Photo: WENN
“We’re here to cheer you up”, Gruff Rhys tells a sold-out Brixton academy, alluding to a certain electoral result that you can’t imagine the Super Furry Animals condone, on the first of two consecutive nights the band are playing the seminal venue.
Taking to the stage clad in customary white boiler suits, one could be mistaken for thinking that rather than playing a gig, SFA had come to take a look at the academy’s plumbing. Alas this was not the case and the band launched into an impressive early set salvo of ‘Do or Die’, ‘Ice Hockey Hair’ followed by ‘If You Don’t Want Me to Destroy You’.
A personal set highlight was the imperious ‘Run Christian Run’ from 2001’s mighty tour de force, Rings Around the World. With its allusions to Christian death cults and religious fundamentalism, the track sounds as devastating (and relevant) now as it did in the pre 9/11 world that conceived it.
And ‘Hello Sunshine’ is still the best Surf’s Up era Beach Boys song Brian Wilson never wrote, complete live, as in the studio, with angelic vocal harmonies and sardonic, tongue-in-cheek lyrics. Against a backdrop of a rising sun, it, momentarily at least, restores the audience’s faith that everything just might be all right after all.
Honourable mentions should also go to ‘The International Language of Screaming’, ‘Golden Retriever’ and riotous set closer ‘The Man Don’t Give a Fuck’, extended for over ten minutes as the band left the stage before returning in fancy dress as the literal incarnation of their name.
This gig was a euphoric, joyous occasion on so many levels, not least because, having taken an informal hiatus, it just reminds you not only how many great records SFA have in their arsenal, but also how - with their idiosyncratic eccentricity in today’s binary, monochrome world - we need SFA now more than ever before.
