Heavy Stereo, Hurricane #1, Arnold, Kevin Rowland in suspenders… it’s generally accepted that Creation Records did not invest their Oasis windfall wisely. Yet amid the frenzy of the mid-’90s guitar-band goldrush, they did make one very shrewd acquisition, swooping in to sign Super Furry Animals after only the band’s second show proper outside Wales – even if Alan McGee subsequently let slip that this may have been more a case of luck than judgement.
“Initially I just heard Super Furry Animals as being similar to Blur,” McGee told SFA biographer Ric Rawlins. “So I thought, ‘Well, fuck! Blur sell lots of records, I could have my version!’ Little did I know that I was signing The Beach Boys meets fucking Gong meets Isaac Hayes on a fucking acid trip.” Perhaps McGee was too busy test-driving Rolls Royces to give it his full attention, but the clues were certainly there. Although they were still in their infancy as a live band, by the time the Furries threw in their lot with Creation, they’d already recorded a wealth of brilliant, fizzing, haywire pop songs – including a couple of future Top 40 singles – all of which are collected on this comprehensive early years round-up.
Disc One comprises the two four-track EPs the band released in 1995 on venerable Welsh indie Ankst Records. Displaying a budding talent for myth and mischief that would soon find them befriending an international drug smuggler and rocking up to festivals in a tank, “Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyndrobwllantysiliogogogochynygofod (In Space)” was declared to have broken the world record for the longest EP title ever. Recorded cheaply but inventively at Gorwel Owen’s Stiwdio Ofn on Anglesey, it contains all the elements that would come to define SFA as a vital force in British music, dragging the centre of gravity away from London.
The harmonica-driven glam stomp of opening track “Organ Yn Dy Geg” may exist primarily as an excuse for a ribald joke (the title literally translates as “Organ In My Mouth”), but the band were quick to establish a unique MO that allowed such japery to co-exist alongside pointed political messaging and a deep sense of cosmic yearning. The layered “ba-ba-ba”s and sly key changes of “Fix Idris” – while also inescapably reminiscent of the theme tune to Jim’ll Fix It – reveal a band keenly studying Brian Wilson’s blueprint for transcendence, while “Blerwytirhwng?” is a gorgeous existential strum that ends with a cacophony of filter sweeps and general mayhem.
Follow-up EP “Moog Droog” contained Super Furry Animals’ first truly great song, the irresistible “God! Show Me Magic”. Later beefed up for debut album Fuzzy Logic, it’s two minutes of rollicking power-pop boogie that proved they could be gleefully sardonic in two languages. Again, its insouciance was offset by the shimmering, questing “Pam V?” and the unexpectedly moving “Sali Mali”, named after a popular Welsh children’s character, but whose English translation reveals it to be a love ballad of epic proportions (“When the sky comes down/I want to be with you”).
Disc Two delves even further back into the SFA timeline to unearth four tracks recorded with the band’s original frontman, actor Rhys Ifans. The best of these is a nifty little psychedelic shuffle called “Pocket Sam”, on which Ifans sounds not unlike Julian Cope circa Peggy Suicide. No doubt the future //Notting Hill// star would have made for an exemplary rockstar, but you can already hear his relatively conventional glam-punk growl beginning to chafe against the band’s whimsical harmonies. Ultimately it was to everyone’s benefit that he chose to pursue a different path to fame, allowing Gruff Rhys’s more idiosyncratic talents to blossom.
Amid some intriguing electronic doodles that nod to SFA’s origins on the illegal rave scene – “Trk05b” is suitably Aphex-ish – probably the most notable new find here is an embryonic 1993 version of “The Man Don’t Give A Fuck”. They are yet to build a full song around it, but the idea of looping that famously sweary snippet of Steely Dan’s “Show Biz Kids” into a euphoric anti-establishment mantra already sounds like a potent one.
Precreation Percolation is nicely timed to ramp up excitement for SFA’s upcoming reunion shows, and bassist Guto Pryce reveals that they’re currently blowing the cobwebs off some of these early numbers for potential inclusion in the setlist. For all the charm of Rhys’s various solo endeavours, or the more back-to-basics swagger of Das Koolies (aka the other four), Super Furry Animals are evidently stronger together. Let’s hope their latest reunion jaunt includes a detour to the studio.
EXTRAS 6/10: Digital editions of the album contain a whole additional stash of demos, mostly instrumental sketches of songs that would end up on Fuzzy Logic. These are largely for completists only, but there is a eureka moment when a series of meandering synth bloops suddenly coalesce into the poignant, unmistakable melody of “Some Things Come From Nothing” from 1999’s Guerilla, suggesting that the band were already thinking three albums ahead.