The Super Furry Animals are my favourite band in the whole world.
They are from Cardiff in Wales, and formed in 1993, and immediately started to do things differently. They bought a tank, painted it purple, and installed a P.A. in it. They wrote an acerbic song about authoritarian contempt and decided, correctly, that it wouldn't be complete without using a sample of Steely Dan saying 'fuck'. They have a notable tendency to begin songs as ballads and end them as 170bpm acid holocausts. Their most recent album contains a song called "The Very Best Of Neil Diamond" which is, in the least frivolous and most right-minded way imaginable, a song about being subjected to an aerial bombing campaign.
I think they're bloody terrific, and here are some reasons why.
1. Their first release was called 'Llanfairpwllgwyngogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochynygofod' ("Llanfairpwllgwyngogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in space") and their second was called 'Moog Droog'. While actually hearing either of these (Ankst Records, 1995) can be a bit of a struggle, the mere fact that they exist, and have these names, is obviously marvellous. I particularly approve of appending "in space".
2.
"Arnofio / Glô In The Dark" (1997)
If I weren't doing my absolute best not to be a bore, there would be a paragraph here saying things to the general effect that being as deathly still as the SFA are on this song is NOT EASY; to do so while your bass player makes like Carol Kaye on 'Good Vibrations' and your keyboard guy makes like Robert Wyatt and readying yourself to go simultaneously Pixies-level apeshit represents something pretty special. It'd be about twice as long as this. I'd probably have managed to mention The Raincoats, not that that's a bad thing, but you know, look at all the bands I can name, ZZZZZZZ, right?
But I am doing my best not to be a bore, so there's just this instead. Incidentally, I've only got this on tape, from a cassette my mate Duncan made for me when I was 17. There's still a bit in the middle that goes blank for a beat or two, which is where the tape was when my Dad ejected it in disgust and tossed it onto the back seat of the car one Sunday afternoon somewhere in Hampshire.
3. "Glo" means 'coal' in Welsh, so that's obviously a really magnificently crap pun. That this casual humour is more or less a given in SFA's work is one of the things that makes me so happy about them. "Hermann loves Pauline, and Pauline loves Hermann / They make love and give birth to a little German / They call him MC Squared, because he raps like no other..." There are tons of these, and some of them are truly and gloriously awful.
It forms a part of the sensible and cheering disregard for coolness that I enjoy so much in their work. It's an escape route from naff, self-conscious trudging through Dead White Male Rock's I'm-a-tragically-dissipated-genius-shithead dressing-up box because an adolescence of untempered hero worship has left you, This Year's Contemporary Rock Star Man, without the imagination for anything else, and a such I'm all for it.
They actually did a song called:
"Happiness Is A Worn Pun" (2001)
4.
"If You Don't Want Me To Destroy You" (1996)
I'm just going to list some of the things that make me love this song: the major-minor chord change; the way it sounds so gracefully tired; the son of '"Heroes"' guitar feedback warbling all the way through it; that bloody title!; the way that instead of a third verse it has a string part playing a new tune (more people should do this); the fact that the entire last third of this putative three-minute pop single (this was a single!) is a fade-out, and they get away with it.
In 1996, this managed to sound simultaneously more imaginative AND more grown-up AND prettier AND more sensual AND more fun than just about anything else I heard coming from some blokes with some guitars. I still think it's bloody lovely.
5. As should be clear, there's a good deal of Weird and Wacky and Fabulous in the SFA genotype. But despite all that, one shouldn't be tempted to write them off as They Might Be On Acid or something like that. That would be foolish.
For one thing, their facility with the absurd specifically means that they can disarm you and then really blow you away. A song called "Sex, War & Robots" which is about precisely those three things sounds like a cute conceit and little more until lines like "I program robots to make them lie" sidle their way up to your very side and stick the blue umbrella of pathos right where it counts. When they want to make you aware of exactly what bothers them, they really don't seem to piss around hoping it doesn't make you too uncomfortable, and I really appreciate that.
Most of the more sombre songs haven't graced YouTube or something similarly convenient, which is a bit of a shame, because they're wonderful and imaginative and touching. The narrator of "Fragile Happiness" daydreams getting away from his tenuously-held equilibrium by taking a holiday to Miami, but can't help wonder whether Will Smith's opinion of the place is one he should trust.
"Hello Sunshine" takes bathos to whole new levels. The closest it gets to catharsis is a bridge that goes: "You're not so innocent / You're a disgrace to your country / If you fled a million miles / I'd chase you for a day, if I could be bothered." I'm really moved that someone wrote a song detailing that point where heartache and disappointment finally becomes boring.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Eczxwv3zk
"Hello Sunshine" (2004) (embedding disabled, right-click on it or something, it's a lovely video)
6. The Welsh language is bloody amazing. The Super Furries do lovely things with it. My interest in it, which admittedly never got quite as far as chapter 6 of Teach Yourself Welsh, is just about entirely down to them. The sound of people singing in Welsh is a gorgeous, gorgeous thing and I'm a complete sucker for it. I was lucky to grow up at a time when you could regularly hear both the Super Furries and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci and a handful of other really great bands played on the radio.
I won't presume to speak for what it means to Welsh people - these Welsh people, even - to sing in Welsh as well as English. That would be stupid, and I wouldn't know what I'm talking about. But it probably means something. These days about the only thing I can say with any degree of authority is that the Welsh alphabet doesn't have a letter 'K' in it. (See b-side "nO.K.")
Anyway, there's an insanely cheerful song on 'Radiator' called "Torra Fy Ngwallt Yn Hir", which is something about getting your hair cut, apparently, and I should warn you that the tune will crawl into your mind and live there forever:
There's a lovely, slightly morose album they did in 2000 called 'Mwng'. All the songs are in Welsh. It's much more stripped-back than their other work, and features some of their loveliest tunes. Here's one:
"Dacw Hi", from 'Mwng'.
Alongside all this, there's also a song on an EP or something called "(Nid) Hon Yw'r Gân Sy'n Mynd I Achub Yr Iaith", or "(Not) The Song That's Going To Save The Language". I'm not sure why, since I haven't actually heard it, but the idea of this makes me very happy.
8. This song and its video (1)
"The Gift That Keeps Giving" (2007)
9. It's taken me all of about fifteen years - specifically, until this evening - to realise that I'm actually more than a little bit in love with Gruff Rhys. I think I'd listen to him sing the Adobe CS end-user license agreement.
Gruff Rhys plays 'Cryndod Yn Dy Lais' solo, October 2009
Boom Bip - "Do's & Don'ts" (2005)
Neon Neon - "Dream Cars" (2008)
Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse - "Just War" (2009)
10. My three favourite Super Furry Animals albums as of today are:
'Out Spaced' (1998)
'Radiator' (1997)
'Phantom Power' (2003)
11. This song and its video (2)
"Fire In My Heart" (1998)
12. Their albums and singles and videos and things invariably have gorgeous designs and illustrations by brilliant designers and illustrators eminently worthy of your urgent investigation:
Pete Fowler
Seán Hillen
Mark James
"It's Not The End Of The World?" (2001)
video by Numero 6
Pete Fowler & Keiichi Tanaami
13. (Fumbling musicology alert, look out!) There's this dreadful word that older people use, "taste". It's one of those unanchored signifiers that usually means "all the attributes and qualities this thing which I don't like would have to possess or demonstrate in order for me to begin liking it", but it seems to me that taste - in the sense of not unnecessarily intervening in the song for a demonstration of lyrical or musical talent - is an expression of confidence. There's no haveta haveta haveta, cause they don't gotta gotta gotta.
Which is another way of saying that the Super Furries are prepared to let the forms of pop / rock / dance songs work for them, rather than spend all their energy and ingenuity fighting against (or ignoring) them. So 'The Gift That Keeps Giving' pastiches Thom Bell's brand of Philly soul right down to the electric sitar, and "The Piccolo Snare" decides the best way to talk about the end of a war is to cop The Mamas & The Papas' churchy harmony vocals, and they're one of the very few bands from the UK who can, er, boogie.
Which is a really long, drawn-out, pre-emptively justified way of saying that listening to them is like hearing a single band play all the music I've ever liked with love and care and great good humour, which feels really nice.
Most of the more sombre songs haven't graced YouTube or something similarly convenient, which is a bit of a shame, because they're wonderful and imaginative and touching. The narrator of "Fragile Happiness" daydreams getting away from his tenuously-held equilibrium by taking a holiday to Miami, but can't help wonder whether Will Smith's opinion of the place is one he should trust.
"Hello Sunshine" takes bathos to whole new levels. The closest it gets to catharsis is a bridge that goes: "You're not so innocent / You're a disgrace to your country / If you fled a million miles / I'd chase you for a day, if I could be bothered." I'm really moved that someone wrote a song detailing that point where heartache and disappointment finally becomes boring.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Eczxwv3zk
"Hello Sunshine" (2004) (embedding disabled, right-click on it or something, it's a lovely video)
6. The Welsh language is bloody amazing. The Super Furries do lovely things with it. My interest in it, which admittedly never got quite as far as chapter 6 of Teach Yourself Welsh, is just about entirely down to them. The sound of people singing in Welsh is a gorgeous, gorgeous thing and I'm a complete sucker for it. I was lucky to grow up at a time when you could regularly hear both the Super Furries and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci and a handful of other really great bands played on the radio.
I won't presume to speak for what it means to Welsh people - these Welsh people, even - to sing in Welsh as well as English. That would be stupid, and I wouldn't know what I'm talking about. But it probably means something. These days about the only thing I can say with any degree of authority is that the Welsh alphabet doesn't have a letter 'K' in it. (See b-side "nO.K.")
Anyway, there's an insanely cheerful song on 'Radiator' called "Torra Fy Ngwallt Yn Hir", which is something about getting your hair cut, apparently, and I should warn you that the tune will crawl into your mind and live there forever:
There's a lovely, slightly morose album they did in 2000 called 'Mwng'. All the songs are in Welsh. It's much more stripped-back than their other work, and features some of their loveliest tunes. Here's one:
"Dacw Hi", from 'Mwng'.
Alongside all this, there's also a song on an EP or something called "(Nid) Hon Yw'r Gân Sy'n Mynd I Achub Yr Iaith", or "(Not) The Song That's Going To Save The Language". I'm not sure why, since I haven't actually heard it, but the idea of this makes me very happy.
8. This song and its video (1)
"The Gift That Keeps Giving" (2007)
9. It's taken me all of about fifteen years - specifically, until this evening - to realise that I'm actually more than a little bit in love with Gruff Rhys. I think I'd listen to him sing the Adobe CS end-user license agreement.
Gruff Rhys plays 'Cryndod Yn Dy Lais' solo, October 2009
Boom Bip - "Do's & Don'ts" (2005)
Neon Neon - "Dream Cars" (2008)
Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse - "Just War" (2009)
10. My three favourite Super Furry Animals albums as of today are:
'Out Spaced' (1998)
'Radiator' (1997)
'Phantom Power' (2003)
11. This song and its video (2)
"Fire In My Heart" (1998)
12. Their albums and singles and videos and things invariably have gorgeous designs and illustrations by brilliant designers and illustrators eminently worthy of your urgent investigation:
Pete Fowler
Seán Hillen
Mark James
"It's Not The End Of The World?" (2001)
video by Numero 6
Pete Fowler & Keiichi Tanaami
13. (Fumbling musicology alert, look out!) There's this dreadful word that older people use, "taste". It's one of those unanchored signifiers that usually means "all the attributes and qualities this thing which I don't like would have to possess or demonstrate in order for me to begin liking it", but it seems to me that taste - in the sense of not unnecessarily intervening in the song for a demonstration of lyrical or musical talent - is an expression of confidence. There's no haveta haveta haveta, cause they don't gotta gotta gotta.
Which is another way of saying that the Super Furries are prepared to let the forms of pop / rock / dance songs work for them, rather than spend all their energy and ingenuity fighting against (or ignoring) them. So 'The Gift That Keeps Giving' pastiches Thom Bell's brand of Philly soul right down to the electric sitar, and "The Piccolo Snare" decides the best way to talk about the end of a war is to cop The Mamas & The Papas' churchy harmony vocals, and they're one of the very few bands from the UK who can, er, boogie.
Which is a really long, drawn-out, pre-emptively justified way of saying that listening to them is like hearing a single band play all the music I've ever liked with love and care and great good humour, which feels really nice.
And they're also capable of doing playful things with those forms, which is what I think makes their music truly great. They'll do something to see what happens, which is a quality I associate with all my favourite music from the Beatles to Basement Jaxx and from Annette Peacock to Alvin Lucier.
"Mountain People" from their second album is a lovely song which, as far as I understand it, is about a particular kind of isolationist, somewhat paranoid rural mindset. It's fitting, then, that the music itself keeps returning to this one chord and thumping it with such baleful deliberation that it becomes scary, then funny, then both at once.
"Mountain People" (1997)
I used to miss the skull-rattling dementia present on their earlier records. There's a smashing tune on 'Rings Around The World' called "No Sympathy", which over six-and-a-bit minutes develops from an exceptionally relaxed ballad to something that makes the end of "Mountain People" sound like a birthday cake. Being by disposition an uptight person, I got a lot out of these bursts of catharsis, and felt their absence. It dawned on me - eventually - that there's more to be said for acknowledging a tension, shaping it, and refusing to pretend that three minutes of delirious wreckage will actually do anything to solve the problem. That process feels a lot more insidious, a lot sexier, and seems to sustain a freight of emotion for longer. It's interesting.
14. Every time I attempted to write a detailed proposal of why I thought any given SFA song was wonderful, I found I couldn't. It felt utterly redundant - like trying to write 5,000 words on why you like sunshine, or going to sleep - and soon enough i found I was writing about myself rather than about them anyway.
If you happen to grow up, as I did, on records and daydreams rather than friendship and adventure, they're a very easy band to love because they have this remarkable ability to sound something like all your favourite bands at once while being utterly themselves. There are all these little just-legible semblances of other music in their landscape, like lardons in spaghetti. I love that.
Their songs have this sort of depth of field to them: whether the dominant mood is thoughtful or hostile or sensuous, big parts of the meaning exist between the words that are sung and the way they're sung and the music they're sung against. I love it when musicians or writers or filmmakers, etc, credit me with the wits to figure something out for myself. I get to have that experience of (a) wondering what something means, (b) wondering how I feel about that, (c) feeling however I feel about it, and/or (d) changing my mind later. It's the difference between a song that you just "hear" and a song that you actively conspire in.
In a word, "forward-thinking". There's a nowness to what they do. They're not prisoners of nostalgia. And there's a positivity in their music, often hard-won but heartening nonetheless, that makes me want to be a better person than I often am. When I feel good, they help me feel great; when I feel like shit, they encourage me not to. Detailed justifications, as I said, being fairly redundant and, I hope, not too tedious, I should probably leave it at that. Thank you very much.
"The Very Best Of Neil Diamond" (2009)
--
Super Furry Animals:
http://www.superfurry.com/
http://www.superfurry.org/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/music/sites/super-furry-animals/
http://www.7digital.com/artists/super-furry-animals/
Pete Fowler:
http://www.monsterism.net/
http://petefowler.blogspot.com/
Seán Hillen:
http://www.seanhillen.com/
Mark James:
http://markjamesworks.blogspot.com/
Numero 6:
http://www.partizanlab.com/partizanlab/musicvideos/?numero_6/biography
Keiichi Tanaami:
http://www.artnet.com/artist/424001537/keiichi-tanaami.html
Neon Neon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_Neon
http://www.7digital.com/artists/neon-neon
The Very Best Of Neil Diamond:
----
*
p.s. Hey. The Dreadful Flying Glove's glorious love fest -- ultra-deserving in my book too -- for the Super Furry Animals is your assignment for the weekend. Please revel, learn, confirm, question, etc. until further notice aka Monday at the very least. Thank you with multiple hearts, TDFG. Thanks, with roughly the same number of hearts, to everyone out there for your attention and comments. Very briefly, acting in the Christophe Honore film yesterday was fascinating, fun, and exhausting. I'll say more about the experience on Monday. For now, below are two photos I shot on the set showing (left) Francois Sagat, the porn star/actor with whom I performed in the longest of my two scenes, and (right) Christophe Honore. Lastly, as explained in that weirdly, irritatingly truncated p.s. yesterday, I'm headed back to Brest early this morning, so I only have time to say the above and wish you all fine and fond weekends, after which I will see you and blab with you once again. Take care until then.
"Mountain People" from their second album is a lovely song which, as far as I understand it, is about a particular kind of isolationist, somewhat paranoid rural mindset. It's fitting, then, that the music itself keeps returning to this one chord and thumping it with such baleful deliberation that it becomes scary, then funny, then both at once.
"Mountain People" (1997)
I used to miss the skull-rattling dementia present on their earlier records. There's a smashing tune on 'Rings Around The World' called "No Sympathy", which over six-and-a-bit minutes develops from an exceptionally relaxed ballad to something that makes the end of "Mountain People" sound like a birthday cake. Being by disposition an uptight person, I got a lot out of these bursts of catharsis, and felt their absence. It dawned on me - eventually - that there's more to be said for acknowledging a tension, shaping it, and refusing to pretend that three minutes of delirious wreckage will actually do anything to solve the problem. That process feels a lot more insidious, a lot sexier, and seems to sustain a freight of emotion for longer. It's interesting.
14. Every time I attempted to write a detailed proposal of why I thought any given SFA song was wonderful, I found I couldn't. It felt utterly redundant - like trying to write 5,000 words on why you like sunshine, or going to sleep - and soon enough i found I was writing about myself rather than about them anyway.
If you happen to grow up, as I did, on records and daydreams rather than friendship and adventure, they're a very easy band to love because they have this remarkable ability to sound something like all your favourite bands at once while being utterly themselves. There are all these little just-legible semblances of other music in their landscape, like lardons in spaghetti. I love that.
Their songs have this sort of depth of field to them: whether the dominant mood is thoughtful or hostile or sensuous, big parts of the meaning exist between the words that are sung and the way they're sung and the music they're sung against. I love it when musicians or writers or filmmakers, etc, credit me with the wits to figure something out for myself. I get to have that experience of (a) wondering what something means, (b) wondering how I feel about that, (c) feeling however I feel about it, and/or (d) changing my mind later. It's the difference between a song that you just "hear" and a song that you actively conspire in.
In a word, "forward-thinking". There's a nowness to what they do. They're not prisoners of nostalgia. And there's a positivity in their music, often hard-won but heartening nonetheless, that makes me want to be a better person than I often am. When I feel good, they help me feel great; when I feel like shit, they encourage me not to. Detailed justifications, as I said, being fairly redundant and, I hope, not too tedious, I should probably leave it at that. Thank you very much.
"The Very Best Of Neil Diamond" (2009)
--
Super Furry Animals:
http://www.superfurry.com/
http://www.superfurry.org/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/music/sites/super-furry-animals/
http://www.7digital.com/artists/super-furry-animals/
Pete Fowler:
http://www.monsterism.net/
http://petefowler.blogspot.com/
Seán Hillen:
http://www.seanhillen.com/
Mark James:
http://markjamesworks.blogspot.com/
Numero 6:
http://www.partizanlab.com/partizanlab/musicvideos/?numero_6/biography
Keiichi Tanaami:
http://www.artnet.com/artist/424001537/keiichi-tanaami.html
Neon Neon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_Neon
http://www.7digital.com/artists/neon-neon
The Very Best Of Neil Diamond:
----
*
p.s. Hey. The Dreadful Flying Glove's glorious love fest -- ultra-deserving in my book too -- for the Super Furry Animals is your assignment for the weekend. Please revel, learn, confirm, question, etc. until further notice aka Monday at the very least. Thank you with multiple hearts, TDFG. Thanks, with roughly the same number of hearts, to everyone out there for your attention and comments. Very briefly, acting in the Christophe Honore film yesterday was fascinating, fun, and exhausting. I'll say more about the experience on Monday. For now, below are two photos I shot on the set showing (left) Francois Sagat, the porn star/actor with whom I performed in the longest of my two scenes, and (right) Christophe Honore. Lastly, as explained in that weirdly, irritatingly truncated p.s. yesterday, I'm headed back to Brest early this morning, so I only have time to say the above and wish you all fine and fond weekends, after which I will see you and blab with you once again. Take care until then.
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