SuperFicial Animals :: Wessex Scene Online

SuperFicial Animals

25th November 2003
Rich Heap

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The Edge meets Gruff, Guto and Huw from Super Furry Animals. Dentistry has never been this much fun. I don’t know what I expected from a band as vibrant and exciting as Super Furry Animals but this certainly isn’t it.

Part of it could be down to the situation, a collection of budding journalists with a selection of mainly moronic questions (eg. “Who in the band is best at skinning up?” “Who’d win in a fight: a snake or a rat?”) Largely, though, it’s down to Gruff (pron. Griff), apparently operating in the human equivalent of a computer’s power save mode, able only to get dressed ironically (pink socks, hideous sweater) and get two thirds of the way through any sentence before taking a minute out to collect his thoughts and pull something profound from the Guildhall dressing room ether. Truly it’s like pulling teeth. Or perhaps one of those seminars where you’re forcing a conversation that needn’t really exist. Yeah, that’ll do.

On stage, of course, it’s a different matter. They’re a sugar crazed teen’s acid-drenched wet dream, complete with volcanoes, yetis, cartoons, films, horses, and tides of coloured light washing over the accumulated masses. Mind you, that could give way to accusations of holding style in higher esteem than content. Do they not worry that people may make these sorts of accusations?

“You could, but that’s somebody else’s opinion.” (Gruff)

Yes, it is, but that’s not really an answer, is it? It’s not a justification or a proof of any underlying meaning. As responses go it’s on page one of the Deflecting Questions About Other People’s Opinions handbook, given to all musicians and politicians as a matter of course. After all, who’d want to commit to anything like an opinion?

But SFA are doing themselves no favours in dispelling criticism. First up they write political songs and then refuse to take responsibility for them. All music is political in the sense that it is formed out of people who have opinions and will thus impose these opinions on their creation in some sense. But then there are some bands that do it overtly and, with background films flashing the words ‘Liars’ and ‘Murderers’ over pictures of Blair and Bush, SFA must fall into this category. But we can’t find what these opinions are ‘cos of a chronic desire to not take responsibility for them:

“Don’t ask me. I’m just a musician,” replies Gruff when quizzed about new album track Liberty Belle. “I’m saying make your own mind up. Here is my opinion and it’s just as valid as anyone else’s opinion.”

Yes, it is valid Gruff, well done. But what is your opinion? There’s no point having an opinion, even one you’re willing to commit to record, if you’re then unwilling to elaborate on it in even a small way. Part of the purpose of having opinions is to both define yourself as an individual then change other people’s opinions, but neither of these are visible on Gruff’s radar, who just comes across like a cloud of gas; indistinct and impossible to pin down, speaking sentences that disappear into the ether one minute and reappear ghost-like the next. Then again, it’s always easier to commit to nothing.

All of this is a shame, and an interesting contradiction. It’s hard to believe that a band so bright and vivid and lively and energetic on stage can be so, well, bored and boring in person. Sad but true. I mean, they come into their element during the post-match rush to get things signed, a room of interviewers suddenly switching into a room of Furry fanatics, when SFA can once again be ‘the musicians’, ‘the rock stars’, ‘the two-hour Gods’. But when they’re real people it’s hard to see anything interesting, especially when they seem so keen to remain as non-committal as possible. If you were talking to them in a pub then you’d walk off.

It’s not even that they haven’t got stories, because they do, about Rhys Ifans and Howard Marks and all that kind of stuff, but that really gives no insight into the processes underlying their music, their motivation. In fact, the easiest place you might suggest they find inspiration is in, ahem, illegal substances. Eh? Eh?

“There’s probably loads of soccer players that have taken drugs… heroin, for example,” begins Gruff, confusingly.

“I think you’d be reasonably safe to say that,” adds Bunf (aka Huw Bunford).

“But no-one knows if a footballer’s taken, say, cocaine, except maybe they might be a bit f**ked, y’know?”

What? Where the hell is this going? Football and music are completely different. True they both have an element of creativity in them, but in football you have to be in peak physical condition whereas music is mainly dependent upon the fruits of the mind. They’re completely different beyond their shared role of being entertainment. You can’t say that opera and wrestling are the same just because they’re both forms of entertainment. Well anyway, carry on:

“I wouldn’t say,” adds Guto [Pryce] “that drugs are crucial to music either. Music is the most potent thing, really.”

“I mean, you don’t sit down and write a song and try to recreate an acid trip. But the music might be influenced by an acid trip because it changes your brain.” [Gruff]

What does that mean then? You have been affected by drugs or you haven’t? Are they crucial because, like Gruff says, they alter your cranial mechanics? Or are they merely a side project, like Guto says, because some humans take drugs, some humans make music, and some do both? It makes no sense. It’s as confusing as the politics thing and, frankly, if we’re not going to get any decent answers then we might as well give up now. I don’t want to sound disrespectful because I’m in a room with Super Furry Animals, I’m where many people would want to be.

At the same time, though, I’m smiling inside, because SFA Fan #1 would probably only feel let down by his or her heroes, which is a shame. This is no reason not to like their music on a purely superficial level, but how can you possibly get deeper if the band themselves give no hint of hidden oceanic depths? Maybe we should all be happier with questions about snake vs. rat, the type of questions that are easy to ask, easy to answer, easy to read and easy to forget. But I don’t want that, I want something more, and I feel let down.

But, and perhaps more concerningly, I actually feel disappointed that I missed a lecture to be here. Rock ‘n’ roll, eh? You’re really not missing out on much.