A guest series by The Robster
#27: The Gift That Keeps Giving (2007, Rough Trade)
Merry Christmas! Well, at least that’s what Super Furry Animals were saying when they released their first seasonal single on 25th December 2007.
mp3: The Gift That Keeps Giving
It was deliberately conceived as a Christmas single as part of the band’s mission to make a pop album, ‘Hey Venus!’. The title is taken from a studio session in 2004. Accordfing to Gruff:
“Geoff Travis asked us for one of our pop records, so we thought a pop record should have a Christmas single. We’d been playing around with this phrase because we had a Scottish engineer who helped us make the 22-minute version of The Man Don’t Give A Fuck” and he always used to say ‘it’s the gift that keeps giving!’ He was just referring to the length of the song… but we found out it’s also a popular American shopping phrase.”
Thankfully, it’s not a typical Christmas song. It’s actually quite good! Soulful and laid-back, it was favourably compared to Burt Bacharach, and you can hear that I think, especially with that trumpet solo. The critics loved it too, but given the nature of the release – a free download, no physical formats, had already been out on the album for 5 months – it got nowhere near the hit parade, becoming the first SFA single not to chart at all.
Obviously, there were no b-sides either, so what gifts can I give you this week? Well, as usual, I’ve dug a couple things up you might be interested in. The first is a live version of The Gift That Keeps Giving recorded for the Bristol-based student radio station Hub Radio. Like last week’s live offering, it features just Gruff and Guto in stripped-back acoustic mode, but it’s an unreleased curio you might like.
mp3: The Gift That Keeps Giving [live Hub Session]
A couple weeks ago, I offered up a live version of Show Your Hand from the 2007 Glastonbury Festival, so let’s return to that show, seeing as it’s from the right time period. Here’s a wonderful version of Northern Lights, played in the style of a band I’m guessing the vast majority of visitors to this blog love dearly…
mp3: Northern Lights [live at Glastonbury]
And finally… while the UK and Europe had been enjoying ‘Hey Venus!’ since August, those poor souls across the Atlantic had to wait until January 2008 to hear it. To promote its impending release, a radio promo was issued, another track from the album, one of its loudest, rowdiest numbers.
mp3: Neo Consumer
Just three more weeks left….
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 
I really like TGTKG. It always suggested to me what Gruff could have been if he was a songwriter for hire as he has a real knack of writing earworms. It wouldn’t have surprised me a few years back if Robbie Williams had a single out and it had been been written by Gruff…