More about: The Super Furry Animals

“When we signed a record deal it was like winning the pools,” Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys tells me in a small room deep in the intricate halls of Maida Vale studios.

As he says this, all I can think of is my teenage self imagining sitting in a room with Super Furry Animals. They were everything to me when I was growing up and now I’m here. And, while it certainly wouldn’t have awarded the life-changing financial gain of winning the pools, or signing a record contract in fact, as a 14-year-old I definitely would have felt like I must have won some sort of prize to be here.

I’m certainly not alone in my extreme fandom. The Super Furry Animals are one of those bands that attract a certain kind of devotion. But speaking to them, you get the feeling the band themselves weren’t aware of the scale of their fans’ frenzied loyalty until they reformed last year, having originally taken a ‘hiatus’ in 2010.

“We’ve been pretty overwhelmed by the reaction since we’ve come back; it’s more than we could ever have expected,” says Rhys in his choppy but considered English. “Originally all we had organised was a pretty short tour. But then we got offered a few things further afield and we started to see the kind of reaction we were getting from people, so that drove us on to keep going for a bit longer.

“And then crazy things started happening like Wales qualifying for Europe. We thought ‘we have to do something to celebrate that’. We used to cancel gigs to go and watch Wales matches, so when we had a chance to go to France as a group and hang out and watch the football, we knew we had to do it. So after 2015 we decided to go in for another year and see what happens.”

There is currently no plan to unveil new music but the band are re-releasing debut album Fuzzy Logic, with new digital mixes and extra tracks, and career retrospective Zoom in November. They’re also heading out for a series of gigs where they’ll play Fuzzy Logic and follow-up Radiator back-to-back.

The band did reveal one new song over the summer, Welsh language single ‘Bing Bong’ in support of The Welsh football team. And they did end up going out to France, and put on a series of gigs in cities where the national team was playing.

But for all the national pride and euphoria at Wales playing in their first major tournament since 1958, there was a shock in June when the EU referendum, coming near the end of the group stages, had a profound effect of the mood across all of Europe.

In a shock to many in Wales, including the band, the country joined England in narrowly voting to leave. And as drummer Dafydd Ieuan explains, the shadow of Brexit and the dark forces it unleashed threatened to spoil the party in France.

“When you think about it we were in Toulouse, playing a gig and going to see the match with all these Welsh people, and they're all being very Welsh. But you know a massive percentage of them voted to leave. I was totally confused, it almost killed the championship for me.”

Even three months later it’s obvious the band still hasn’t got its collective mind around the result and what it means. During the conversation Rhys protests that the demographic of people coming to the gigs in France was made up of more remain voters than the national average. “You don’t know that,” Ieuan fires back.

“Yeah, it’s confusing,” concedes Rhys, before admitting: “After the Brexit vote happened, and I’d seen how people in Wales voted, I did almost think ‘we don’t deserve this team’.”

Rhys had a particular emotional investment in the referendum that might explain this quite extreme reaction. In June, he released ‘I love EU’ to encourage people to go out and vote to remain. But despite dipping his toes in the waters, he doesn’t seem himself or the band as ever hurtling toward a life as political firebrands.

“I just came up with the song and then decided to release it, which I think is the right way round. Ultimately as a campaign song it was a failure,” he jokes in a characteristically self-deprecating way.

“But it was just something I did you know. If I was taxi driver maybe I would have driven people to protests, but I’m a musician and tried to help in any way I could. But we’re not a political movement with a band manifesto. At the end of the day we’re just five people in a band. We don’t all think the same, politically or musically. And those positive differences I think make us the band we are.”

But the band that the Super Furry Animals have become might not have happened at all. They were spotted, by chance, by Alan McGee in a pub in Camden when playing their first ever show outside of Wales. And when Gruff Rhys says it was like winning the pools he absolutely means it.

“It really was, it was like being part of a winning syndicate. And we could easily not have been signed at all,” he continues. McGee’s interest saw them ushered into the world of Creation Records, and shortly after their arrival on the label they had a bit of luck that helped them immensely.

Bassist Guto Pryce explains: “So we got signed and then Oasis happened and everything changed. The pressure was off from that point because you didn’t have to make money for the label to survive.”

The band all speak very fondly of McGee and the whole Creation set-up in the early days of their career. When asked to name one thing that made him a success, passion is the word they all come up with, almost in unison. And that passion ran through the whole label, according to Rhys.

“This was pre-internet age so were were nurtured really in a way that bands now can’t be,” he recalls. “So the A&R man Mark Bowen would come in when we were recording, and he wouldn’t interfere as such but he’d just bring us a bunch of great records by these obscure American artists for inspiration. So little things like that really helped to educate us. We made a lot of long-lasting connections from that time.”

The Oasis effect also meant money for the band’s projects, and whims (they were famous in the 1990s for turning up to festivals in a branded tank), were usually well-funded. Although the availability of cash was at least partly dependent on the nature of the purchase.

“If you wanted an orchestra for a song or a gig Alan would just write you a cheque and off you’d go,” Rhys says. “But then if you asked for clothes for a photo shoot or something like that you’d get told to fuck off.” But did Creation pay for the tank? “Oh yeah, tanks – perfectly acceptable,” he confirms.

And with that our time’s up. My meeting with my heroes is at an end. The Super Furry Animals will always be something very special to me and thousands of others. They are a band who seem to defy time and genre – whose existence depends on little else other than their will to exist. And for now we must be grateful that once again they have chosen to come together to entertain us. Personally, I hope this time it lasts forever.

Fuzzy Logic and ZOOM! (a best of 1995 - 2 albums are available to pre-order now via Pledge Music

Limited signed copies, collectors’ cards and test pressings available

More about: The Super Furry Animals