SUPER FURRY SUNDAYS (aka The Singular Adventures of Super Furry Animals)

A guest series by The Robster

#4: God! Show Me Magic (1996, Creation Records, CRE231)

By the Spring of 1996, Super Furry Animals’ debut album was ready to go. A second preview of it came in the form of a track that had already been released, albeit in a different version, on the previous year’s Moog Droog EP.

mp3: God! Show Me Magic

This brand new recording wasn’t drastically different to the original in terms of its arrangement, but the bigger budget meant the production was much improved and gave the song a bit more of the welly it deserved. God! Show Me Magic has long been a fan favourite, but even at the time it was the single that thrust the band into the fore of the emerging Cool Cymru scene. Not that they cared about being part of any scene, SFA were too different to be part of anything but themselves. Even so, it made John Peel’s Festive 50 that year and became the band’s first top 40 hit.

It was released on 29th April 1996 on 7”, CD and cassette and invaded the charts at #33 before dropping out the following week. The b-sides had both been demoed and recorded for the album, but never made the final cut.

mp3: Death By Melody (CD only)
mp3: Dim Bendith

I’m not a big fan of Death By Melody. Even by the Furries standard, it was a little light and novelty-ish. Dim Bendith (trans. No Blessing) is the better of the two by far.

Three weeks after the single’s release, Super Furry Animals’ debut album ‘Fuzzy Logic’ was in the shops. It really was a refreshing change to hear something so new, yet so… old. The band chose to record it in their native land at the legendary Rockfield Studios near Monmouth. Their reasoning? “We heard they had jacuzzis and you got three meals a day, all the wrong reasons for going to a studio,” according to Gruff Rhys. Regardless, it was a triumph, with the media lauding it with gushing praise. It featured in all the relevant Best Of 1996 end-of-year lists, and even nowadays gets huge retrospective acclaim.

Being so out-of-step with the trends of the time, it’s somewhat surprising ‘Fuzzy Logic’ became such a success. But then, as I said earlier in the series, Super Furry Animals were proving to be the antidote to Britpop which was becoming stale and ugly. It was almost like the perfect protest record against that increasingly smug, self-congratulatory movement. While Blur sounded like The Kinks and Oasis wanted so desperately to be the Beatles, SFA bathed in Syd Barret and glam-era Bowie vibes, while occasionally hinting at a cheeky electronic undertone that would gradually come more to the fore and define their sound.

God! Show Me Magic was the hectic opener to the album. It wasn’t demoed for the record – I assume because they had already released a version at the time they were demoing these songs – but they did demo the track that followed it.

mp3: Fuzzy Birds [demo]

Fuzzy Birds is a song about a dream Gruff had about guitarist Bunf’s hamster Stavros. In the dream, Bunf wired Stavros’ wheel up to a dynamo to produce electricity for his house. The lyrics depict the conversation between owner and pet – the verses being Bunf, the chorus being Stavros’ reply.

Mad but brilliant! Or maybe it has a more serious message than you think:

[Gruff]: “Stavros came into Bunf’s life and it was a very beautiful moment for all of us, because we all loved Stavros: funky hamster! He had special tricks where he would slide up chairs. I had a dream that Bunf had wired up his wheel to make electricity for his house, so I wrote a song about it. But it dawned on me that it was also a song about the slave and the enslaver, and I think you can apply that to the worker and the employer, or the landlord and the tenant. It’s a pop song about a psychedelic dream I had, but basically Stavros was shouting for more worker’s rights.”

The first Super Furry Animals song about a super furry animal. There would be plenty more.

 

The Robster