Ric Rawlins’s new authorised biography, Rise Of The Super Furry Animals, charts this saga in appropriately fantastical, “cinematised” fashion. The singer’s career since his BMX days has ranged from rumbling up to rock festivals in a fully operational tank to maverick searches for lost Welsh-speaking tribes in the Americas. I meet the very softly and very slowly spoken Rhys in Bath, where he’s touring his surreally ambitious solo album, American Interior. His answers seem to place the Super Furries, silent since 2009’s Dark Days/Light Years LP, more firmly in the past tense than ever before. Moments of unusual caginess are explained when, after we’ve spoken, the band’s entirely unexpected live return is announced. Still, his comments make it clear that their old music is unlikely to be added to.
“We committed ourselves to some kind of distorted vision of reality completely, for about 15 years,” Rhys reflects. “Being in a band’s a hugely romantic idea. We gave everything to it, to the detriment of everything else. That’s changed. Most of us have kids and families, and we’ve got different priorities. We’ve made nine albums, in which months were spent with our whole beings focused on making fantastical records. It’s a huge undertaking on a personal level, and I’m extremely grateful to have that experience. But fatigue sets in. It gets harder to recreate the momentum. It’s far less stress, making solo records, and difficult to imagine any more intense way of living than making those band records. It’s quite difficult to imagine being able to cope with that intensity forever.”
The band began on Ankst, a mostly Welsh-language label “formed in a political fever”, but signed to Alan McGee’s Creation for their debut, English-language album, Fuzzy Logic (1996). While label-mates Oasis showed pre-millennial rock remained capable of generation-binding scale, the Super Furries conjured more creative, whimsical excesses, often based on childhood dreams. Drummer Dafydd Ieuan had tried to build a tank when he was 9. So they got Creation to buy one. A follow-up request for an aircraft carrier sadly failed. “We were trying it on,” Rhys admits. “But we understood that if someone offers to make a video with [ex-Stones Svengali] Andrew Loog Oldham in Bogota, it’s unlikely you’ll ever get that opportunity again. For the most part, it was for musical reasons. We were trying to make unique records, and sometimes unique experiences can lead to that.”
With the band members’ more mature, settled family lives now limiting the intense devotion and extreme experiences that fed those records, does that in itself make another album unlikely? Does the Super Furries’ music belong to a life they no longer lead? “I’ve no idea,” Rhys says. “But I definitely agree that it’s a hedonistic band. We were always conscious that we wanted our live gigs to be celebrations, and to be extremely hedonistic. We took that as some kind of duty. Our formative years happened with the explosion of acid house, so even though we were confined to rock, we were drunk on that euphoria.”
Rawlins compares his book to Oliver Stone’s film The Doors, which seems apt for the Super Furries’ wide-screen, hallucinogen-fuelled adventures. But compared to their Sixties forebears, their trip seems to have been benign. All five band members have lived, stayed sane, and stayed friends, with no known casualties along the way. “Well, there have been awful moments as well,” Rhys says cautiously. “The book is one vision of the band, and it’s not Heart of Darkness. You could probably write a book about the extremely dark times as well. But I’m not going to dwell on them here.”
Were there secret casualties along the way, then? “Inevitably. If you’re living the extremely unusual life of a rock band, it doesn’t always fit in with most people’s reality. I think the sounds of highs and lows are all there in the records. I don’t want to put them down as anecdotes in interviews. Some people talked about doing a book about us before. But when Ric said it was going to be like a fictional story, we were very comfortable with that!” he laughs.
Rhys is happier reflecting on the remarkable supporting cast in this Welsh psychedelic saga; the likes of ex-international drug smuggler Howard Marks, and future Hollywood star Rhys Ifans. “Rhys is extremely intelligent,” he reflects, “and extremely hedonistic, and an anarchist. He was able to whip a whole community into a frenzy, just by arriving in town. Rhys was a huge influence on our self-confidence.” Marks was similarly crucial. A few days after we speak, most of the Super Furries play a London benefit gig for his treatment for inoperable cancer. “I’m extremely concerned for him,” the singer says simply.
Rhys politely escorts me back to Bath station. Gently asked to gee up his characteristic stroll towards my imminently leaving train, he breaks into a near-trot. “Gruff’s very considerate of others,” Rawlins notes, “and very enthusiastic. But it’s enthusiasm in slow-motion.”
“I haven’t been able to reflect on those years with the band in Ric’s book in any clear way,” Rhys concludes. “It feels extremely fresh, and suddenly it’s years in the past. I’m just flattered that anyone wanted to document it at all.”
‘Rise of the Super Furry Animals’ by Ric Rawlins is published by The Friday Project. The Super Furry Animals begin their tour in Cardiff on 1 May, the same date their album ‘Mwng’ is reissued on Domino Records.
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