A conversation with Gruff Rhys and Guto Pryce of Super Furry Animals from 2003
The Welsh psych-rockers talk about mixing pop and politics, the earnest irony of The Darkness, and the Esperanto appeal of Van Halen
Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars (and the occasional classic-rock icon). This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).
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THE OPENERS
Last week, the Toronto Star ran a retrospective special section on the 2000s, and I contributed this essay on the decade in rock music—specifically, how the 2000s were the last decade when rock bands could still shape mainstream pop culture, why that's no longer the case today, and why that's okay.
The Broken Social Scene documentary It’s All Gonna Break (in which I play the David Fricke/Dave Grohl/Questlove role of awestruck onscreen pundit) will be screening over the next month in a town near you (provided you live in Southern Ontario, northern California, Alberta, and, uh, Romania). Check the dates here.
RIP Rick Buckler—mod, rocker, and master of the “Taxman” funk:
Notes on this week’s additions to the stübermania 2025 jukebox:
Trupa Trupa, “Mourners”: This week, Poland’s foremost anti-fascist psychedelic post-punk band releases the Mourners EP, produced by Birthday Party/PiL mainstay Nick Launay. The equally funky and feral title track suggests Talking Heads’ Afrobeat era shot through a ‘90s post-hardcore filter.
Cici Arthur, “Cartwheels for Coins”: This Canadian avant-smooth supergroup—featuring Chris Cummings (a.k.a. Marker Starling), Joseph Shabason, and Thom Gill—releases its debut album, Way Through, on Friday (Feb. 21), and this single strategically uses an elegant sophistipop arrangement to sugarcoat its bitter sentiments about trying to make a living as an entertainer. (Bonus points for shouting out my all-time favourite Steely Dan song.)
Loud Hands, “My Baby”: The new band from TV Freaks’ Sweet Dave O’Connor eases off the manic garage-punk fury of his main gig for a more easy-goin’ Stonesy groove akin to vintage Deadly Snakes or Black Lips circa 200 Million Thousand. (If you like what you hear, grab their self-titled full-length debut on Bandcamp.)
Gus Englehorn, “A Song With Arms and Legs”: I wrote the bio for this Hawaii-via-Portland-via-Québec-via-Utah-via-Alaska artist’s new album, The Hornbook, way back in June—a good half year before its planned release date—and, as a result, I lost sight of the fact it actually came out recently. If you were a fan of The Unicorns’ peculiar brand of innocent-yet-perverse psych-pop, then Gus is your guy—this tune is like a kindergarten circle-time singalong performed by a weirdo-hippie music teacher who’s destined to get fired after the parents complain.
PartyNextDoor & Drake, “Die Trying”: I suppose one way to get past the biggest rap beef of the century is to move beyond rap entirely, as Drizzy does on this acoustic alt-pop outlier, which lands somewhere between “Hold On, We’re Going Home” and Clairo’s “Bags.”
THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Gruff Rhys and Guto Pryce of Super Furry Animals
The date: September 15, 2003
Location: The Bishop and Belcher pub on Queen Street West in Toronto
Publication: Eye Weekly
Album being promoted: Phantom Power
The context: When you get obsessed with a band—as I was with the Super Furry Animals roughly between the years 1996 and 2004—you do weird things in the name of fandom. For instance, during a 1998 backpacking trek through the UK, I made a point of detouring to the Furries’ native Cardiff just so that I could visit Acid Casuals, a boutique affiliated with the band. In a pre-smartphone/map-app era, that meant asking local record-store clerks for its whereabouts and scouring labyrinthine shopping arcades for hours. Finally, after spending the better part of a Tuesday searching for it, I found the shop. I got there around 3 p.m.—and it was closed. Which seemed appropriate: Super Furry Animals have always been a band that operates according to its own fuzzy logic.
While they first emerged during the ‘90s Britpop boom, Super Furry Animals were less interested in aping The Beatles and The Kinks than imagining the kind of music they might be making at the turn of the millennium, absorbing influences from hip-hop and electronic music, and contemplating a world drunk on technology and flirting with eco-disaster. But the seriousness of the subject matter is always leavened by the band’s playful spirit, and that goes double for their interviews, where frontman Gruff Rhys—here accompanied by bassist Guto Pryce—offers answers that are 85 percent lucid observation, 15 percent gleeful absurdity.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the band’s formation. Did you mark the occasion in any way?
Gruff: I don’t believe it’s been 10 years. We were making demos 10 years ago, but we didn’t actually play a show—if you want to get technical—until eight years ago. I thought potentially it could be a long-term band, we always hoped it would be. It’s been amazing—to play with the same line-up for eight years is incredible.
Guto: I think we’ve been really lucky, really. We’ve just made records and gone on tour, there hasn’t been any distractions, no drama.
Gruff: We talked about forming a band 10 years ago, and we talked for about two years—we were going out and getting drunk and just talking about this band and how amazing it was going to be. And I think that set us up nicely because we knew then what our ambitions were and we had some kind of scheme in place before we played a note. We’ve seen many bands come and go, and they’re still coming and they’re still going—it’s amazing that we’re still here. I feel extremely lucky to put out our sixth album and that people can still be arsed to listen to it, and the fact that it’s more people is incredible.
Guto: It’s been really comfortable. We’ve seen bands who’ve gone massive… with us, every record sold a little bit more than the last one, as we tour.
Gruff: Because we haven’t had a big hit, it means that we’ve never had to embark on two-year-long road tours, which means we can record more records than successful bands. I think it’s interesting when the music is out of your control… you don’t know when you write a song whether it’s going to wind up in the scrap heap or on a football show, or whose ears are going to hear it. When people come to us and say, “I love your band, you’re my favorite band,” we’ve learned now not to say, “Oh who else are you into?” Because it’s usually someone we really hate—like, “My other favorite band is the Eurythmics!” You have to let your songs go, and it’s our own fault for releasing them. We could stay at home and keep them for ourselves.
It’s interesting how when Fuzzy Logic came out in 1996, you were portrayed as this wacky band, but now you’re praised as a voice of reason who’s speaking to the times….
Guto: Around Fuzzy Logic, it was a particularly bland period of music in Britain, especially the music that was getting pushed. But it was strange, the way we got pigeonholed as “off the wall.”
Gruff: I think if you try to be subversive, it doesn’t work. We presume that we’re not subversive or experimental or pop… we were just trying to make interesting music.
But the things you've been warning listeners about for years—like our dependence on technology—have become serious issues, especially in light of last summer's blackout. It’s almost like: as the world gets worse, your reputation as astute songwriters improves.
Gruff: It must be a dark time for humanity. We’re like rats and cockroaches—after the nuclear holocaust, the Super Furry Animals will still be here. But I don’t think we’re particularly outspoken with our politics. It’s just what we talk about. We sing about our domestic lives, and sometimes politics affects it. The songs are observations—they don’t contain policy-making ideas. I don’t think people buy records for political insights. I think people book a taxi to go from the station to the house, not to hear the taxi driver rant about politics—which they occasionally choose to do, and which we occasionally choose to do too, which is no big deal, but we don’t want to sit on any fences either. We’re the musical equivalent of a cab ride—the difference being that there’s five of us and we drive a starship taxi that flies in all directions at once.
You're in an interesting position: you get regular MTV play in the UK, but over here, more and more people are still discovering you with each new album.
Guto: What you’ve got here is a lot more alternative media. At home, you’ve got your national radio station, and your local commercial radio station, and if you don’t get on those stations, then you’ve got nothing. At least here you got the college radio.
Gruff: But you can spend a day in London, and go to all the radio stations and TV stations and do all the magazines and newspapers in a day and become a national phenomenon and play the stadium the next week. There’s the Canary Wharf skyscraper in London and I went in there once to do some interviews, and I was basically going up and down the lift doing all the national papers in the same building. The next day, we were in every paper and I was just in one building. It’s quite an interesting place—it’s very comic-book.
So the first single from Phantom Power was “Golden Retriever,” which marks a return to you singing from the perspective of animals…
Gruff: Yeah. My girlfriend has two golden retrievers, but it’s been a bit of a dark week—one of them died. The hamster died as well, from Fuzzy Logic—Stavros the Hamster—shortly after it was made.
[Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” comes on the pub stereo]
Gruff: I think this song has got the longest held note in pop.
It’s funny how everyone compares The Darkness to Queen, when they really actually sound more like Boston to me…
Gruff: I think the falsetto singing in The Darkness is interesting, because it came out and people were going, “Oh they’re taking the piss out of arena rock,” and now they are an arena band! When I see him on TV, I definitely turn it up. They entertain me. It’s this new zone—like, earnestly ironic. I suppose there’s an ’80s revival right now, and people have picked up on some of the cool ’80s bands who didn’t sell any records, but the Darkness picked up on what actually defined the 80s for the public. [Pauses.] How do you turn a duck into a soul singer? Stick it into a microwave until its bill withers—ah, that was very, very bad.
You've been praising Welsh hip-hop bands like Goldie Looking Chain in the press, and you've worked with producers like Chris Shaw—who’s done stuff for Public Enemy—and Mario Caldato Jr. from the Beastie Boys. Would you say you approach your music more like hip-hop producers than a rock band?
Guto: The hip-hop thing is all about the lyrical prowess. Good hip-hop uses words that have never been used before. We look up to that. We’ve got our [rock] heroes from the past, but we’re not precious about them and we don’t want to regurgitate them.
Gruff: I like the way a lot of hip-hop albums are composed—they’re very psychedelic albums in composition. A lot more thought goes into them than a rock record. And there’s so many retro garage-rock records now—you get a few good bands and then you get loads of shit. It does get a bit dull. I love a lot of rock music, but I’m not into extreme tribalism in music. I suppose we’re not purists and we generally dislike purists and we’re not trying to make an authentic folk album. We didn’t want to mimic Wendy & Bonnie, we just nicked the notes and sampled it. You don’t have to respect the past—you can really fuck around with it. We milk a lot of sacred cows and then we make a milkshake with it—banana-flavoured, and full of chocolate.
You seem to use different recording set-ups for each album.
Gruff: Yes, and the next record will be dramatically different. This record is about playing as a live band, although obviously other things come into it. We wanted to make something more immediate, and now we’ve learned a lot of engineering tricks and [keyboardist] Cian is instrumental in setting up our surround-sound studio in Cardiff so that we can make a lot of surround-sound records. And I think the next record will be really experimental, with the engineering knowledge we’ve picked up, and we probably won’t need a lot of the personnel. We can make something with a really ambitious production without spending a lot of money. We’re really looking forward to the next record.
Do you always plan far ahead?
Guto: I think we had started recording [2000’s] Mwng by the time [1999’s] Guerrilla had come out. We had about 60 songs when we started Phantom Power, so obviously a lot of them are left. We write all the time. We’re writing more and more, and Bunf [guitarist Huw Bunford] started writing now as well. The dynamic of the band is changing. Cian has a massive backlog of ideas.
Gruff: I tend to write in my head and then transfer it to guitar, and sometimes piano. Hopefully, the songs will work when the power cuts—you could whistle the songs without electricity. Ultimately, you can perform them under any circumstance. Maybe in the future, there will be no electricity network, and you have to have your own generator, and if you don’t have any money, or maybe there won’t be any money left, we’ll all be living in caves and ultimately the songs have to be able to be passed from generation to generation, orally. You know, that cockroach mentality.
This goes back to what you started singing about on Guerrilla—how our dependence on technology is slowly killing us…
Gruff: But we do celebrate technology as well. This 5.1 mixing technology exists, and so we’re using it, and not many people are using it. I’m a little bit confused…
You’re doing shows this fall with Dead Meadow…
Gruff: Aye, an incredibly heavy experience.
Are you big metal guys?
Gruff: I remember growing up in the era where heavy rock was coming to my area, with people like Ian Gillan… I’ve got a lot of old heavy rock seven-inches, sort of heavy pop-rock with ludicrous lyrics. I got over it by the time I was 12. But I’ve regressed…
Guto: I had a punk-rock radar, so I didn’t like all the heavy metal. [Van Halen’s “Jump” comes on the pub stereo.] Like this, for example. Now, I can appreciate this song, but at the time, I thought it was bollocks.
Gruff: It’s like Esperanto, really. People all over the world can understand it. They can get people in countries where nobody speaks English, and maybe those people can ask the teacher in the local high school, “What does ‘jump’ mean?”, and just by watching the video, you understand what it means. That’s why a lot of Scandinavian bands are huge—because the English they use is intentionally simple and direct. Like Aqua and Ace of Base—people all over the world get it. I think Aqua were the height of the Eugenics movement. I acknowledge that it’s perfect pop music—I just don’t like it.
ENCORES
When I need a Super Furries fix these days, I usually reach for Radiator, the Ice Hockey Hair EP, or Rings Around the World, but Phantom Power does feature one of my all-time favourite SFA tracks, the bossa-nova bop “Valet Parking”:
Barring the occasional reunion jaunt, the Furries have been largely dormant since 2009’s Dark Days/Light Years, but Gruff has stayed busy with a steady stream of excellent solo albums, including two I reviewed for Pitchfork: 2014’s American Interior and 2018’s Babelsberg. In fact, this April, he’ll be embarking on a 10th-anniversary tour of American Interior (including a Toronto date at Longboat Hall on April 14), and if you caught it the first time around, you’ll know this is no ordinary rock show:
Gruff also served as producer on Careful of Your Keepers, the fine 2023 release from British singer/songwriter Katie Stables, a.k.a. This Is the Kit. In October of that year, he opened a handful of dates on her North American tour—including a surprise last-minute appearance at her in-store gig at Hamilton’s Into the Abyss Records:
This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please consider a donation via paid subscription, or visit my PWYC tip jar!