SFA@30: The thirty greatest Super Furry Animals songs as voted for by fans

Leon Barton

It’s now thirty years since Wales’ greatest, most unique band released the ‘Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllantysiliogogogochynygofod (In Space)’ EP on the Ankst label.

SFA quickly came to the attention of Creation boss Alan McGee after he saw them play live in London, although there was another Ankst release in the autumn of ’95 – the Moog Droog EP – before the band changed labels.

Although their most recent album came out in 2009, the band reunited for gigs in 2015 and 2016, and, considering the devotion of their fans, there will be thousands hoping that’s not the last we ever hear from them.

As comedian, broadcaster and Super Furry fan(imal) Elis James says ‘they had a very profound effect on people. They were a commercial success and it was amazing to see one of ‘our’ bands on Top of the Pops and on Radio 1…but they were also critically acclaimed and creatively perverse enough to always feel really subversive. And they were the right mix of everything. I always felt you could chat to them as much about politics as the Welsh football team, they were political without being pious, they just had such great taste’.

In order to put this together I asked a bunch of friends, friends of friends and acquaintances to give me their top five SFA tracks in order, and I awarded every top choice 5 points, second place 4 points and so on. I got 34 lists in the end (I was aiming for thirty to celebrate the band’s top 30 songs for their 30th anniversary but a few lists came in late and I didn’t want to not include anyone who made the effort to compile a top five and send it to me)

Diolch, all.

It thought I was doing something nice here but quite a few people seemed to get angry with me for asking them to perform such a taxing task. Sorry! (not sorry)

(SFA)OK, let’s go:

30. Torra Fy Ngwallt Yn Hir (from Radiator, 1997)

The only Welsh language track on any of the band’s first three studio albums is a short, sweet and playful sub-two minute blast. Translating roughly as ‘cut my hair long’, ‘Torra…’ sneaks in around halfway through the Radiator album, fitting in perfectly amongst the English language tracks around it. It’s lack of statement could almost be seen as a statement (lower case s) in itself (in a ‘we’re bilingual and it’s really no big deal’ sorta way).

29. Frisbee (from Fuzzy Logic, 1996)

‘Locked in a sorry dream, you know we’re drowning in designer ice cream’ is surely an opening line that only SFA could have come up with. Whilst Creation labelmate Noel Gallagher would specialise in nonsense lyrics with seemingly no point, there always appeared to be some meaning behind every Super Furries song. And very often a stealthily dark or subversive edge too; ‘I had my frisbee sharpened and honed, I had it galvanised and chromed, decapitate and bury your toys’ goes the second verse. Perhaps a childhood nightmare that frontman Gruff Rhys never forgot?

28. The International Language of Screaming (from Radiator, 1997)

A gloriously mad rush that attempts to distill the Super Furries restless creativity. It’s also something of a riposte to those in Wales who critisized the band for singing in English; ‘Ultimately rock and roll is a primal medium, where it’s all about emotion…what people connect to is a deep human emotion.. like a scream’, Rhys said of this track.

27. Some Things Come From Nothing (from Guerilla, 1999)

Some things come from nothing is as charming as it is minimal; ‘Some things come from nothing, nothing seems to come from something’ are the only two lines, whilst keyboardist/programmer Cian Ciaran noodles away in the background. Let’s face it, a song with a title like that doesn’t need much more.

26. Cardiff in the Sun (from Dark Days/Light Years, 2009)

The only choice to make this top 30 from the most recent (possibly final?) SFA album, 2009’s Dark Days/Light Years, Cardiff in the Sun is SFA go ambient; a gorgeous, sun-drenched Eno-esque soundscape.

25. Dacw Hi (from Mwng, 2000)

‘It’s about a teacher I used to have at school when I was five years old who claimed she had eyes in the back of her head and I took it literally, so it’s a song about her. I brought an egg to school, I nicked an egg, and I was going to break it on her desk when she wasn’t facing me. And she caught me’ Rhys told the BBC at time of Mwng’s release. Written in the Eighties at the height of his teenage Velvet Underground obsession, perhaps the title (which translates as ‘There she is’) is Rhys’ nod to VU tracks ‘There she goes again’ and ‘Here she comes now’.

24. Zoom! (from Love Kraft, 2005)

The opener from 2005’s Love Kraft pulls you in with it’s slinky rhythms, to reveal one of Rhys’ best ‘dreamscape’ lyrics.
‘Saw Lord Lucan riding Shergar to the shops last night. Couldn’t be positive in candle light. Chased them in a Mustang to the Kwik Save till. Searched for words to fit the bill. Dug myself a hole then I fell into a vacuum…’ A song you can get lost in.

23. Bing Bong (Single, 2016)

The band’s most recent release is a football ‘anthem’ SFA-style. Actually written in the build up to Euro 2004 when it looked like Cymru would qualify for that one, it was revived twelve years later for the glorious summer of 2016 in France. SFA were there of course, playing one of their most memorable gigs in Toulouse, just ahead of the 3-0 demolition of Russia a few days later.

22. Presidential Suite (from Rings Around the World, 2001)

‘I suppose it’s about what kind of super ego makes someone want to be president. I think it’s the most complete song I’ve ever written in a conventional way, in terms of chord structures and lyrics and narrative’ Rhys said of this epic string-laden ballad that’s as grandiose as it’s subject matter.

21. Pan Ddaw’r Wawr (from Mwng, 2000)

In contrast to Presidential Suite, Pan Ddaw’r Wawr goes the other way, stripping down to live band feel. It’s both stark and beautiful, like talking a walk around Eryri in the depths of December. Appropriate considering Bethesda-raised Rhys says ‘it’s about the death of rural communities… I suppose it’s from experience, areas where I grew up’.

20. She’s Got Spies (from Radiator, 1997)

‘She’s got eyes and they’re lodged in the back of her head. And she can see 360 degrees without turning round’ Dacw Hi wasn’t the only time Rhys explored this theme! There’s a fantastic contrast here between the gentle verses and ‘Beach Boys go punk’ chorus.

19. Arnofio/Glo in the Dark (B side to the ‘Something 4 the Weekend’ single, 1996)

Described by producer Gorwel Owen as the key B side that formed a bridge between debut album Fuzzy Logic and SFA’s masterpiece, the follow up ‘Radiator’, Arnofio/Glo in the Dark also features on the 1998 B sides and early singles collection ‘Out Spaced’. Cian Ciaran’s keys make for a dreamy start before the punk pop thrashing gatecrashes nearly two and a half minutes in. This is the sound of a band expanding their sound to go anywhere and everywhere they want.

18. Y Teimlad (from Mwng, 2000)

Following a withdrawn break up and the death of his father, Rhys spent some time back home in Bethesda, pulling out records from his teenage bedroom, amongst them, this beauty from Datblygu. ‘They were a big influence on us, especially their lyrical outlook. It’s a song about love, or it’s a song about not knowing what love is or what love means. The original is a really raw, kinda electro, dissonant song, but it could it could be made in a Sinatra style. Musically it’s a live song, probably the most straight thing we’ve ever recorded.’ As great as the original is, perhaps the live band feel of the SFA version makes it more timeless.

17. Play it Cool (from Radiator, 1997)

SFA are not a band who are well-known for their sex songs (to say the least!) but whilst it’s clear that they always went wherever they wanted musically, Play it Cool is the proof that the same applies lyrically too. ‘The electric mistress always sounds so bold, she says I’m free to do anything I’m told. I try the latest newsflash, it’s sensational.. I feel so seduced, tell me to reproduce’ Oo-er missus, etc. And it’s got handclaps! Which is always great.

16. Golden Retriever (from Phantom Power, 2003)

SFA go 70’s glam rock! T-Rex would have been proud of this one. Rocks harder than most of the bands featuring in Kerrang! magazine at the time. Dedicated to midfielder Robbie Savage when the band played it ahead of the Wales vs Azerbaijan football match at the Millenium Stadium in 2003.

15. If You Don’t Want Me To Destroy You (from Fuzzy Logic, 1996)

The fourth single to be released from the band’s debut album, ‘If you don’t want me..’ was so delicate, so beautiful, it became clear that they were nothing whatsoever like the ‘Britpop’ band they were marketing and promoted as up until that point. Or, as Welsh music journalist Simon Price (and contributor to this piece) put it in his sleevenotes for the Zoom! compilation album;
‘At first I didn’t get it. The image of SFA as presented via the English media was a turn off…the way in which the press played up SFA’s drugginess misrepresented them as a laddish herd of gonzo hedonists. But SFA’s repuation as wacky funsters almost did them a disservice, taking attention away from the transcendent gorgeousness of their music’.

14. Hermann Loves Pauline (from Radiator, 1997)

Although debut album Fuzzy Logic was a critical and commercial success (going Gold in the UK) and remains much loved to this day, for the band themselves, there was a rueful sense that they’d played it too safe. This, the lead single for second album Radiator would make it clear that the metaphorical handbrake was well and truly off. ‘Marie Curie was Polish-born but French bred. Ha! French bread! Of course, she ended up dead from radiation…’ I still remember, the sheer WTF-ness of seeing them perform this on Chris Evans’ teatime TV show TFI Friday upon it’s 1997 release. This is also the point where, musically, wunderkind Cian Ciaran comes to the fore, it’s his keys on the final chorus that take an already brilliant track to stratospheric heights. A truly staggering pop song.

13. Hometown Unicorn (from Fuzzy Logic, 1996)

The band’s first single peaked at number 47, despite its video featuring movie star friend (and former SFA singer Rhys Ifans) Perhaps it’s subject matter – the French UFO abductee Frankie Fountaine, who went missing for several weeks in 1979 before turning up in a cabbage patch – was a little too esoteric for the top 40 (even if X Files was one of the biggest TV shows around at the time!) An early example of SFA’s gift for classic rock medolicism.

12. (Drawing) Rings Around the World (from Rings Around the World, 2001)

Inspired, said Rhys, by ‘a night phoning around the world. We’d get the national code and then try random numbers. We thought we’d make this amazing collage but it’s just a collection of these irate people being woken up at four o’clock in the morning. The American Embassy in Madagascar, a record shop in Osaka, a record company in Australia…’

Musically, this is for those who believe Wings are the band the Beatles could have been and Jeff Lynne is a musical genius on a par with his fellow Traveling Wilbury Bob Dylan.

‘At the time we were really fancying ourselves as a vocal band, so there’s me and Bunf and Cian and Daf harmonising away on top of a rock’n’roll pop song….there’s radio waves everywhere, and if you visualised all these waves then the earth would be surrounded by this network of rings and pollution and junk’.

11. God! Show Me Magic (from Fuzzy Logic, 1996)

Fuzzy Logic’s opening track is like a hyper-charged early Beach Boys hit updated for the ecstacy generation.

Second verse ‘and wouldn’t it be nice to know, what the paper doesn’t show, or what the TV doesn’t say, or what the hamsters ate today’ is maybe the perfect distillation of SFA’s brand of left wing lyricism and surrealism.

10. Hello Sunshine (from Phantom Power, 2003)

Gruff Rhys: ‘The voices at the beginning are a sample of Wendy and Bonnie. There’s a sense of loss in the sample: a sense of longing. I suppose it’s a courting ballad with a ‘been so down looks like up to me’ mentality. It’s easy to wallow in misery, it’s the most comfortable place to be. But it’s always worth trying to get out of it.’

This is a track which might have broken SFA in America if they’d decided to go down that route…
‘We kind of spurned the financial opportunities that came our way in America. Sprite and Coke wanted to buy it for million dollar-plus campaigns…it got too heavy for us’. Instead, in in true SFA fashion, ‘we gave it to War on Want for free for a You Tube campaign video, detailing human rights abuses by a Cola franchise in Colombia’.

9. Northern Lites (from Guerilla, 1999)

Like one of the band’s musical heroes Jeff Lynne, SFA were often inspired by the weather, including on this one, their highest charting hit at number 11 (they hold the record for the most top 40 hits without ever reaching the top 10)

The fact that steel drums feature so prominently was a happy accident as they just happened by be lying around in the studio at the time. By this point the band were so gloriously unpredictable, a bit like when The Cure would release singles like The Lovecats or The Caterpillar in the Eighties, seemingly from out of nowhere.

Northern Lites is a calypso-tinged classic, which, in the words of the band’s biographer Ric Rawlins ‘imagines the weather system El Nino as a demanding lover – a perfect metaphor for such an explosive and unpredictable phenomenon’.

8. Fire in my Heart (from Guerilla, 1999)

It’s testament to what the Super Furries mean to people who grew up in and around Wales in the Nineties that I’ve attended more than one wedding where this song soundtracked the first dance. It’s maybe their most charming and straightfoward love song, although the ‘you’ve got needles and pins, and the seven deadly sins’ line gives it a deceptively dark edge.

7. Demons (from Radiator, 1997)

‘Demons is about relationships falling apart, and trying to keep a lid on demonic forces that are going to destroy you and trying to cope with them’ Rhys told the BBC. ‘It’s also about living outside structures, like the idea of fuzzy logic – there’s no black and white, it’s just fuzz. It’s about the grey area’.

Musically it pulls off the impressive trick of being both warm and melancholic at the same time. When the brass comes in during the musical breakdown ahead of the final chorus, it’s one of those great SFA moments. Cian’s gorgeous Fender Rhodes playing also deserves a mention.

6. Run! Christian, Run! (from Rings Around the World, 2001)

Lyrically inspired by guitarist Huw Bunford being ‘heavily into doomsday cult websites’ says Rhys. ‘He printed out quite a lot of essays by these nutters, and I wrote the lyrics from there. And also when we were on tour in America we watched a lot of Christian television shows, the sort where preachers say ‘It’s not your money, it’s God’s money, so send in your cheques!’ The heavy lyrics are counterbalanced by the utterly sublime music; ‘Cian had demo’d a repetitive theme with this loop that became the intro and outro, and I added a country rock verse, by which time Bunf had learnt the pedal steel. Bunf found the title and I started singing it on top of Cian’s demo’.

This one seemed to particularly strike a chord amongst fellow musicians who sent in top fives, such as Gareth ‘The Gentle Good’ Bonello; ‘It’s consistently amongst my favourite tunes! I even did a cover of it for the Corona Logic charity album during lockdown’.

5. Something 4 the Weekend (from Fuzzy Logic, 1996)

In Oasis, Creation records boss Alan McGee already had his Oasis. Next he wanted his Blur, and in SFA’s ‘racous, quirky pop’ he believed he’d found them. It was only later that McGee was to realise he’d ‘actually signed a band of mad Welsh anarchists’.

With this, the band’s first top 20 hit, you can certainly hear what McGee was getting at with the Blur comparison, although I can also detect a hefty dose of ELO’s ‘Mr Blue Sky’ in there too.

Having only recently started to sing in English, Rhys was still finding his ‘English’ singing voice, and due to the amount of ELO and The Move he was listening to, the vocals took on a Brummie tinge.

‘Britpop was quite a risible scene’ Guto Pryce was later to reflect, and in retrospect SFA, as a band more in thrall to The Beach Boys than the Beatles, The Move to The Kinks, Datblygu to The Jam, did not fit in with the scene they were so often lumped into at all. Nevertheless, with it’s bouncy, playful rhythm, classic-rock chorus melody and lyrics about going out and taking loads of drugs, Something 4 the Weekend was clearly SFA’s most ‘Britpop’ moment.

And even as someone who didn’t particularly ‘get’ Britpop, I have to admit this still sounds great!

4. Mountain People (from Radiator, 1997)

In 1996, Manic Street Preacher James Dean Bradfield told Kerrang! magazine that ‘sometimes the Welsh haven’t got it in them to spell out that we are a different country’.

As bassist Guto Pryce makes clear ‘we didn’t like the idea of flag waving and we never waved a Welsh flag’, so any reference the band made to their homeland in song was always likely to be understated. Nevertheless, the line ‘they own the milk and runny honey, and they’re not quite the same’ in the chorus of Mountain People is surely an unmistakeably SFA-take on the issue that Bradfield was talking about a year previously.

Pryce described the process of making Radiator on Ynys Mon as ‘creating our world instead of having the world thrust upon us’ and with Mountain People, Rhys was inspired by Harold Pinter’s play ‘Mountain Language’.

The lyrics only tell half the story though. Starting off like an Americana Meic Stevens, it somehow descends into an atonal techno stomp worthy of Underworld.

‘There was an opportunity to develop Mountain People at the end because it was so monotonous, in a good way. Most techno or house tracks are repetitive. Some people find it annoying but the point is it takes you into a trance’ says Cian Ciaran.

An utterly unique slice of musical alchemy that stands as one of the bands most towering achievements.

3. Ice Hockey Hair (from the ‘Ice Hockey Hair’ EP, 1998)

Although Gruff Rhys would later opine that ‘we were too idiosyncratic for mass appeal’, when the Ice Hockey Hair EP hit number 12 in the UK charts in late spring of 1998, becoming the band’s biggest hit to that point, major mainstream success didn’t seem so far out of reach. What felt truly thrilling was that the band had reached the edge of the top 10 with a song that seemed to throw all their biggest influences – no matter how disperate – into the mix. This is perhaps the track that best fits Alan McGee’s decription of the band as ‘The Beach Boys meets Gong meets Isaac Hayes on a fucking acid trip’ (although, as so often, traces of Kraftwerk, Datblygu, the Velvet Underground and ELO can also be heard here)

Named after the Swedish slang for the mullet (short on top, long at the back) haircut, Ice Hockey Hair had been around for a while before seeing the light of day. ‘We probably could have recorded an album in the time in took to make it’ says Guto Pryce. It was worth persevering with; a song which shouldn’t work, and yet, clearly does. Sublime. SFA’s ‘Good Vibrations’.

2. Slow Life (from Phantom Power, 2003)

Described by music journalist Keith Cameron as ‘peak techno-Americana from the originators of the form’ SFA’s most beloved album track is a genuine epic. According to Rhys ‘it was either going to start (Phantom Power) or finish it because it dwarfs all the other songs’ (they chose it as the closer). Starting off like Jean Michel Jarre or Orbital before heading into Grandaddy/Lambchop territory, it’s probably only the Super Furries who could have fused such diffuse musical styles to such stunning effect. Lyrically it’s ‘regurgitating what we hear on the news, recycled, vomiting them all back. I like the idea that even the mountains have memories and that people don’t forget things easily’. Fitting themes for such an unforgettable track.

1. The Man Don’t Give a Fuck (Single, 1996)

With 55 points, a whopping 16 ahead of second place, it became clear around ten lists in that TMDGAF would come out on top.

Fittingly, for a band as brilliant, bonkers and irreverent as SFA, the top choice of fans is their most brilliantly bonkers and irreverent track.

TMDGAF is also one of the band’s oldest songs, built around a sample from Steely Dan’s ‘Show Biz Kids’ which was brought in by drummer Dafydd Ieuan. Ric Rawlins’ Rise of the Super Furry Animals book describes the moment the band first worked on it. ‘As the loop kicked into life, the musicians couldn’t help but burst out laughing; it was at once ludicrously catchy and perfectly anti-establishment. They’d never heard anything like it, and yet it contained elements of everything they were into’.

A couple of years on, it was set to come out on the ‘If you don’t want me to destroy you’ single until the weekend that Alan McGee listened to it over thirty times in a row; ‘I didn’t play a huge part in their development. My only real interference with them was when Dick (Green)and Mark (Bowen – Cardiffian A&R man who brought SFA to Creation. Also a contributor to this piece) were going to put ‘The man don’t give a fuck’ out as a B side and I insisted they bring it out as an A side. They nearly missed that chance, and it became the band’s best known single. It could have been written for me you know, there was no way that wasn’t going to be a single on my label!’.

Both emboldened and flush from the huge success of Oasis, McGee’s attitude was ‘fuck Steely Dan, let’s give them the money!’ and he was happy to write the American hippie rockers a cheque to get the clearance.

Described by Rhys as ‘protest song for our time’ regarding ‘any organisation which you feel is terrorising you as an individual, anyone who’s cramping your style’ it’s release as a single at the end of 1996 was a masterstroke, even if it didn’t get played on the radio much.
It still made number 22 in the charts, and of course, it’s a very Super Furry thing that their most beloved track is, due to its lack of exposure, so little known by the general public.

The top 30 was compiled with the help of contributors: Gareth Taylor, Russell Todd, Elis James, Andrew Dempsey, Justin Barwick, Lindsey Allen, Andrew Pollard, Jonny Owen, David Cook, Ashley Drake, Haley Evans, Simon Price, Mark Ainsbury, Ian Hamer, Neil Collins, Gary Pritchard, Huw Davies, Lucy Mason, Gareth Ellis Thomas, Gareth Bonello, James Cuff, Russ Jones, Iwan Williams, Robyn McIntosh, Sarah Todd, Tim Hartley, Richard Hawkins, Mark Bowen, Tim Williams, Joseph Daniels, Peter Hart, James McCallum, David Owens, me.