by Ben LatimerCian Ciarán, keyboard player of Super Furry Animals, walks into the interview room looking a little worse for wear. It is hardly surprising when, after a few minutes of holding his head in his hands in obvious discomfort, he asks if I’d mind coming to the band’s own backstage hangout. Evidently, the background din of the roadies’ onstage sound-check was bugging him, so before we long relocate. Truth be told, he is nursing all the symptoms of one mother of a hangover, and I sympathise when I notice the lengthy list of all the other interviews he has to do over the next two hours.
There’s no particular reason why this state of affairs should surprise me; only you come to imagine your heroes as attaining a kind of superhuman existence, a kind of life outside of themselves. Yet apparently these people still get ill like the rest of us; they sleep and eat, perhaps even bleed. You would not have thought it. Of the 8 albums SFA have released over the last 11 years (solo and side projects aside), there has been not one dud among them. In fact, new album Hey Venus, and its predecessor Love Kraft stake a claim to being the very pinnacle of SFA’s career so far. The one-time darlings of the NME remain largely overlooked by today’s music press, however, which begs a lot of questions.
I ask Cian if this might be due largely to the demise of the whole Britpop era in the late 90’s, since his band tended to be carelessly lumped into this broad category. He replies that he ‘never really felt a connection to the whole movement’, but that they were lumbered with the tag by some journalists. Certainly, this lazy pigeon-holing of the band does not do any justice to SFA’s genre-defying hybrid of psychedelia, anthemic rock, techno & soaringly melodic pop anthems. Yet, what may have a greater bearing on SFA’S neglection by the music press in recent years is simply their complete and utter lack of concern for it. Any band who hopes to become stratospherically successful in terms of sales must also play the game to an extent, maintaining a constant flirtation with the music press. Cian sums up the band’s attitude to this with ‘We certainly didn’t fly the Union Jack. The Union Jack is like a fucking swastika as far as I’m concerned’.
Which leads on to something I was hoping to ask him on anyway – how important the band’s Welsh identity is to them. Here, I’m referring specifically to the fact that SFA are, apart from Catatonia, the only band of recent years with any significant international renown to release music in their native Welsh tongue. Cian assures me this is no gimmick; it was simply the natural product of having a band of bilingual musicians. Their album Mwng, sung entirely in Welsh, reached #11 in the UK album charts, and is cited to be the most commercially successful Welsh album ever. When I ask if Welsh songs were written specifically for this album, Cian responds that the band are constantly writing in both languages, and it simply ‘felt more coherent to release them together on one record’. He then turns the tables and asks whether I would ‘have even asked that question if it was an English artist releasing an English-language album, or a French band in the French language’.
He makes a valid point; and with music this good, who cares about questions of language and national identity? Just sit back, crank up the volume and let yourself be swept away by the hauntingly beautiful melodies.
