@originofpwoper I figured it was probably easier to put this into a post, because there were a few other things I wanted to link too!
Here's the Super Furry Animals playlist :] :] :]
(Super Furry Animals propaganda is probably my favourite pastime so you have no idea how much humouring me means lmao)
Hangin' With Howard Marks is the song they wrote about Howard Marks—you'll enjoy reading about him! Worked at one point as a double agent for MI6 and the IRA, did drug stints for the mafia, worked for the CIA at one point, betrayed the CIA at another, was caught in the 80s and imprisoned in the US.
In the mid-90s while writing their debut album Fuzzy Logic (1996), Super Furry Animals wrote a song about him—it was quite fantastical: the lyric goes, "You and me and the guy from Sparks/Hangin' out with Howard Marks", and this verse was a list of other impossible things things that could never happen. Still, they regarded Marks as a kind of Welsh icon (he was Welsh, after all, and a very cool guy), and they wrote to him in prison asking if they could use his mugshots as their album cover, and he said yes, and when he was released in the 90s, he met with the boys and was quite fond of them! (Mixed one of their songs too... fittingly, a song called Smoking lmao.) He joined them on stage at Glastonbury in 1996—yep, the same year that SFA drove only a fuckin' decommissioned military tank to Glastonbury as their sound system and transport! What a year!
The tank at Glastonbury. Apparently they sold it to Don Henley of the Eagles (?!).
You'll enjoy reading about Howard Marks, he was a lovely dude. There are some interview scans around here I'll have to dig up where they interviewed the band and Howard together—he was quite fond of them! In another Super Furry Animals connection, later on when his book/life was turned into a film, Rhys Ifans, the Welsh actor played Howard. Rhys of course, sang in the earliest incarnation of SFA (they put out a previously unreleased single from the vaults for a charity last year, Of No Fixed Identity, which had Rhys on vocals instead of Gruff. Here he is, second from left, while Gruff's third from left with the long hair (keyboardist Cian who made SFA's weewooo spaceship techno sounds, younger brother of Daf the drummer all the way on the right, hadn't joined the band just then).
Rhys is still good friends with the band though, he in fact sang on the latest Das Koolies single that came out last month, and he was good friends with Howard Marks too, there's an interview out there somewhere that they did on I think Jonathon Ross' show that I can dig up from somewhere on YouTube. Anyway, you and me and the guys from Sparks, we should go read about Howard Marks, he was really cool and became a sort of cult face for the Cool Cymru scene!
The Man Don't Give A Fuck is a breathtaking song—supposedly SFA's "only explicitly political song" (mmmm? "Drygioni" literally means "devolution" lmao, as in decentralisation of government, hoping to move powers away from Westminster and make home nations of the UK, in this song in particular, Wales, more autonomous in governance, that's political) . It uses a sample of a Steely Dan song, Show Biz Kids, just the line "you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else", and loops it 52 times. They'd wanted the song on their debut album, but Steely Dan didn't agree to clear the sample in time, so it ended up as a separate single that wasn't really on any album at the time when it was cleared. When it got played on radio once, by a presenter who was on his last day at the BBC, he bowed out with this song, and it made some sort of record: most occurrences of "fuck" on daytime radio or something. (I'll double check that lmao)
Donald Fagen initially wasn't actually happy to let them use the sample which is why they couldn't clear it in time for the single it was supposed to be a B-side for, and when he finally did he asked for 95% of the royalties from it, which SFA agreed to because they figured they'd never receive airplay for such an explicit song anyway. A couple of years ago they called it "our contribution to the Steely Dan retirement fund" which I just find to be the funniest thing.
This song is insane live, they keep it going for like 20 minutes and it became SFA's staple set closer, their Knights of Cydonia, if you will ;) It all turns into a legendary rave as Cian goes wild on the keys! Another reason I simply HAVE to see them live if they ever reform—and they really better! They actually did release a live version of this once, and if I'm not mistaken that holds the record for most swears on a recorded song. Only good times with SFA :)
Drygioni– SFA cowbells time!! It's the opener on their 2000 self-released fourth studio album Mwng (pronounced moong, meaning mane), this was SFA's lo-fi all-Welsh language album that would incidentally go on to become the highest-selling Welsh language album of all time, it still holds that record, even when there are a lot more Welsh language albums being released today. It even got a mention in Welsh Parliament in an early day motion for its extraordinary contributions to Welsh music and culture. The song itself advocates for devolution and somehow ends up with advocating for having kids lmao it's a wild ride and only 1 minute 58 seconds long; Pitchfork when reviewing the album back in 2000 called this song "a mistake", so add that to the extremely long list of Pitchfork's mistakes.
Receptacle For The Respectable - SFA's own genre-changing operatic song. They said of it, “It started as a song in two parts, and then we added a third and then a fourth, and at one point a fifth as well - there was a hip hop bit at the end.” They ended up cutting the fifth because "where does it stop? Suddenly you have 20 parts", only a band with overflowing creativity like them has that problem!
“It's a song about a girl around town, and being in awe/hurt by a powerful woman about town. And it's a celebration of absurd musical juxtapositions. I think the final section makes the song valid, because up 'til then it's an exercise in classicist rock music.
“It features a great vocal by Daf [drummer] in the third part. It was a monster track to mix. And it's our chance to indulge in pantomime death metal at the end.”
SFA pantomime death metal :) This song and (Drawing) Rings Around The World have some amazing Beach Boys-esque harmonies! The bit with Daf's vocals ("Welcome as a storm cloud in the late December gloom...") also features none but Paul McCartney in the background, crunching celery as extra percussion like he had once done on a Beach Boys album. Why did he do it? SFA had convinced him, drunkenly at an awards show, to let them remix a selection of his songs that ended up as an album called Liverpool Sound Collage, so this was Paul returning a favour, but SFA were a band of talented multi-instrumentalists who didn't really need a guest bassist... so they got him to crunch celery on their Beach Boys-harmonies song. It's only fitting! This was on 2001's Rings Around The World.
On the same album is the song that kinda remains one of their best known songs (if not for radio airplay getting in the way, it would be The Man Don't Give A Fuck to anyone who knows the band as a fan and was able to see them back in the heady 90s), Juxtaposed With U. The lyrics are lovely, the instrumentation is lovely, the band had wanted to do it as a duet with guest vocalists on the verses, and they'd approached Brian Harvey and Bobby Brown but both said no, so Gruff just ended up duetting with himself through a vocoder. He's done it live with and without the vocoder (Glastonbury 2007 my love), but there's this one acoustic session they did for an Austrian radio station that is just SO BEAUTIFUL that you need to hear.
Can't really think of too many other notes on the songs, except obviously things like song meanings and inspirations behind some of their songs—oh, Northern Lites: written, simultaneously about “the El Niño effect, and Jesus” amazing work—and we talked of course about Hermann ♥︎ Pauline—and the Welsh language songs. But I feel like this is enough infodumping for one post! 😅