Fantastic Fur: Super Furry Animals interviewed

It's been a memorable year for Super Furry Animals. The Welsh group’s reunion tour, now rolling on for 18 months, continues to sell out venues across the UK and abroad. Bing Bong, their first single in seven years, easily outclassed another comeback song released that same week in May – the forgettable All For One by The Stone Roses. As satisfying as this was for the five SFA members, the real high point of this summer was watching Gareth Bale and company propel Wales to the semi-finals of the European Championships in France. 

“The Welsh team were amazing, man,” recalls Furries lead guitarist Huw Bunford with obvious delight. “We played in Toulouse in front of 1000 mad Welsh fans, and some very confused French ones, two days before Wales played Russia. That was hilarious.”

It was Wales’ first appearance at an international finals since 1958, and meant the band – all keen football fans – could finally release a track they had been holding back for such a momentous event. “Bing Bong was a reflection on our own excitement really,” says Bunford, known to fans and bandmates alike as Bunf. “It wasn’t contrived, although it had been 12 years in the making. Every time we failed to qualify we had to put it back on the shelf.”

The Furries are now gearing up for a headline appearance at Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia on 23 September. Bunf admits it's the kind of event he would attend as a punter himself, and has no problems with his band being labelled with the psych tag.

“If you do experimental pop you’re seen as a psychedelic band now,” he ponders. “It’s lost a bit of its 1970s tag, which meant Tangerine Dream and 18-minute concept songs. I think it became a tag for bands people couldn’t easily pigeonhole. When we started out, the NME couldn’t really pin us down as our albums always changed – even within an album, we would change styles. But we would rather have a psychedelic tag to us than Britpop. There’s no contest there. That’s when you start pulling your hair out.”

It’s easy to forget the Furries arrived on the national pop scene at the height of the British music industry’s last hurrah. Their debut album, Fuzzy Logic, was released in May 1996 and its mixture of Welsh-inspired rock and playful lyrics provided a welcome antidote to a London-centric scene that was taking itself far too seriously. Musically, SFA may have had little in common with the likes of Oasis. But they did both share the patronage of Alan McGee’s Creation Records, then the country's most successful independent label by some distance.

Not that the Furries were particularly bothered. “We had an attitude of 'come and get us,'” laughs Bunf. “And in those days there were loads of labels. Our first gig in London was full of A&R men. McGee turned up in Camden – because they never left North London – and he came up and said something like: ‘Fuckin’ brilliant.. but it’d be great if you could write some songs in English.’ To which we pointed out only one had been sung in Welsh. At that point we thought he was the kind of guy we needed – enthusiastic, but wrong.”

Bunf and his bandmates have reason to look fondly back at that time. Their first two albums for Creation, Logic and 1997’s Radiator, were remastered this summer and will be re-released with a clutch of rare bonus tracks on 4 November. The band will then undertake a short December tour in which they will play both LPs back to back, in order.

It was the success of Mwng, the band’s turn-of-the-century Welsh language album, re-released to critical acclaim last year, which led them to consider other reissues. Former Flaming Lips drummer Kliph Scurlock, who acts as the official SFA archivist when not touring himself, helped select outtakes and other rarities that make up the re-releases, along with a new 'best of' compilation which comes out on the same day.

“We didn’t know what the reaction to Mwng would be from the fans,” Bunf says. “It wasn’t a new record, you know? All our hardcore fans probably own it. But it was lovely to see the enthusiasm for it, and that led us to look back. It is a bit of nostalgia, fair enough, but then it was a mad 18-month period of our lives. We were given an opportunity to do an album, and one of the things on our minds was it might be the last one we do. If no one liked it, end of story. But Creation stuck with us and we were very prolific. It was a real rush, that time. A whirlwind. You’d do four singles, when there was that kind of industry: churn out product; something in the shops all the time. We were very prolific. We loved it. We embraced it.”

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Super Furry Animals play Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia on 23 Sep. Fuzzy Logic is re-released via BMG on 4 Nov, alongside new compilation ZOOM!