Super Furry Animals
Unleashing Their Power
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NATN: So it won't be six or seven months between U.K. and U.S. release dates this time?
Guto Pryce: No, no. Before it took us a while to sort out the deal with XL, but we have a label this time.
Gruff Rhys: In the past, the U.S. has always been the last place we've come to tour an album. Well, apart from Mwng. We only toured America for that.
GP: We did Japan as well, right?
GR: Oh yeah. That was cool, touring a Welsh album in the States. We didn't even tour it in Wales. Well, that'll be cool. Getting a record out in time and touring here first.
NATN: I actually saw you guys in Chicago at the Double Door on the Mwng tour.
GP: Oh yeah, Chicago's always been very good to us. There's a hell of a lot of music in Chicago.
NATN: So, it seems to me that each of your albums have a sort of unique focus. Mwng, which you mentioned, has a bit of a low-key, home recordings type feel, whereas Rings Around The World was more textured and produced. Could you describe what your collective mindset was going into the making of the new album? Was there any sort of overall plan for it?
GR: We had lots of different options. We basically decided on the songs out of a large batch, and the songs dictated the feel. We also tried to experiment with engineering the record ourselves, which made it a bit of a more "home" album, although we went to a lot of professional studios as well. We set up our own space in Cardiff, where we could record with no one else involved. We could dictate everything ourselves. It's a small room, it's about half the size of this room. With a computer, and a surround sound system. In an office block. So we had space restrictions, but no time restrictions.
GP: Well, there were time restrictions because we had to record at night. But no time limit.
NATN: Cuz you had to wait until everyone was out of the office?
GP: Yeah. If you wanted to crank up amps, you had to wait 'til they all had gone back home. And then we could get the amps out and crank it up. And build tents. Cuz we were learning as we were doing things, so you know, everything we had to record, we had to figure out ourselves how to do it. The tent was pretty spectacular; it was like a wigwam built out of curtains and mic stands.
NATN: And you recorded inside it?
GR: Yeah, we had to pull it down before people came back to work. Also, we went with Gorwel Owen to record a lot of live tracks, in his studio in Wales. Our old friend Gorwel Owen. He likes to keep things quite live. So there are a few tracks that were very straight ahead -- live vocals, you know?
GP: Gorwel's a big influence on us, back from when we started. And he's built his own studio; it's quite efficient. We did Radiator up at his house.
GR: He's sort of always been one of these people who's been into electronics, since the '80s. And when we were making the album, he was going through an acoustic phase, so he was helping us getting takes down live. But he didn't want to carry on with the project; he wanted to spend time at home with his wife and family for the next year. So we came down and did about two weeks with him where we cut live tracks, and then we took all that stuff back to Cardiff and messed around with it. And we also bought 700 sound-effect and light-music vinyl albums from a guy down the corridor. He knocked on the door just as we were beginning the album: "hey, I've got these records to sell, are ya interested?" And Cian went down to check them out and gave him a hundred pounds on the spot and carried 700 albums back to our tiny room. So we spent a lot of time sorting through these to see what we could do with them.
NATN: And you just layered some of the sounds throughout?
GR: Yeah, we tried to keep it simple. We tried to write loops, electronic loops, into some of the songs.
NATN: Can you talk about the DVD a little? I understand [long time collaborative animator] Pete Fowler is doing a lot of it this time.
GR: It's going to be real exciting. You enter it through a room. A little space; you look around and you ... well, that's really giving away too much (laughs). Pete's designed wallpaper which morphs with every song. So when you listen to the songs, the visuals are quite banal and slow, like wallpaper to the music. But between songs, Pete has interpreted each song as an animation which lasts two and a half minutes or so. And he's done some amazing animations, and we've done the soundtrack to his animations. After we finished the album, we had to go back into the studio to cut the soundtrack to his animations. So you see his work on every level -- the interface, and between the songs. There's also films produced by NoBrake, who've got an office in the same building in Cardiff. They started out doing our Web site and then they did the interface for the last DVD. And they did all of this new one. It's quite exciting, cuz when we were working on the sounds, they were working on the visuals. And they put 14 films together. And you can access them also, but it doesn't default to the films the first time. So there are films, but the top layer is wallpaper, plus the animated intros to each song. And the album is in a surround-sound mix. And there's also remixes for every song by um, Four Tet, Kubrick, and loads of others...
GP: Sean O'Hagan, who did more strings for the album again.
GR: Yeah, so I think it's going to be much more creative a DVD than the last one. I think you'll find it a bit more ... it won't be as much of a scrapbook as last time. When the visuals are on, the emphasis is on the visuals, and the music is secondary. And when the music is on, that's what you'll focus on this time.
NATN: So it makes it more of just a different listening experience to the album, instead of just watching the videos.
GR: Exactly. That's, to a certain extent, what I think we didn't get accomplished last time. We're packing so much in. The people at authoring were going 'you can't put all this stuff on the DVD!' It's a bit like archeology, the DVD. Or geology, in that it's a series of layers. And we've put some hidden stuff on it as well, that you have to figure out and find.
NATN: Are there extra songs on it, like b-sides?
GR: Not this time.
GP: Last time, we recorded a lot of songs. This time, we recorded a specific amount of songs, because it took us about four months last time to decide the track listing. So we just did the songs for the album this time. That's why we had the extra songs on the DVD last time.
NATN: I was going to ask you about track listings. The copy of Phantom Power that I actually got from the label was in the wrong order -- It started with "Slow Life" and the instrumentals were lumped at the end. I had seen the track list before, so I could tell that it was mixed up, but it made me think, what goes into you guys deciding a track listing order?
GR: It's crazy. And we've got five people, it's insane. It was particularly hard for Rings Around The World, because it was almost a different album. The album could have gone in so many different ways. It didn't turn out like the album I saw in my head, because so many of the tracks were left off. So it was particularly frustrating. So this one, we only left two songs off, and we didn't fall out too much. It was less volatile.
GP: It gets quite intense. We will discuss it for a couple of hours, and then we've got to sit down and listen to it for 50 minutes.
GR: And this is after having been in the studio for 10 months, listening to it every day. To listen to an album four times in a row, you forget which order you're on and it's very difficult to be objective. And it's something we take rather seriously as well. We're not flippant with it, you know.
GP: It gets done in the end, but we're not the sort of band to just dump a bunch of songs on the record label and tell 'em to make an album out of them. We sit together and we're very precious about our music. For me, this new album ... I still haven't been removed from it and appreciated it as a record yet. Maybe because I don't have the vinyl yet. For me, that's when you really have an album is when you get an LP. So I hope we got it right.
NATN: Do some songs just jump out at you as 'oh, that's a great opening track'?
GR: "Slow Life" is such a distinctive song, it had to go at the beginning or the end. Cuz it's the most sonically impressive track. So we tried that at the beginning a few times, and at the back.
GP: Yeah, it's funny, you can start an album with a long song, or start it with four short songs.
GR: I like the way hip-hop albums are composed. The process of album conception, album composition is great. You get a definite intro that has been written as an intro. You get a finale, and often you get a sort of story running throughout. A Tribe Called Quest's first album is one of my favorite compositions. With "Hello Sunshine," cuz it's got a distinctive intro, it's removed from the rest of the album. And it's not even us.
NATN: Yeah, what is that sample from?
GP: Wendy & Bonnie. Again, it's like hip-hop; they're not precious about just dumping in music that somebody else made. A Tribe Called Quest did that all the time. And it's cool.
GR: I set up "Hello Sunshine" as if it was a duet. And there's a female vocal; but I never got around to getting anyone to sing the duet with me, so in the end we just chopped up the Wendy & Bonnie song and stuck it on. It's in the same key, so it seemed to make sense.
NATN: You seemed to have the same problem with "Juxtapozed With U;" why does nobody want to duet with you?
GR: It's just sloth. Just generally not getting around to doing it. I got turned down a couple times for "Juxtapozed." It's the third time I couldn't get a duet going. I just like to, as a songwriter, try little things. It's as if Prime Minister Tony Blair wants to try out having a war, because he's never been a Prime Minister in a war. I have no idea why else he would have gone to war. So I do want to do a duet at some point. Bunf's sort of done a duet; it's Bunf's first song on an album -- "Sex, War, and Robots" -- it's the first time he's done a lead vocal.
NATN: Yeah, what was the genesis of that? Did he just come in with the song?
GR: Yeah, he came in with a song and he had demoed it with a pedal steel player, and he's got a girl called Rachel Thomas singing harmony with him. So it's exciting, cuz Bunf's starting to write songs now. He's a late starter, but it brings another dimension to the band. I think technically, he's got the best ... the loudest voice in the band. According to soundmen, he's got double projection.
NATN: Have you played that song live yet?
GP: Well, we did in the studio; that's the only time we've ever played it.
GR: We'll do it live. I'm looking forward.
GP: A lot of the songs we put down live in the studio.
NATN: Yeah, I remember you playing "Bleed Forever" and "Golden Retriever" last year at Irving Plaza.
GR: Yeah, that tour was in the middle of us doing the record. It was quite a nice break from the recording.
GP: We don't often play songs live before we record them, but that was good.
NATN: Some songs on the album, like you mentioned "Slow Life," are really sonically complex; other songs like "The Piccolo Snare" have a lot of variety and movement between parts within the song. Can you describe how you go about writing something like that?
GP: "Slow Life" is a tune which ... the electronic part of it is a tune that Cian has had for quite a few years, and we've tried to fit it on albums in the past, but never got 'round to it.
GR: He encouraged us to jam on top of it, cuz we really wanted him to get the tune out. And Cian was really reluctant to leave it as a purely electronic track. So we all played on top of it in the studio, pretty much live. Put a live vocal on top of it, you know. And we made up the lyrics and composed it afterwards. It was a 10-minute jam on top of the electronic stuff. We kept the electronic section intact, and just chopped it up and made into a composed song. And then Sean O'Hagan added some strings.
"The Piccolo Snare," that was something written and demoed as a song, and then in the studio Cian started to do a remix of it, and it sounded really good. He had sampled up all the different elements of the song. And it sounded so good, so powerful, that we thought it should be part of the song. And he was reluctant to put it at the end basically, cuz we've done a lot of songs that morph into electronic songs at the end. But, we did it anyway (laughs). You know, it seems like every album we've done has a song that morphs into an electronic song at the end. And this is no exception. But it's good, it takes it somewhere else, you know?
NATN: Your music certainly shares an overall spirit, but now and again you have songs that seem like homages to certain genres. "The Undefeated" sounds very ska-inspired for example. Is that an aim of yours sometimes, like "we want to write a hard-rock song"?
GP: It's not contrived in that way, but ... yeah. Most songs of ours are done on an acoustic demo. Sometimes they stay in that form, and sometimes not. We treat every song separately, and then we'll arrange it however we feel works best for the song.
GR: With "The Undefeated," we tried our best to not make it sound ska or reggae, cuz we didn't feel we could pull it off successfuly. So we self-consciously tried to keep the drums knocking, and we've got pedal-steel guitar on it, so that it wasn't run-of-the-mill reggae. And then we put it at the end of the album. But it was difficult to bring it down from that end.
GP: But we're not like, "you have to do this -- this is a reggae song," blah blah.
GR: We were sort of aware that it was sticking out, but I dunno, it's an uplifting song. But it is a curious thing about our band that we have these bastard songs, sort of bastard tracks that we do that don't always fit in. I have a bit of a sweet tooth musically, and often I think you just got to go with it. And sometimes they stick out a bit, the songs are so sugary. But that's the way they turn out.
NATN: Probably a lot of bands couldn't pull that off, so if you can, more power to ya.
GP: Yeah, there's no formula involved to explain how it works out, it just works out like that.
NATN: In that song specifically, there are a lot of crazy percussion sounds. At the beginning it sounds like there's machines sort of whirring. What is all that?
GP: It's a guitar, fed through a Chaos Pad. The Chaos Pad is an effects box; it literally has a pad, where you draw on the sound (Gruff demonstrates) It makes that crazy sound, like King Tubby.
GR: You can put any effect through it. It's got about 60 sound effects. You know, in the studio, most effects boxes are about this big (holds his hands apart). With the Chaos Pad, they're all on this tiny thing. You just select a number from naught to 60 randomly and for instance, you go like that, and it goes (makes pitch-shifting whirring sound). Sometimes you go in and slow it down. We have this thing on standby at all times. It's very addictive.
GP: It's very wild as well. Its effects are not very polite. It's inhuman, and allows you to take some sounds to extremes. And it's really fuckin' easy to get something cool out of it.
GR: So yeah, "The Undefeated" needed some tweaking. At one point it was very clean, and serene. And it needed some ... to be dragged through the mud, you know? It's like when your shoes are too clean, they are just gleaming white sneakers, of a song. You have to bash it up some.
NATN: I imagine that a lot of people will take notice of "Venus And Serena," it's such a sunny track and name-checks the famous tennis sisters. what is it about?
GR: It's about a sort of wolf-child. A child raised by wild animals, and he gets left by a door of a human family at the age of say five. And uh, he learns to, you know, live in a human way. Finds it difficult to relate to his adopted parents. And he spends more time with his pet turtles, who are called Venus and Serena. Often, animals, and even reptiles, have more wisdom than grownups. It's just about the confusion of growing up, basically, using a tennis vocabulary. So i suppose it's a song about the confusion of adolescence really.
NATN: Does the whole "Father, Father" thing stem from the tuning?
GR: Yeah, although ironically that's one of the only songs that isn't in that tuning (laughs). Because there was already a song called "Father Father," it seemed sort of appropriate to use the line somewhere else. I'm a big fan of Julian Cope, and was always confused cuz he had an album called World Shut Your Mouth, and then on his next album, which is called something else..
GP: St. Julian.
GR: St. Julian, yeah, and the first single on that album was called "World Shut Your Mouth," but it wasn't the same, you know? So everyone went out and bought the album called World Shut Your Mouth because they thought the song would be on it, but it was on a completely different album. So we've done that a few times. I dunno. I guess it's a bit confusing.
NATN: The instrumentals, where did those come from? Were they recorded as one piece and then edited up?
GR: Yeah, we recorded a demo in Gorwel's house initially, and we overdubbed some brass in Cardiff, and some strings, and some percussion. But we finished the track in a half-hour; it was very simple. The "Father Father" songs, and "Hello Sunshine," "City Scape Sky Baby," "Out Of Control" and "Golden Retriever," they were all written more or less in the same day, in the same tuning. The core of the songs on the album are in that tuning. And a lot of the other songs are in D as well. We've never tried to formulate a record by tuning in one key before. It never occurred to us before that an album would be more coherent if it was in the same key, you know? I mean, the songs are still stylistically different, but hopefully they sort of fit together.
NATN: You ever listen to Neutral Milk Hotel?
GR: Yeah.
NATN: You know their second album, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, is all written in the same key. It sort of sounds 'of a piece', you know?
GR: Yeah, yeah. We all like the Olivia Tremor Control and got into Neutral Milk Hotel through them.
GP: And Elf Power. They're all in each other's bands, aren't they? Yeah, they are a really interesting bunch of people. They'd have pretty poppy tunes, and then they'd have long, spaced-out tunes. Hell of a good band, Olivia Tremor Control.
GR: Are Neutral Milk Hotel still recording?
NATN: As far as i've heard, no. It's basically down to the one guy, Jeff Mangum, and he put out a live record, but I haven't heard of any Neutral Milk Hotel stuff in the works.
GR: I know quite a lot of people that are heavily into Neutral Milk Hotel. They're very devoted. Our first tour in America was with the Olivia Tremor Control. It's like they put a show on every night, with the films, they would erect chairs and put a projector on top. They were quite influential on us, because they put so much effort into every show, even though they were working with a very minimal budget. You know, they were doing it on a shoestring, but they still managed to make something really creative.
GP: Good ambition.
NATN: Yeah, I saw them with you at the Lounge Ax. I remember them coming out into the crowd and playing.
GR: And doing a procession, yeah (laughs).
NATN: One of my friends had had a few mind-benders when we saw them there and he was getting spaced out to the OTC, so he told us 'Hey, I'm gonna go relax for a bit on one of those couches near the back of the club." And then on the very next song, they walk off the stage and start heading toward him playing their instruments. Very funny. So you recently played at a Welsh qualifying soccer match?
GR: Yeah, it was our first stadium gig. We played in the middle of the field. And the deal was, they gave us a box to see the game in, so it was a two-way thing. We gave 'em a song, and they gave us free tickets.
GP: The team was warming up in front of us while we played.
GR: Yeah, it was the richest audience we've ever had! It was a bit exciting. And we were miming it too, so we could take some liberties. We erected fake palm trees on the pitch, and cacti. And we spliced the theme tune of a famous British sports show, called Grandstand, into the track. So we were miming the tune, and we pretended like we were the orchestra.
We 've done quite an array of unusual shows over the past few months. Our last show was in a chapel in a deserted village in North Wales, about two weeks ago. And it was really difficult to get to, as well. It's by the sea, it's in this sort of bowl, and there's this sort of one track leading down to it, about 1500 feet from the village. And we did a bingo show there, where we chose all the songs by bingo ball. And that was the total opposite. It was such a loose show. At one point, we got the whole audience to stand outside and sing a song a capella while watching the sun going down.
NATN: Would you ever be able to do one of those Bingo shows over here?
GP: Our back catalog isn't as available here as it is at home.
GR: But i think finally we're going to try and re-release our records over here sometime before the end of the year. At which point, I think maybe we'd be able to do that type of show in the U.S.
GP: It's nice, because we've got so many songs. It's nice to just play 'em in a simplified fashion. Because when we play live, it's quite a proper gig, it's rehearsed and we know what we're doing in advance, and we've practiced those 25 songs or whatever.
GR: So it's very structured usually, and it's nice to do things that are a bit looser and play some of the songs that we haven't got the chance to do usually. Cuz we've written ... I don't know how many songs, but quite a number.
GP: It's gotta be over 100.
NATN: I can tell you how many i've got on my iPod ...112.
GP: Yeah, I'm so jealous of those things.
GR: You don't get so much of them in Europe. In Europe the big thing now is the video mobile phones. In America, it's the iPod. Gotta get on that iPod.
NATN: What's your take on digital music? Would you consider selling your music as downloads?
GP: It's such an unknown. Cuz our album's already on the Internet. It came out straight away. I'm not sure which version though, that's the downside.
GR: It's exciting to get access to so much music. It's changing the whole face of the way music is presented. There's no rules for that anyway; nobody ever said that music has to be paid for. You know, music is just an expression. And it's gonna become much less structured, i guess, than it is now, where you've got certain bands that are signed by certain labels in order to distribute their music. They have some sort of monopoly. So it does open the music world up to a lot of eccentricities. It's gonna be much more interesting and varied. Much more difficult to control by huge corporations, I imagine.
GP: I don't quite understand how it works.
GR: I don't know how to police the Internet. It's something we've always tried to shy away from. People are always trying to sponsor our Web site or getting fans to register for things or getting people to pay for things. With our Web sites, we've always tried to keep it independent. And absolutely accessible, with no strings attached. i think that's the beauty of the Internet. If you start policing it, it can turn into a nasty sort of environment. So it's a fine line between -- on one level, you want to make a living, but not at the expense of ruining a whole culture of freely accessible music, you know? It's just a really interesting time. I'll be interested to see if it can stay unpoliced. It would be nice to think that it could remain quite free and unpoliced; the Internet in general. Because it started out as quite a utopia. At the beginning, the Internet had quite utopian values of accessibility and interactiveness and the sort of corporations have gotten on to it a little later on, I suppose. It's incredible that it's taken them so long. But I know they want to start selling our files, but we want to make sure that definitely doesn't happen until the album is released.
GP: But it's impossible. I think when you're downloading something for free, you're aware that the music has been digitized. It's been put into ones and zeroes and sent down a phone line. When we make a record, we put it down to tape. We spend a lot of care on the warmth. And it should be presented on a .... well, preferably vinyl. Or a CD, you know. And I don't see how we can charge somebody the same amount for something that is not as good quality as the actual produced record.
GR: It's a simile; like a photocopy.
GP: Yeah. I dunno; it's bound to happen I suppose. As broadband gets on, it's going to happen more and more.
GR: But it really isn't our problem. I mean, we'd do music if we didn't have a deal; a record deal. Maybe we'd have to get day jobs, but it wouldn't stop us making music. So in that sense, the record industry is powerless.
NATN: And you could play concerts, make a living that way ... well, depending on how many fans you've got.
GR: I suppose. But I think people are aware that if they do check it out on the Internet, and if they like it, they'll go out and buy the vinyl version or the CD version. And we've got some great artwork, kids (laughs).
NATN: I bet the DVD goes a long way toward that end too.
GP: Yeah, but there's gonna be a time when the technology's gonna be easy for that. Downloading DVDs.
GR: And you'll have a 5.1 sound system on your computer.
NATN: But at that point, hopefully they could just go to Superfurry.com and download your stuff there, and pay you. Apple has said, "Well, you can download this stuff for free somewhere out there, but here we've got a quality, authorized version, and it's cheap. We're banking that you're gonna come get our version, and not do the illegal thing."
GP: I'm not convinced that the authorized version would be up to scratch, sonically. I'm not an expert, but I can't believe that something coming down a phone line is gonna sound as good. It's like when you use computers, there's a warmth that is lost. And you spend so much time making records that sound exactly a certain way. It will be fascinating to see how it all works out. Maybe people will be willing to pay instead of getting it for free, just out of conscience or whatever. But maybe not. I mean if people just download stuff, they can set their computers to just download shit all night and maybe never listen to this stuff.
NATN: Yeah, it's crazy ... I've gone on to the message boards on your site, and everyone is talking about which are their favorite tracks on the new album. And then someone will say, "how the hell have all of you people heard the album?!"
GR: Yeah. I think it's great when you want to go on tour and everybody already knows your new songs. That's wonderful.
GP: And it's great distribution in countries where we haven't got distribution.
GR: We've gotten lots of great feedback from South America. And Russia!
TROY CARPENTER | Troy Carpenter founded NATN from a Chicago apartment during the ambitious winter of 1998 with co-conspirators Ben French and Jonathan Cohen. After a five-year stint in New York, he and wife Lourdes have recently relocated to Indianapolis, where he spends days listening to music and nights in the kitchen at Elements restaurant. Musical heroes: Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Super Furry Animals. What else makes life worth living: Sushi, Phucty, runs in the park, and the Atlanta Braves.