came to dominate the UK and much of the world in the mid-nineties, but they’ve kept busy and have released plenty of acclaimed music since then.

It puts a smile on our faces that they still call Wales home, when, after all their success, they could be in their condo in Cardif, sifting through Cardif escort reviews. When enjoying their cracking good albums that can serenade you to sleep or blow out your speakers (sometimes within the same song), there is no doubt that you can hear a little bit of the Welsh spirit in every note.

For Starters…

The band began with frontman Rhys not even singing a note, as the first track they made was an ambient piece (‘Dim Brys: Dim Chwys’) for Radio Cymru. For all their accessible songwriting abilities, it’s good to remember that the band were strongly influenced by techno and electronic music that was all the rage in the early nineties. When they did ‘speak’, it was not without some head-scratching and controversy. 

Their debut EP was called (deep breath) ‘Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (In Space)’ and goes down a lot easier than the title, although it didn’t exactly burn up the charts. While it did well in Wales, the band’s decision to sing songs in both Welsh and English did not go over well at first with the local press.

However you can’t argue with success (well, you can, but it’ll probably hamper future success), and the band soon had a record deal, with their debut album Fuzzy Logic arriving in May of 1996, buoyed by the three singles ‘Hometown Unicorn’, ‘God! Show Me Magic!’ and ‘If You Don’t Want Me to Destroy You’. 

While the band clearly has excellent songwriting chops, what sets them apart from plenty of other bands that are comprised of guitar-bass-drums-keyboards is how willing the SFA are willing to weave in electronica elements, with synths and samples constantly adding flourishes to the music. There are just so many sounds to burrow into your ears beyond the straightforward chords.

Their follow-up – 1997’s Radiator – continued their success, charting better than their first record, and balancing the high energy power pop of ‘Placid Casual’ and ‘Play it Cool’ with the bizarre sonic explorations of ‘Short Painkiller’ and ‘Mountain People’. 

Guerrilla completed their first trilogy of albums, and it pushed the sonic palette even further, as the accessible singles mix and matched with some heavy drum and bass tracks like ‘The Door to This House Remains Open’, and the folk-tinged ‘Fire in My Heart’ (the pipe-smoking alien in the front covers certainly helps inform listeners of what they’re in for). The NME later put it on their top 500 albums of all-time list.

Later albums cleaved their pop and experimental sides in two, with 2007’s ‘Hey Venus!’ being very accessible, and 2009’s ‘Dark Days/Light Years’ being very not.

A Love Letter to Wales

At the height of their success, SFA turned back towards their homeland wholeheartedly, and recorded an entire album in Welsh, titling in ‘Mwng’. In addition to the language change, it also eschewed much studio experimentation of their earlier work, focusing on a much quieter, acoustic sound throughout. 

It is also much more reflective and sombre, with topics ranging from the fading of pastors world, the band’s youth and education, and an accent roman road. Rhys himself has said that the album was not necessarily political, but that recording in Welsh immediately made it a piece of culture that stood against globalization.

It was warmly received, garnering plenty of praise from music publications that probably didn’t know what Rhys was singing about.</a>. Amazingly, it almost made the UK top ten and was a big enough deal that it was acknowledged in Parliament as an example of the Welsh language still having a place in popular culture.

Pushing the Boundaries, Just For The Heck Of It

By being so surface friendly with their singles and generally pleasant demeanour (and a quirky name doesn’t hurt either), it certainly made it easier for the Super Furry Animals to go quite weird at times. After all, not many bands can get away with a song called ‘Shoot Doris Day’ or ‘Baby Ate my Eightball’, or name an album after a sex shop near their band management offices.

When Paul McCartney popped in their studio to say hello, they had him munch on a carrot into a microphone and used the sound on the track ‘Receptacle for the Respectable’ (eventually released on the 2001’s ‘Rings Around the World’). This was not their first McCartney run-in, as he had previously invited the band to work on the Liverpool Sound Collage project.

Some of the attention the band enjoyed, some of it they didn’t. The Super Furry Animals turned down a two million pound offer from Coca-Cola for their 2003 single ‘Hello Sunshine’ because of the company’s harsh treatment of employees in Columbia. Meanwhile, they were happy to collaborate on a beer with The Celt Experience craft brewery in 2014 (the beer, titled ‘Fuzzy Beer’, is inspired by the first album).

On their 2016 reunion tour, their encore was the band coming back onstage in animal costumes and clearly miming playing their instruments to a short backing track of an exceedingly generic rock song. To rapturous applause and smiles. It was a great way to acknowledge just how silly the band is, how silly their fanbase is, and how silly rock superstardom really is.