The New Cue #355 February 5: Gruff Rhys
"There was a period when I was buying more records than I could listen to."
Happy Monday,
Yes it’s February, yes it’s windy, wet and you’ve got a runny nose. But every day this week will get better for you. I feel this very strongly.
Your first step on that road to joy and fulfilment is this breezy interview with Gruff Rhys, former Super Furry Animals frontman and exalted singer-songwriter, who last Friday slammed into the album charts at number twenty-two with Sadness Sets Me Free, his eighth solo album and - incredibly - his thirty-fifth in total.
Our chat is just below these buttons here. If you’re able, we’d really appreciate you becoming a paid subscriber (a fiver a month) so we can pay our mortgages. This edition, however, is free, as all Mondays are.
Enjoy your week.
Ted, Niall and Chris.
Start The Week With…Gruff Rhys
Everyone loves Gruff Rhys, who made some of the most adventurous and enjoyable psychedelic-pop records of the 1990s and early 2000s with Super Furry Animals.
Subsequently he has followed a solo career path that has seen him record with Tuareg rockers in the Saharan Desert and with the Mandan tribe of the Great Plains in North America. He’s a long-time master of melancholy melody and deadpan cosmic reflection. Here, have a listen to a Spotify playlist the Welshman made of his solo stuff:
He’s also one of the slowest, most considered talkers in the United Kingdom. There was a moment during this conversation when Gruff paused in contemplation for so long that Ted thought his computer had frozen: I was just about to reboot when Gruff started to speak again.
Hi Gruff, how are you?
Good. Good. Can you hear me?
I can, Clem Fandango. I can hear you and see you.
Great. Are you OK?
Yep. Where are you?
I’m in Alan Partridge-land. In a hotel room, travelling between two record shop gigs, somewhere on the English Rivera between Brighton and Totnes.
How’s your week been?
Great, putting the record out that I recorded nearly two years ago. So it’s been a relief to get it out and it’s been nice doing acoustic gigs. I’m really fresh, as my proper tour hasn’t yet really started. That’s the week ahead and I’m looking forward to playing my songs for the people!
You’ve had thirty-five albums out: that’s a lot of promo.
It is, yes.
What’s the best thing about having a new record out?
Having other people hear the music. Sharing the experience. Playing people the songs: sometimes they know them and react to them. That’s really magic, it’s amazing where sounds can end up. It’s mildly life-changing, you know. I love records. I love buying records. I love listening to them. I’m very engaged with the process. It’s something I value more than most things in life.
You love records.
I am a fan of the album. I don’t know if it’s a contemporary medium. But I’m into it.
Is there an emptiness knowing it’s done, that you have to push that ball back up the hill again in the future?
No, I’m thinking about other records now. It’s a relief that this record can be heard and I can move on. It’s a thrill to have a memento of this time in my life: I have a full album that I can keep and it reminds me of writing the record, recording it. It’s like a fancy diary.
Above: The Celestial Candyfloss video
You made Sadness Sets Me Free in a French chateau near Paris, La Frette – tell me about working in French residential studios as opposed to British.
I suppose it’s a similar purpose. It’s like a big house with a bit that you can record in. We could only afford it for three days and Olivier – the guy who runs it – was really keen for us to come and he made it work. Gave us a discount, you know. We were trying to find ways to save money. There’s a chef there and we were saying, ‘It’s OK, we don’t need the chef – we’ll cook for ourselves.’ Olivier was, like, ‘The chef has been working here for thirty years, that’s not an option: everybody eats together.’ So that was different. But, when it came to it, the cook had been there thirty years, she was cooking this tasty food, and everyone would turn up for it. The gardener would turn up, we’d never seen him before. The owner would turn up, everyone would eat together, and it would all start to make sense. Everyone’s sugar levels in the band were really high. Everyone was in a great mood because of that and so we were able to record so much material really quickly and get it done in three days. We worked long hours without being stressed. It was a change from Pot Noodle and amphetamines.
Well, the French know that an army marches on its stomach more than most.
Yes, it really was a lesson for us all.
Did the Gallic influence affect the record in any other ways?
The reason I was there was because I’d done some recordings [Aboogi] with a band called Imarhan and the engineer on that record was Maxime Kosinetz of France. We were finishing a French tour so I asked him if he could do some recordings with us for a few days and he suggested that this was the best place that we could set up live in. It sounds completely different, because Maxime did a great job, but we recorded it all acoustically: piano, bass, drums, all recorded live in one room. Those were the recordings we were after, which is why we were there, capturing those moments. He also mic’d the outside of the building because there was a lot of birdsong. Some of the surroundings stayed on the recording. We weren’t there for France, though. We were there for more mundane reasons.
What were the records you were thinking of or listening to when you were writing Sadness Sets Me?
We were on tour so I was listening to a lot of music. Kliph Scurlock [drums] prepares the long playlists for the journeys on tour. He was influencing us by stealth. We were listening to a lot Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson. Kris Kristofferson, Dolly Parton. I’d be playing Michael Rother records too. It was some kind of collision between song writing and cosmic charms.
As a man of a similar age to you, I relate to the mood of gentle anxiety and mild self-loathing in the album. Are these themes that run through your head before sleep?
Ha! Well, it’s not too bad. It’s a coping mechanism that is tied in with dark humour. I channel it through songs, because life’s too busy to think about it. It’s overwhelming. There’s a kaleidoscopic number of things we have to do to get through the day in contemporary life. Mostly I’m worrying about my kids rather than myself, you know. It all comes out in the songs. I listen back and think: ‘Oh right! Oh dear…’
Do you also worry about your kids listening to your songs? I’m thinking of the album’s opening lines: ‘In the nightclub, of my mind/I’m doing cocaine in the cloakroom…’
No, I trust them and the songs they listen to are far more obscene than mine. I try not to think about it. I don’t know what the songs they listen to are but I’m not worried about my lyrics in comparison to what they are acclimatised to.
Bad Friend in particular rings true lyrically. How could we all be better friends?
Well, better enemies is more true probably. If more people were bad friends rather than enemies then maybe the world would be a better place. But any kind of friend is OK, you know. People’s expectations are lowered by the hoops we have to jump through. It’s just playing with the terminology. People talk about their best friends, their old friends. I think a bad friend can be perfectly acceptable. We know they’re there and everything is going to OK.
Above: the Bad Friend video
Do you stay in contact with your old friends in Super Furry Animals?
Yeah. I saw them all last week! When you tour with someone for fifteen years non-stop they’re family, you know. And families are weird. That’s fine. But definitely family and unbreakable in that sense.
Above: the full American Sasquatch documentary about Super Furry Animals
Do you have any tips for mental well-being, generally, for middle-age? Does music keep you young?
Yes, but I don’t feel pressure to be young. But making music is extremely enjoyable and that is good for you, isn’t it? It’s strange what I can enjoy now, musically. There was a period when I was buying more records than I could listen to. Buying them on tour and accumulating records that I wasn’t at home to listen to. So I’ve been listening to them and some records I thought were awful I now play non-stop for three months.
Like?
Hejira by Joni Mitchell. I remember buying that ten years ago or something and couldn’t engage with it. I put it on four years ago and I played it continuously for months. Weird how you change like that.
I really like They Sold My Home to Build a Skyscraper: what was the inspiration for that?
A lot of places I spent a lot of time in in Cardiff, cultural spaces, have been knocked down. For example, where Super Furries recorded the Mwng album, that’s gone. Another studio where the Manics recorded The Holy Bible has gone. All replaced by fairly flimsy-looking buildings to make money from rental accommodation. I’m into modernist architecture. But they’re not being replaced by other cultural spaces. They’re being replaced by property developers. Unfortunately, that seems like a universal situation.
Are you rural or urban?
I live in Cardiff. I enjoy it. That’s where I’ve ended up. I’ve always found Cardiff to be a city that works. I can get a lot of things done there. It’s the kind of city where you can bump into the people you need to see without having to email them. If I’ve forgotten to answer someone’s email it’s usually OK because I’ll just run into them on the street and we can just sort it out face to face. Small enough for that, but big enough to have rehearsal spaces for bands. There’s a place called Music Box that’s run by music fans who care about the musical community. They’re the cogs that are in place which without the whole place would collapse.
That kind of links with the lovely communal feeling that closes the album, I’ll Keep Singing.
Yeah, I wanted to have something positive and uplifting to end the record with. Nobody goes home empty-handed. It’s sort of a cosmic gospel song. Also, I think it’s a really funny message. I’ll Keep Singing: you can’t stop me.
OK Gruff, great to talk to you. Good luck on the tour this week.
Thank you. Looking forward to getting back in that transit van and seeing the world!
TK