Louis Pattison caught up with Gruff Rhys to talk about musical multi-tasking, terrorism nostalgia and the American nightmare.
Last updated: 28 January 2009
Hello Gruff. How are you?
Not bad. I was up til five or six last night finishing the mixing of the new Super Furries record. We finished it Sunday. We've got a few possible titles... but the others would kill me if I told you.
What's going on with Super Furry Animals at present? Are you no longer working with Sony/BMG?
The previous deal came to an end and Rough Trade approached us. Daf's been off making an album with The Peth and Cian's been doing Acid Casuals stuff. And in the meantime we've been working on two or three Super Furries records. Some of them are more ambitious than others - it might be a while til they see the light of day.
Right towards the end of touring the last record we'd dropped a lot of the slow songs, because the crowd seemed to be reacting well to the faster, rockier numbers. We want to make a really upbeat, crazy record. I'd recorded a lot of straight acoustic songs [for Candylion] but I listened back and ended up leaving a lot of them off the record, and writing some faster stuff instead.
Why make another solo record?
We don't really tend to take time out to do our own stuff - there are always gaps between touring, and you get bored. Daf's been using up any time he's had in the studio in Cardiff, and likewise, I'll head up to Gorwel's [Owen, Super Furry Animals producer] house in North Wales and write some songs. We just do stuff in the gaps.
Do you feel there's something slightly egotistical about making of a solo album?
No. I suppose I've been in bands for 20 years. You get to know what will work... what your friends will enjoy playing, and what will wind them up. I've just got so many songs.
Who plays on the record?
It was mostly recorded over about two weeks. There's a guy called Owen Evans on double bass, and a girl named Lisa Jên from a band called 9 Bach - she's from my home town of Bethesda. She came and sang on about five songs; it's nice because we share the same accent.
A few people came in and played various things - bells, and things. Then I put on some strings with Sean O'Hagan. And I went out to Brazil for a week and mixed it out there. It was where we mixed the Love Kraft stuff, but a smaller studio.
The record closes with a 14-minute track called Skylon about a hijacked plane. What inspired that?
It's sort of a romantic love story, about you can't help who you have to sit next to on the bus, or an aeroplane. You've just got to get on with whoever you're living next to. But in the background is a violent hijacking. It's sort of a nostalgic, retro recollection of terrorism, before people started blowing themselves up - looking back with nostalgia at the terrorism of the 1970s.
The song is purposefully quite outdated - there's 1970s vocabulary in there, words like actress, which is probably not a word any more. It was actually written before the thing at Heathrow where they claimed there were people trying to blow up planes with liquid in bottles. I was actually mixing the record round about then - I thought I might end up stuck in Brazil.
What do the Welsh language tracks mean?
There's a track called Gyrru Gyrru Gyrru, which means 'Driving Driving Driving' - it's a road song. The lyrics are about transport, getting to A to B by rowing boat, or helicopter. And there's a track called Ffrwydriad Yn Y Ffurfafen which translates as 'Explosion In The Upper Stratosphere'.
It's about exploding with joy - about meeting someone and having a great time, a 'having the time of our lives' kind of vibe. Looking back now, getting a kind of general overview, it's a pretty upbeat record. I ended up layering it a lot more than I expected to, I ended up putting a lot of fuzz and drums on, to get it bouncing along.
Finally, is it true you're making a record with the experimental hip-hop artist Boom Bip?
Yeah, we've been making an album. It doesn't actually have a name yet, but the theme of the album is the De Lorean car manufacturer. It's sort of an album about the American nightmare, based on the life and times of John De Lorean. It's about his life. He grew up from humble beginnings to build a car plant in Belfast. We're still working on it but it'll hopefully be out in the next few months.
