Rise of The Super Furry Animals

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Later that summer, Gruff was sitting on the roof of a train – speeding briskly through the luminous green forests of Mid Wales. Sitting up alongside him was a teacher he’d met at the party below – a party which they both agreed was crap.

The plan had been simple: Gruff would assist a band of hedonists in transporting a crate of booze between Llanuwchllyn and Bala, after which he could either crash at the party or split with his share of the crate. Something had gone wrong, however: the hedonists had drunk the booze on the train, and subsequently gone out of their minds. Gruff and the teacher – who was equally embroiled and equally confused – had no option but to sneak politely out of the window.

Still, the roof of the train was a serene place to be, and while the teacher explained that he, too, played in a band, Gruff experimented with lifting a beer up to his face, using the force of the wind to surf it towards his mouth.

Suddenly, however, the train began to puff to a crawl. Gruff raised an eyebrow at the teacher.

‘Let’s get down!’

They sky-dived back through the window, kicked the cans under the seats and neatened their shaggy hair. Seconds later, the guard came in and slammed the door behind him.

‘Right, lads,’ he said with vaguely sadistic enthusiasm. ‘Who’s been sitting on my train then?’

After a few seconds’ pause for thought, a hand lifted up from behind a seat, and pointed at Gruff. Then another hand appeared, pointing at the teacher. The two accused could not quite believe what was happening: this was not Spartacus. This was the opposite of Spartacus.

‘Right! You two, out!’

Gruff and the teacher stood in the middle of the tracks as the train pulled away, slowly coming to terms with their new environment. The situation didn’t look promising: the horizon stretched for miles with field and forest, the sun was fading, and to make matters worse a crow was hopping about in front of them.

‘We’re fucked,’ concluded the teacher. ‘That crow is definitely a sign that we’re fucked.’ The two of them estimated that it was an hour’s walk to Bala, although they could probably hitch their way in half that time. The road was deserted and the sun was setting. They began to walk.

‘And that’s how I really got to know Gruff,’ says Bunf today. ‘It was interesting that it was him and me, for almost no apparent reason, meeting like that. You couldn’t have made it up.’

FURRY FILE: BUNF

BORN – Cardiff, 1967

CHILDHOOD SUPERPOWER – ‘My Puma football boots’

CHILDHOOD SUPERWEAKNESS – Sweetcorn

CHILDHOOD DISASTER – Burning down parents’ living room

CHILDHOOD VICTORY – Winning a womble in a raffle (‘I believe it was Great Uncle Bulgaria’)

BAD BEHAVIOUR – Perennial daydreaming

TEEN REBEL ICON – Gianluca Vialli, Juventus and Italian striker (‘He had a sneaky cigarette while he was a sub during the World Cup … the commentator Barry Davies didn’t know what to say’)

TEEN GROOMING TIP – Leather jacket

GEEKY PASSION – Sharks

FIRST ATTEMPTED SONG – ‘Swn’ (‘It means noise … I had no idea what I was doing’)

BEACH BOYS VALHALLA – ‘Good Vibrations’

LIFE WISDOM – ‘Never judge a book by its cover’

Bunf was the guitarist in a band called U Thant. All the posters said that U Thant were a punk band, but somewhere along the road they’d taken a left turn into space-rock territory, and now Bunf was armed to the teeth with psychedelic guitar pedals.

Totally uninterested in learning the blues, playing hyperspeed solos or even being technically any good, Bunf was instead on a mission to find his own sound. Three heroes, at the time, were pointing the way.

‘Tone-wise it was Mick Ronson,’ he says of the legendary glam-rock guitarist. ‘In terms of stage presence it was Chuck Berry, and [I wanted] the pacing of George Harrison’s solos. To be honest, I never did crack Chuck Berry.’

When he wasn’t being a psychedelic rock star, Bunf worked in education – and following two years at a primary school, he’d graduated to being head of art at a secondary near Pontypridd. To the kids, Bunf was a source of dazed amusement, arriving late in the mornings to find that they’d already registered themselves and started without him.

‘I managed to get the two most responsible girls to help out,’ he says now. ‘If I was five minutes late they would take over the register. It’s not what you’re supposed to do as a teacher, but in a way I think they enjoyed it, because it empowered them to take responsibility … in my own sick way I taught them a lesson!’

The other teachers at school, however, viewed Bunf with suspicion – and the feeling was mutual. Organised religion and discipline were the twin forks of the school’s philosophy, with the deputy heads in particular displaying an evangelical streak. It wasn’t the religion that bothered Bunf, however; more the school’s insistence that religion alone could save kids from a life of poverty. ‘We were in a really hard, deprived area which had this enormous lack of hope,’ says Bunf, ‘and it was inadequate to suggest that it’d be OK if you followed that path. The kids were beyond that.’

When possible Gruff and Daf would catch the teacher in action with U Thant, and it wasn’t long before they got to know another member of the group who seemed a like-minded kind of person: Guto Pryce, their dark-haired, square-jawed bass player.

FURRY FILE: GUTO

BORN – Cardiff, 1972

CHILDHOOD DISASTER – ‘Having to make do with a hand-me-down pink Raleigh Commando bike instead of a BMX’

CHILDHOOD VICTORY – ‘Bunnyhopping that Commando’

BAD BEHAVIOUR – Cross-country running fraud

TEEN REBEL ICON – Diego Maradona

TEEN GROOMING TIP – Dungarees

GEEK SPECIALITY – Oink! comic

FIRST SONGWRITING ATTEMPT – ‘Mynd Am Dro’, 1978 (‘It was basically a rip-off of a Welsh song about two dogs that go for a walk in the woods and lose a shoe’)

BEACH BOYS VALHALLA – ‘Big Sur’

LIFE WISDOM – ‘Bunf once told me: “Don’t eat anything bigger than your head”’

Guto had grown up on a diet of punk and melodic pop, supplied to him respectively by The Damned and ELO. His earliest encounter with the bass guitar was watching the French TV superstar Jean-Jacques Burnel, who not only played bass, but also knew karate; very cool indeed.

Like Gruff, Guto’s adventures in rock and roll started early. ‘It’s funny,’ he says today, ‘I don’t think you can do it now, but back then you could start a band and easily get on TV, then pick up a cheque for £140 at the end of the day. So you’d form bands just to get on telly, earn a bit of money.’

After a couple of years playing Ramones covers in a garage band, Guto signed up for U Thant. For some time the group enjoyed playing the ‘rock ’n’ squat’ scenes of Eastern Europe, and at just seventeen years old found themselves playing in the former East Germany. ‘It was quite nuts really,’ says Guto, ‘and an eye-opener when you’re seventeen. We were playing to a bunch of Iron Maiden fans every night, classic punk rockers – they’d seen Camden Town on a postcard and thought “I want to be zis!”’

At the dawn of 1991, U Thant were comfortably nestled in their home town of Cardiff. However, before their counterparts in Ffa Coffi Pawb could join them, a brief geographical diversion was about to occur: Manchester.

Gruff and Daf moved to the city of dance music together, in an attempt to kick-start their art educations at the university. To their delight, the acid house scene was in full bloom – and for a few months they embarked on a hedonistic holiday in the ‘second summer of love’, checking out the 24-hour nightclubs and casually noting the latest techno sounds.

Yet Daf soon became contemplative and, disillusioned with art education and spooked by the suspicion that he was neglecting his one true calling, music, he decided to move back to Cardiff. Although the move separated him from his best friend, it was a pivotal decision: the flat he was moving into would shortly become the arts lab of the Super Furry Animals.

Daf unpacked his bags on the wooden floors of 12 Column Road, Cardiff on 5 June 1993. Moving in alongside him were his girlfriend Debbie, Rhys Ifans, and Rhys’s strange Polish girlfriend who enjoyed shoplifting. Before they could get round to settling in, however, the phone rang. It was Bunf.

‘We were thinking about taking some acid, and then going to watch the dinosaurs at the museum,’ he said. ‘Would you like to come along?’

Daf put the phone down and smiled at his girlfriend. ‘Fucking ’ell, I think I like this guy!’

That night, the acid was far too strong, forcing them to walk very slowly and carefully back to Bunf’s flat, under the watchful eye of strange lights emanating from the traffic. Inside, Daf switched on the living-room light to reveal a labyrinthine city of guitar-effects pedals on the floor. They had entered Bunf’s space-rock HQ.

‘Pedals,’ whispered Daf, pointing at the floor, the wall, then the ceiling too. ‘Pedals,’ he repeated. ‘Everywhere!’

It was Cardiff’s hottest summer for twenty years, and the surf was definitely up: living in the capital, Daf got to sample the countryside raves that were exploding in its satellite countryside. There was also an additional benefit to living in the city: he got to hang out with his younger brother, Cian – a film student living up the road in Newport.

FURRY FILE: CIAN

BORN – Bangor, 1976

SUPERPOWER – Flight

SUPERWEAKNESS – Sleep deprivation

CHILDHOOD DISASTER – ‘I was caught with my trousers around my ankles in primary school, when the fire alarm went off. I had to go on yard in my pants and all had a good laugh at my expense’

CHILDHOOD VICTORY – ‘Winning the Albert Owen shield with Pentraeth FC’

BAD BEHAVIOUR – ‘I never got caught!’

REBEL ICON – Diego Maradona

TEENAGE GROOMING TIP – Eyeliner

GEEK DISCLOSURE – Lego

FIRST ATTEMPTED SONG – ‘I remember recording myself doing raspberries into the tape machine when I was about six years old’

BEACH BOYS VALHALLA – ‘Forever’

Cian was too young to go raving, but he was nonetheless an acid house fan. One track that proved particularly influential to the young teenager was the Snowman mix of ‘Humanoid’ – in part a rave version of The Snowman soundtrack – by an early incarnation of The Future Sound of London.

With Orbital also making regular appearances on the turntables, it was only a matter of time until Cian started to make his own dance music, making his earliest recordings onto DAT tapes. As Cian explains today, it was a time of experimentation and creation.

‘I had this teacher who’d say something like “Ideas are a penny apiece, it’s how you execute them that makes them special.” Which was frustrating at the time because I thought all my ideas were worth something, and it seemed like he brought you right down: anyone can have an idea! But it influenced me from that point on, not to get hung up on an idea – the next one would always be better, and if you get a good one and execute it well … that’s where the magic is.’

By the time Cian had started to apply this magic to samplers and synths, his older brother was going out and dancing to them.

One night in June 1994, Bunf, Guto, Rhys, Daf and Gruff – who was down from Manchester for the weekend – partied at Cardiff’s Hippo Club until 2am, then jumped into Bunf’s Ford Fiesta and set the coordinates for the heart of a rave. In those pre-satnav times, their journey into the countryside was a challenge in itself: first they drove out to the outskirts of Merthyr, then they sped up the dual carriageway before finally pulling up in a floodlit Asda car park, along with thirty or so mysterious vehicles.

Daf wound down the window and spotted a tall, dreadlocked man shouting at the cars like some kind of crazed traffic controller.

‘That’s him, that’s the man,’ he said. ‘He’s the one telling people how to get there. HEY! YOU! WHERE ARE WE HEADING?’

‘South exit, follow the convoy!’ shouted the dreadlocks, prompting Bunf to rev up the engine and fall in line.

Several miles later, they were zooming through a wide stretch of moonlit countryside, spiralling in and out of the cover of forest. There was just one problem: it was becoming increasingly difficult to tell which cars to follow: the trail of ravers was running cold, diluted with regular traffic. Stuck for a solution, the car pulled over and Gruff got out to have a listen. At first, there was only open sky, cricket chirps and wind. But then:

OOM OOM OOM

OOM OOM OOM

OOM OOM OOM

The sound of muffled drums rolled towards them, then rolled back again. ‘Festival wind!’ thought Gruff. Rhys came out to offer a second opinion, and they both stood there a while, surveying the ambience. ‘It appears to be coming from the direction of the trees!’ announced Rhys in a Shakespearean accent.