Totally Dublin 1
decisions have been made on our creative position
s. The most stressful part of being in a band is the daily decisions you have to make together, on the font size and things like that. Democracy? Yeah. ruff Rhys is a peculiar interviewee, to put it mildly, but also a genial one. It is well known that he tends to live inside his own head. In conversation, this results in very long pauses mid-sentence, as he cogitates how best to get to the end of the line of reasoning he has started. Sometimes you don’t know whether to let him be, to find his own way there, or if you should give him a friendly nudge in the right direction. Sometimes the inner machinations of his brain waves resolve themselves eventually. Other times he loses his train of thought completely. Accordingly, there will be a fair smattering of… ellipses in this feature. It would be banal to characterise this mannerism as typical of those who have overindulged in psychotropic substances over an extended period, their predilection catching up with them in later years. Maybe he was always like this. Maybe he is more like himself than he ever was. He is, whatever else, unfailingly polite, which goes some measure towards making the whole process fun. This morning, in particular, you’d be more than willing to cut him some slack. After all, the band he has fronted since 1995, Wales’ own Super Furry Animals, have just played their first gig in ten years the night before, and he is understandably befuddled, and in recovery mode. As he sits down in a noisy hotel breakfast restaurant, he could probably do with a couple more hours’ sleep. H So, how did it go last night? Quite amazed, it happened. It started and, you know, it finished. Why did you choose to have a reunion now? We get asked to play often but, you know, it’s a big commitment. You give your life to the band, in a way, and everyone was looking for it this time. And our booking agent for thirty years, Jeff Neill was like telling us this is the one, if you’re going to do it, it’s this year. And we have to come to terms with … maybe there couldn’t physically be a 60th anniversary, for example. So this was the year to do it, 30th anniversary, and everyone was into it. We’ve been rehearsing in Cardiff for about a month, but we got together to jam a few weeks before that, to check if the muscle memory was still working. And with some songs it was, with others it really wasn’t. It’s been a process of getting things together. Do you think you’ll have any new material? It’s not the plan. The plan was to just enjoy the songs. We have nine albums, and all the 14 What about the set list? You have to hammer that out? We use D’Hondt’s system. It’s extremely proportional. It’s a Single Transferable Vote. This time we got to choose twenty songs each. If there’s five that coincide they go in, you know, and then it goes down, there’s a few fours and even a few threes, etc. Which Furrys’ material do you enjoy playing the most now? Well, I enjoy it all. Because some of it is challenging because you have to reacquaint yourself with a younger person. We didn’t play everything. We’ve rehearsed more than we can play in one gig, and I do enjoy the ones we can sing together. You know, it sounds corny as hell, in a way, but when you sing in harmonies, I really enjoy the down beats. But I also enjoy the sort of real things we do as a band. It elevates into something an individual couldn’t match. So when the band was still a full-time concern, how did you decide what was a Furrys’ song and what was a solo song or a solo album? How did you divide your creativity, personally? I think that, as a band, we know each other very well, so when I started doing solo stuff, I suppose instinctively it was, maybe there’s no point taking particular songs to the band. It just wouldn’t be suitable and it was just a chance to experiment a little bit with different ways of doing things. There were conceptual things that I wanted to see through to a particular sort of end. And I imagine it’s the same for everyone in the band, we’re quite prolific. We’d write so much as a band, we just had to create space for everything. I think we faced criticism – friendly criticism – from some critics, like, ‘Please don’t give us another album now’. Like, ‘Not yet! Give us a year off.’ Because we were releasing an album a year, different projects. It was like an avalanche of music. Why did you stop? Why did the band stop? Well, I suppose it’s an age thing, in that it coincided with when I had kids. I mean, I think that’s the obvious thing, just life changed. When we were touring, when we released the albums, apart from the last one, I didn’t have kids, so I was putting everything into the band, 100%. So, life changes? Life changes. And it’s great, you know. And I suppose, at the time… you don’t quite understand what’s going on. You probably got a bit tired as well? Well yeah, but, I mean. . . I think we appreciated every minute. It’s not a painful existence, it’s a… (after a minute or two) sorry, I’ve lost my train of thought. I suspect, during this pause, he was thinking THE BIG Ahead of their performance at the Wider Than Pictures gig series in Collins Barracks, Super Furry Animals head honcho Gruff Rhys spoke to Des Traynor about the big issues; playing together again after 10 years, Welsh independence and Dublin audiences. WORDS Desmond Traynor PHOTO Ryan Eddleston
