Rise of The Super Furry Animals. Ric Rawlins
TIP – Leather jacket
GEEKY PASSION – Sharks
FIRST ATTEMPTED SONG – ‘Swn’ (‘It means noise … I had no idea what I was doing’)
BEACH BOYS VALHALLA – ‘Good Vibrations’
LIFE WISDOM – ‘Never judge a book by its cover’
Bunf was the guitarist in a band called U Thant. All the posters said that U Thant were a punk band, but somewhere along the road they’d taken a left turn into space-rock territory, and now Bunf was armed to the teeth with psychedelic guitar pedals.
Totally uninterested in learning the blues, playing hyperspeed solos or even being technically any good, Bunf was instead on a mission to find his own sound. Three heroes, at the time, were pointing the way.
‘Tone-wise it was Mick Ronson,’ he says of the legendary glam-rock guitarist. ‘In terms of stage presence it was Chuck Berry, and [I wanted] the pacing of George Harrison’s solos. To be honest, I never did crack Chuck Berry.’
When he wasn’t being a psychedelic rock star, Bunf worked in education – and following two years at a primary school, he’d graduated to being head of art at a secondary near Pontypridd. To the kids, Bunf was a source of dazed amusement, arriving late in the mornings to find that they’d already registered themselves and started without him.
‘I managed to get the two most responsible girls to help out,’ he says now. ‘If I was five minutes late they would take over the register. It’s not what you’re supposed to do as a teacher, but in a way I think they enjoyed it, because it empowered them to take responsibility … in my own sick way I taught them a lesson!’
The other teachers at school, however, viewed Bunf with suspicion – and the feeling was mutual. Organised religion and discipline were the twin forks of the school’s philosophy, with the deputy heads in particular displaying an evangelical streak. It wasn’t the religion that bothered Bunf, however; more the school’s insistence that religion alone could save kids from a life of poverty. ‘We were in a really hard, deprived area which had this enormous lack of hope,’ says Bunf, ‘and it was inadequate to suggest that it’d be OK if you followed that path. The kids were beyond that.’
When possible Gruff and Daf would catch the teacher in action with U Thant, and it wasn’t long before they got to know another member of the group who seemed a like-minded kind of person: Guto Pryce, their dark-haired, square-jawed bass player.
FURRY FILE: GUTO
BORN – Cardiff, 1972
CHILDHOOD DISASTER – ‘Having to make do with a hand-me-down pink Raleigh Commando bike instead of a BMX’
CHILDHOOD VICTORY – ‘Bunnyhopping that Commando’
BAD BEHAVIOUR – Cross-country running fraud
TEEN REBEL ICON – Diego Maradona
TEEN GROOMING TIP – Dungarees
GEEK SPECIALITY – Oink! comic
FIRST SONGWRITING ATTEMPT – ‘Mynd Am Dro’, 1978 (‘It was basically a rip-off of a Welsh song about two dogs that go for a walk in the woods and lose a shoe’)
BEACH BOYS VALHALLA – ‘Big Sur’
LIFE WISDOM – ‘Bunf once told me: “Don’t eat anything bigger than your head”’
Guto had grown up on a diet of punk and melodic pop, supplied to him respectively by The Damned and ELO. His earliest encounter with the bass guitar was watching the French TV superstar Jean-Jacques Burnel, who not only played bass, but also knew karate; very cool indeed.
Like Gruff, Guto’s adventures in rock and roll started early. ‘It’s funny,’ he says today, ‘I don’t think you can do it now, but back then you could start a band and easily get on TV, then pick up a cheque for £140 at the end of the day. So you’d form bands just to get on telly, earn a bit of money.’
After a couple of years playing Ramones covers in a garage band, Guto signed up for U Thant. For some time the group enjoyed playing the ‘rock ’n’ squat’ scenes of Eastern Europe, and at just seventeen years old found themselves playing in the former East Germany. ‘It was quite nuts really,’ says Guto, ‘and an eye-opener when you’re seventeen. We were playing to a bunch of Iron Maiden fans every night, classic punk rockers – they’d seen Camden Town on a postcard and thought “I want to be zis!”’
At the dawn of 1991, U Thant were comfortably nestled in their home town of Cardiff. However, before their counterparts in Ffa Coffi Pawb could join them, a brief geographical diversion was about to occur: Manchester.
Gruff and Daf moved to the city of dance music together, in an attempt to kick-start their art educations at the university. To their delight, the acid house scene was in full bloom – and for a few months they embarked on a hedonistic holiday in the ‘second summer of love’, checking out the 24-hour nightclubs and casually noting the latest techno sounds.
Yet Daf soon became contemplative and, disillusioned with art education and spooked by the suspicion that he was neglecting his one true calling, music, he decided to move back to Cardiff. Although the move separated him from his best friend, it was a pivotal decision: the flat he was moving into would shortly become the arts lab of the Super Furry Animals.
Daf unpacked his bags on the wooden floors of 12 Column Road, Cardiff on 5 June 1993. Moving in alongside him were his girlfriend Debbie, Rhys Ifans, and Rhys’s strange Polish girlfriend who enjoyed shoplifting. Before they could get round to settling in, however, the phone rang. It was Bunf.
‘We were thinking about taking some acid, and then going to watch the dinosaurs at the museum,’ he said. ‘Would you like to come along?’
Daf put the phone down and smiled at his girlfriend. ‘Fucking ’ell, I think I like this guy!’
That night, the acid was far too strong, forcing them to walk very slowly and carefully back to Bunf’s flat, under the watchful eye of strange lights emanating from the traffic. Inside, Daf switched on the living-room light to reveal a labyrinthine city of guitar-effects pedals on the floor. They had entered Bunf’s space-rock HQ.
‘Pedals,’ whispered Daf, pointing at the floor, the wall, then the ceiling too. ‘Pedals,’ he repeated. ‘Everywhere!’
It was Cardiff’s hottest summer for twenty years, and the surf was definitely up: living in the capital, Daf got to sample the countryside raves that were exploding in its satellite countryside. There was also an additional benefit to living in the city: he got to hang out with his younger brother, Cian – a film student living up the road in Newport.
FURRY FILE: CIAN
BORN – Bangor, 1976
SUPERPOWER – Flight
SUPERWEAKNESS – Sleep deprivation
CHILDHOOD DISASTER – ‘I was caught with my trousers around my ankles in primary school, when the fire alarm went off. I had to go on yard in my pants and all had a good laugh at my expense’
CHILDHOOD VICTORY – ‘Winning the Albert Owen shield with Pentraeth FC’
BAD BEHAVIOUR – ‘I never got caught!’
REBEL ICON – Diego Maradona
TEENAGE GROOMING TIP – Eyeliner
GEEK DISCLOSURE – Lego
FIRST ATTEMPTED SONG – ‘I remember recording myself doing raspberries into the tape machine when I was about six years old’
BEACH BOYS VALHALLA – ‘Forever’
Cian was too young to go raving,