LOUDER
APE SHIT
Gruff Rhys has his (hash)cake and eats it with placards reading such instructions throughout tonight's show - winking at the crowd and demonstrating how charmingly post-modern he is, while also eliciting from us the exact ape-shit responses that he's asking for. Not that we need much encouragement on a relatively dry Saturday night at the tremendous Bandstand when one of the great crowd-pleasing bands is in town. Rhys' harmonica at the start of "Slow Life" beckons bodies to the front of the stage and out of their seats, where they'll remain for the next giddy hour and a half.
The SFA '16
live show isn't wildly different from the last one I saw in 2007: we still get
Gruff's Power Ranger helmet and horned
keyboard/gadget unit (which looks increasingly beaten-up and sorry for itself); he still chomps and hands out celery during
"Receptacle for the Respectable"'s quiet section (a task performed on the studio version by none other than Paul McCartney, in a nod to his carrot-munching on "Vega-Tables"
by Rhys' beloved Beach Boys). But it doesn't have to be different - the Super
Furries have always recognised the importance of having skewed yet
primary-coloured pop songs to capture listeners' imaginations and act as
gateways to their eccentric, more experimental LPs, and, over nine albums,
these songs have been stockpiled to perfection in their live set. Songs that
act almost as terrace chants. Songs about
black-magic dogs ("Golden Retriever"), songs that imitate telephones ("Rings
Around the World"), songs with gibberish lines like "we ride
tornadoes, we eat tomatoes" ("Do or Die"), songs with brattish
"la la la la" refrains ("The International Language of Screaming"). Songs that could be dismissed as "lightweight" or
"novelty", if they weren't so characterful and infectious.
These instant hits of pop (many of them bonafide pop
hits) are countered in the set by longer, slow-growing numbers:
"Zoom!" ("I can't get enough of this, kiss me with
apocalips"), "Mountain People", a truly gorgeous "Run Christian Run". A vocoder interlude includes the swooning "Juxtapozed With U" and unofficial Euro 16 anthem "Bing Bong", the joyous
sound of Os Mutantes playing keepie-uppie with a robot head on Copacabana
Beach. One, admittedly lovely, track from their recently reissued
Welsh-language album Mwng is the only obvious trip-to-the-bar opportunity.
"The Man Don't Give A Fuck" is the swear-tastic, Steely Dan-sampling
closer - parents leaping to cover their young childrens' ears as the Furries
gleefully drop tens of life-affirming F-bombs. As Gruff holds the side
door open and his bandmates file out, my mate says "I don't see how
they're gonna be able to top that". When they return in their now-famous
yeti costumes (again - these have seen better days), you realise that they're
not even gonna try - they just start up the song again and do more of the same...only in yeti costumes. Gruff raises his final placard (RESIST
PHONEY ENCORES) and the crowd goes ape shit one last time.
THE
END
10/10
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