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Review: Super Furry Animals, Bristol Sounds – ‘Disparate tastes, joyfully reconciled’
Harbourside is a furnace, yet Gruff Rhys is dressed head-to-toe in black. It feels apt, since Super Furry Animals are so ideologically anti-pigeonhole. They revel in their contradictions.
So-wrong-it’s-right exhibit A is Rhys himself. Inscrutable behind sunglasses, a man of few words. Yet the Furries’ music is a constant invitation. To sing along, to smile. “Hello sunshine,” Rhys sings. “Come into my life,” we beam in return.
The women in front of us, who followed the band on tour “back when we were young”, sway along, hands raised. An SFA audience is a community, not a crowd.
Fans were ready for the band’s return to the stage after a decade away – photo: Hayley Thompson
So-wrong-it’s-right exhibit B: those black outfits. Like, really? SFA are instinctively psychedelic; they break the light in colours no one knows the names of.
Groovy freakouts abound among the pop choruses. They play country licks and heavy synths and calypso. Even the intro of The Man Don’t Give A Fuck, SFA’s set-closing anthem that’s tailor-made for celebratory bouncing, sounds like David Crosby.
The notion that this is some Britpop reunion is for the Byrds.
It’s a long and dynamic set with plenty of comic diversions – photo: Hayley Thompson
I count 19 more songs before then, each a banger, slow, fast or otherwise, each joyfully reconciling its own disparate tastes and textures.
Northern Lights, a slice of groovy Os Mutantes-style tropicalia, ends with harmonies riding the Pacific Coast Highway, rooftop down, not a care in the world.
Ice Hockey Hair is an alchemy of shuffling beat and ascending chords. “Tell me what to do if it all falls through”, Rhys sings, his doubt carried aloft by the most rousing of melodies.
Gruff Rhys: a man of few words – photo: Hayley Thompson
God! Show Me Magic is 108 seconds of pogo pop wizardry that’s made for side two of Revolver. Slow Life is electro hip-hop with harmonica. Night Vision’s descending rock riff dissolves into subwoofer-friendly drum ‘n’ bass. You get the idea.
Something 4 The Weekend captures all this with customary irony, its circular harmony of “I just keep repeating myself” the only time SFA do any such thing.
Theirs is a knowing humour, delightfully silly. They open with Wherever I Lay My Phone (That’s My Home), Rhys singing into an outsized inflatable mobile. He munches celery during Receptacle For The Respectable, replicating Paul McCartney’s contribution to the original record.
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Their choice of support act complemented the silliness. Getdown Services are two shouty blokes, topless and flabby, playing disco rock the way Goldie Lookin’ Chain do hip-hop. They swore at us a lot and made us laugh.
SFA’s crowd work is subtler, but still funny. Rhys occasionally holds up a neon sign asking for ‘applause’, then ‘louder’, and finally ‘apeshit!’ For Slow Life, for some reason, he dons a high viz jacket and helmet.
Rhys’ choice of hi vis and helmet was inexplicable but demonstrated his commitment to the performance – photo: Hayley Thompson
Nothing subtle about the finale, though, when the band changes into full yeti outfits. At 27 degrees, you have to admire their commitment to the bit.
The common thread is SFA’s need to experiment, to collide the ‘wrong’ together until it’s right.
Those opening lines of Demons – tonight played as more balladic than rousing, the trumpet solo replaced by gentle “ba ba”s – get closest to a credo: “Clarity just confuses me / the lines drawn on a map a strange assembly.”
Full yeti suits in a heatwave show real dedication to the craft – photo: Hayley Thompson
Despite the heat, it’s the warmth of the music that resonates most. There are more swooning hits (Juxtaposed With U, If You Don’t Want Me To Destroy You), and deep cuts too (The Piccolo Snare, a few b-sides).
But it’s Hello Sunshine that sums up what it means to have Super Furry Animals back: “In honesty, it’s been a while / since we had reason left to smile.”
Are they here to stay? Let’s hope so.
The band are being cagey about whether they will continue to play live after this clutch of shows – photo: James Caig
Main image: Hayley Thompson
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