Rise of The Super Furry Animals. Ric Rawlins
bleating and waving his stick in the air. The spokesperson chewed his fingernails. Then it dawned on him what the noise was: ‘The Beach Boys!’
The tank was rumbling downhill at quite a slow speed, but it was also shaking uncontrollably as it hit all the bumps in the field. Behind it was the brown gate. The brown gate was good. Ahead of it was the blue gate, though – and nobody quite knew what the blue gate was all about. Ian and John started babbling.
‘Look!’ shouted John. ‘A gap in the hedge – straight ahead!’
Ian squinted at the hedge. ‘That’s not a gap!’
‘It’s the field we need, Ian. Head towards it, just head towards it …’
He put one hand on the wheel.
‘Get off my wheel! Look at your eyes – you’ve got the eyes of a madman!’
They burst through the hedge, slammed up a steep incline, and stopped. The tank stood motionless for a few seconds, silent except for the sound of gently creaking metal and a cool breeze.
Inside, Cian lit a match. ‘Rats,’ he muttered, lifting a vinyl to the light and tracing a scratch with his finger. After a quick check to see if everyone was OK, Gruff lifted the hatch and peered out. Looking across the field, he could see a big tent at the far side, with the sign ‘ARTISTS’ ENTRANCE’ next to it. He looked back down into the tank, where the quiet sneeze of laughter had overcome his bandmates.
‘I think we’re in the correct field,’ he announced.
The rest of the day panned out well for the festival: bards were appointed, ale was drunk, eighteenth-century costumes were worn, and the tank finally found its home – in a field where teenagers could boogie to Cian’s techno.
Later in the evening, the festival spokesperson wandered down to the stage where Super Furry Animals were playing. He slurped on a ginger ale while tapping his feet and humming along. One thing seemed curious, however: the crowd were singing along to an instrumental performance. Stranger still, although some were singing in Welsh, others were singing in English and … was that even Japanese he heard? He walked into the audience and spotted a girl handing out lyric sheets.
‘Would you mind if I took a look at this?’ he smiled, grabbing a pamphlet. At the top of the first page was an illustration of a dragon screwing a man up the arse, while the lyrics below were printed in a variety of translations, a different one on each page. Finally, a simple instruction: ‘SING ALONG IN WHICHEVER LANGUAGE YOU LIKE’. The spokesperson put his quivering hand over his mouth, then looked back at the stage.
The contradiction of voices as they blended into one another made for an almighty sound – indecipherable, certainly – but also a strange kind of international language.
It was a misty morning in 1974, and four-year-old Gruff Rhys was being carried up the side of a mountain, perched on his dad’s shoulders. Once they’d reached a level where they could see the valley before them, his father put him down and pointed up to where the rocks hit the mist.
‘That, Gruff, is the peak of the mountain!’
Gruff nodded.
‘Unfortunately, my lad, the peak of the mountain is the most boring part. But! Take a look over there, at the dip between the rocks. Do you see?’
He pointed slightly further down, to where a pathway seemed to wind its way cryptically between the hills before disappearing round the corner.
‘Those are the passes – the gateways between the mountains!’
Gruff nodded.
‘It’s along those passes that you’ll find different peoples meeting and interacting with each other. Historically they are a link between cultures … a connection between the towns.’ He put his son back on his shoulders and set off again.
‘It’s not the peaks of the mountains that matter, lad,’ he announced. ‘It’s the gaps between them!’
Gruff’s family had recently moved to the slate-quarrying town of Bethesda from Cardiff. This had mainly been because Gruff’s dad had taken a job as county secretary in nearby Caernarfon, but Bethesda also appealed because it was a Welsh-speaking area.
‘My grandfather had lost the Welsh language by one generation,’ says Gruff today, ‘so my father spoke English with him and Welsh with his mother – and could never imagine speaking to either of them in any other language.’
By contrast, both Gruff’s parents spoke to him, his brother and his sister in Welsh: the family was going back to its roots.
Gruff’s father, Ioan Bowen Rees, had two main passions: he was a committed public servant, and he loved the Welsh mountains. The two themes came together in the books that he wrote, in which the freedom of the mountains provided a convenient metaphor for his political philosophy. Ioan was widely regarded as a fair man who could rise above petty political games, a left-wing internationalist who disregarded the obsessive self-worship of his country as insularism. His politics were forged during an era of social tension and cold war propaganda, and he shared his thoughts openly, telling one interviewer that ‘the battle for Wales is the battle for all small nations, all small communities, all individuals in the age of genocide’.
Gruff’s mother, Margaret, ran the local Welsh-language playgroup. She was also a teacher who shared her husband’s love of writing, and had composed a book of poems. According to Gruff, ‘She did one book, a book of sonnets. If I remember correctly most sonnets have fourteen lines, but she specialised in thirteen-line sonnets.’
At home, the music on the stereo was a curious mixture. Ioan was a record collector who despised pop, instead preferring the ‘proper music’ of composers such as Wagner, who’d be blasted from the speakers at full volume. And yet, strangely enough, reggae was deemed acceptable, as was Welsh-language pop. National radio stations such as Radio One were cut off by the mountains surrounding Bethesda, but Gruff and his siblings found other ways of discovering international pop music: the frequencies of Irish stations would occasionally travel across the sea, transmitting the disco hits of the 1970s alongside the occasional Celtic fiddle ballad.
At the age of six, Gruff learned that Planet Earth was about to come to an abrupt end. One day, he and his cousin returned home from messing about in the fields to discover a book that Gruff’s brother had left lying about. ‘TIME AND THE GALAXY’, boomed the title. Flicking through the pages, their curiosity turned to morbid horror as they came across an illustration of the sun crashing into Earth, melting human civilisation into a pool of lava in the process. Underneath was a simple caption: ‘The fate of the sun.’ Understandably, the kids were devastated.
‘At this time we hadn’t even realised that our parents were going to die,’ says Gruff, ‘so we were completely terrified at the thought of this massive event. Unfortunately we didn’t read the book any further, so we were oblivious to the fact that it wouldn’t happen for a really long time.’
FURRY FILE: GRUFF
BORN – Hwlffordd, 1970 (‘In the hospital’)
CHILDHOOD SUPERPOWER – Hallucination
CHILDHOOD SUPERWEAKNESS – Pasties
CHILDHOOD DISASTER – ‘I had a ticket to see Gary Moore and Phil Lynott at the Manchester Apollo, when I was thirteen. And my parents decided I shouldn’t go to Manchester on my own at thirteen to watch a heavy metal band … and then Phil Lynott died a few weeks after. That was a bit of a scar’
CHILDHOOD VICTORY – Discovering music (‘It was a defining change of pace’)
BAD BEHAVIOUR – Covering