Super Furry Animals keyboardist Cian Ciaran returned from one of many trips to the toilet at the 2000 NME Awards in London, in a band-professed "off his head" state, with an unusual new mate in tow. Seems that during a bit of a literal piss-off, he began chatting up one Sir Paul McCartney.

"Cian came back and was like: 'Lads, lads, look what I found!'" remembers SFA guitarist Huw "Bunf" Bunford. "Cian introduced us to Sir Paul and by the end of the night he'd agreed to send us some outtakes from Revolver for us to remix." The resulting tracks wound up on McCartney's Grammy-nominated Liverpool Sound Collage, and, to return the favor, Sir Paul munched a bunch of carrots on "Receptacle for the Respectable" from SFA's latest release, Rings Around the World, in homage to his similar performance on the 1967 Beach Boys track "Vegetables." The album, released this week on Beggars/XL Recordings, hit the U.K. during 2001 and topped the influential Mojo Magazine critics poll for the year.

McCartney's guest role, as with John Cale's piano accompaniment on the Clinton-Lewinsky love ballad "Presidential Suite," is in typical Super Furry form. The Welsh rockers have never made a solely commercial choice in relation to their career. Rather, they much prefer to make decisions that crack themselves up, which often turn out to be sound choices as well. "We end up doing things while making a record or on tour, and then we'll watch Spinal Tap on the tour bus, and go, 'Oh my fucking god, I can't believe we just did that,'" laughs Bunford over beers at a London pub. "You haven't seen Spinal Tap for years, and then there's Gruff's violin on a stand like in the film."

"Gruff" is Gruff Rhys, the silken-voiced frontman for a band who has never been afraid to make a political statement in the name of good music. But unlike a Rage Against the Machine, for instance, a Super Furry Animals statement can easily be obscured under a wall of psychedelic pop that at once evokes aural images of the Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, Neil Sedaka, Radiohead and Brian Eno. Their world of pop is complicated and technical, but warm and -- dare say -- fuzzy at the same time.

"We're still looking for the definitive 'Furries sound,' whatever that is," says drummer Dafydd Ieuan, who with Bunford is drinking the hair of the dog after a particularly liquored performance on British TV's Top of the Pops show the night before. "It's something you want to look for, but hope that you never find. Once you do a record you're completely happy with, then you'll either be repeating yourself or putting out something that's not as good [in the future]."

The Super Furries began life in 1993 as a techno group, looking for ways to fuse electronic noodling with a punk sensibility. But over the course of numerous Welsh-language EPs followed by a series of highly successful U.K. releases for Creation Records, the band's sound has morphed into art rock, but without the pretensions. They also lay claim to the best-selling Welsh-language album ever, 2000's MWNG, which moved more than 45,000 copies in the decidedly English-speaking Britain.

Rings Around the World is a subtle, sonic beauty that resonates on many levels. Not surprisingly, the band took incredible care in its recording. SFA have often taken a quadraphonic sound system on the road to immerse their audiences in the music. But this time out, the disc was recorded in Dolby 5.1 surround sound and released (to take advantage of the enhanced mix) as a DVD with a different, commissioned art student short film for each track. "The next album, of course, will be completely different," says Bunford. "Maybe we'll turn around completely and go in the direction of Phil Spector -- a completely mono album. In mono you can get another six decibels out of the recording. It's all very Spinal Tap, I suppose."

And while the band has always enjoyed critical and touring success in the U.S., it has never garnered mainstream attention, even with songs that would fit nicely onto MTV or rock radio. Rings Around the World might be the album, and 2002 might just be their year, but if not, SFA don't seem to care. "Success for us is making records," says Ieuan. "Sure, it would be nice to sell a couple of million of 'em, but we'd rather be allowed to make records that we like, that we feel good about. We're still good musicians. We pay our bills, see the world and make records. That's more than ninety-nine percent of the bands out there."

And the success abroad they've enjoyed until now has afforded Super Furry Animals some interesting opportunities. A couple of years ago the local Cardiff football team was sponsored by the Furries, which saw its logo emblazoned on the team's uniforms. One past tour featured forty-foot-tall inflatable bears. And in 1996 they trekked around to European rock festivals in a tank painted with the band's blue and yellow color palette. "If you've got a marketing budget of ten grand, you can either buy a few adverts in magazines like NME and Q, or you can buy a tank and tour it around Europe," says Bunford. "People remember the tank, they still talk about it -- they don't remember your adverts."

ANDREW STRICKMAN
(March 20, 2002)