Rise of The Super Furry Animals. Ric Rawlins

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СКАЧАТЬ SUPERWEAKNESS – Not being able to fly or swim

      CLASSROOM DISASTER – ‘Sneaking off to school at five years old in my paisley pyjamas, ’cos I thought I looked like Gary Glitter’

      CHILDHOOD VICTORY – ‘Realising that a man-made, invisible, supernatural, totalitarian being, that demanded to be praised lest it condemn you to eternal torture in hell, was a bag of shite’

      TEEN REBEL ICON – Ffred Ffrancis, Welsh Language Activist

      TEEN GROOMING TIP – Tooth brushing

      GEEKY PASSION: Pigs (‘I wanted to breed them and make money’)

      FIRST SONGWRITING ATTEMPT – ‘Llanaelhaearn Lleddf (Blues)’,1979

      BEACH BOYS VALHALLA – ‘Till I Die’

      LIFE WISDOM: ‘Don’t be a cunt’ – Jim Jeffries

      As the eighties gave way to the nineties, Ffa Coffi Pawb’s songwriting continued to blossom: Rhodri was inspired by the early work of Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses, while Gruff and Daf began thinking about the craft of pop music, reasoning that every great tune should kick off with a memorable hook.

      Gorwel remembers a philosophy that they adopted at this time: ‘I recall them saying that “the studio is just a vehicle for the songs”. That’s very true, of course, but they also understood that the opposite was true: that songs can be vehicles for experimenting.’

      The experimenting was paying off too: for one matter, Gruff finally resolved the dilemma of which way round to play the guitar. Trained left-handed, but in possession of only a right, he simply flipped the guitar upside-down.

      As 1991 dawned, the runway for Ffa Coffi Pawb was clear for take-off. Not only had they settled on a ‘fab four’ line-up and started writing great songs, but they had an occasional harmonica player too: the Wildest Man in North Wales. From the beginning, Rhys Ifans had a strong belief that he was going to be a professional actor; but of all the musicians he dabbled with, he was undoubtedly the most rock ’n’ roll.

      One winter’s afternoon, the band had just finished soundchecking at a small club in Porthmadog when Rhys and Rhodri went outside to see what the crowds were like.

      ‘Crikey,’ said Rhodri. ‘The only thing missing is tumbleweed. I guess we’ll be playing to the sound engineer again.’

      ‘There, there, Rhodri,’ said Rhys, slurping a cocktail with a twinkle in his eye. ‘It just so happens that I know precisely where to get a massive crowd from. You go back inside and set up with the band, and I’ll be back in five minutes with an audience.’

      ‘Five minutes?’

      ‘Five minutes,’ winked Rhys.

      He jogged down the street to a crossroads, then stopped and looked around, smelling the wind for signs of life. Suddenly a cheer resonated from a bar called The Headless Ram. Rhys swung through the door and coughed loudly.

      ‘Good afternoon, ladies!’ he said, silencing a roomful of leather-bound men. He cleared his throat and started again.

      ‘Word has it … that there is a rather good biker rock band playing just round the corner at the club tonight. The best biker band in North Wales, in fact!’

      The bikers stared at him. One of them folded his arms.

      ‘And apparently it’s free beer too. I’ll be going now.’ He grinned and slowly began to crab-walk out again.

      That night, Ffa Coffi Pawb performed their pop music to a gang of confused, hairy men. As the final notes rang out to reveal an eerie silence, it became apparent that some sort of reconciliatory gesture was required. Rhys stepped up to the microphone. ‘Would anybody like to buy a tape?’

      

      ‘It’s ten past three in the morning, this is Radio Cymru and that was Ffa Coffi Pawb! Now we’ve got something a little bit different for you, a new band from Pembrokeshire. They’re only fifteen years old and this is their first ever session. One word of warning, though: I’ve got a sneaky feeling the lyrics to this one are in English … do you think we can get away with it? Put it this way: it’s the middle of the night, so if you don’t tell the BBC, I won’t. Let’s have it for Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci.’

      Before 1991, Welsh bands had relatively few choices regarding who to sign with. The biggest contender was the major label Sain, which had put out some decent folk albums in the 1970s but was by now deemed deeply uncool. As Gruff explains, ‘They’d got into Aled Jones and choirs, sheep farmers singing Elvis songs in Welsh … they were like a dinosaur back then.’ At the other end of the spectrum was Rhys Mwyn’s punk label Anhrefn: it was established and hip – but also radical, niche and somewhat limited in reach. There was clearly a gap for a label that could sit between the goalposts; and that label was Ankst.

      Ankst Records was set up as an independent operation by Alun Llwyd, Gruffudd Jones and Emyr Glyn Williams while they were students at Aberystwyth University. The three of them were music fans rather than musicians themselves – indeed, they had no desire to become musicians – and therefore they were free to stay in the background and concentrate on nurturing artists.

      ‘Ankst were absolutely crucial,’ says Gorwel Owen today. ‘They created a space for the creative process to happen, which is one of the most important things that a label can do.’

      The founders of Ankst quickly established it as a launch pad for the new generation of Welsh pop, folk and hip hop – and, being massive fans of Ffa Coffi Pawb – soon approached them with a record deal for two EPs.

      ‘Gruff is one of those natural musicians – he’s never going to stop writing pop songs,’ says the label’s co-founder Emyr Glyn Williams. ‘Even back then the songs were catchy, clever, psychedelic and musically ambitious. He wanted to make great albums, as he still does now. So for us it was a safe bet to help them, and work with them. They were one of the best bands around at the time, and we were big fans.’

      Although Ankst had initially run a Welsh-language-only policy, the emergence of bilingual bands such as Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci had prompted them to reconsider. ‘I think it was the bands that changed Ankst,’ says Emyr. ‘We responded to the circumstances, particularly with Gorky’s because they were bilingual from the beginning, and quite naturally so.’

      Ankst were super-enthusiastic about Gorky’s, a band of teenagers from Carmarthen, South Wales, with massive potential. Getting them played on Radio Cymru was another matter, however: it was left to rebellious, late-night DJs like Nia Melville to play them. ‘She had great taste,’ says Gruff. ‘It wasn’t anything to do with language, it was just whether she liked the music or not. Radio Cymru scrapped the show after a year because they thought it was too weird – they couldn’t see how pioneering it was.’

      Oblivious to the arguments happening around them, Gorky’s mixture of folk, psychedelic Dadaism and Fall-inspired rock immediately clicked with a young audience both in Wales and England, and suddenly the NME and John Peel counted themselves among the band’s supporters. This was something new.

      ‘The СКАЧАТЬ