Do not feed the animals
Super Furry Animals wax passionate about Nazi taxi drivers, nuclear power stations and obscure Celtic sports
Ed Power, 04 Sep 2007
Gruff Rhys and Huw Bunford of Super Furry Animals are tucking into a Mediterranean spread in Dublin’s Market Bar with the frantic enthusiasm of men who haven’t seen a square meal in days.
“We’ve been up since four,” explains Bunford, between mouthfuls of olives. “It was a nightmare, to be honest. Our cab driver was a bit of a fascist. He had a go at me because I wasn’t standing on the steps waiting for him. Then, we drove around to collect Gruff, and he had a pop at him, too.”
Presumably the Nazi cabbie didn’t realise he was in the company of Britrock cult heroes, a band who, for the past 12 years, have ridden the vagaries and vicissitudes of the music industry and, today, are stronger than ever.
“We’d put out four albums a year if we could get away with it,” says Rhys. “There’s so much we want to do that keeping it all under wraps can be a problem sometimes.”
Rather than issuing an LP every three months, the Super Furries must make do with putting one out every other year. They’ve just dropped their latest, a whimsical and rather sweet blast of psychedelic hooey called Hey, Venus!
“It’s a concept album that we wrote by accident,” explains Gruff, who, with wide eyes and tangled hair, has the air of a recently awoken teddy bear. “We’d put together all of these songs, when suddenly it occurred to us that there was a theme emerging. We still hadn’t come up with a name for the record. And the songs seemed united by this one character, whom we decided to call Venus. Hence the name.”
For the second LP in a row, the Super Furries forsook their native Wales in favour of somewhere more exotic. In 2005, they recorded LoveKraft north of Barcelona. This time, they decamped to a castle and vineyard in the south of France.
“It was a bit of an experience,” Bunford recalls. “A bat got into my bedroom one night and started going completely mad. It took hours to get him out. He was very bothered about something.”
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, the recording studio, they reveal, achieved a reputation as a bastion for ghastly FM rock.
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