Pod Insights Bandsplain Perfect Song: ‘The Man Don’t Give a F*ck’ by Super Furry Animals with Chloë Walsh About this episode Giving new meaning to “this song f*cks,” Super Furry Animals’ 1996 single “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck” is a psychedelic protest anthem built on a looped Steely Dan sample, fifty f-bombs, and a whole lot of righteous chaos.
In this episode, Yasi is once again joined by Scotswoman and known Super Furry Animals mega fan, Chloë Walsh, to make the case for this song’s perfection (with a bunch of band lore and Welsh history shoehorned in, of course). From its origins as a B-side protest against the UK’s Criminal Justice Act to its transformation into a ravey, 23-minute-long fan favorite gig-closer — “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck” isn’t just a song, it’s a statement. A tanked-up, freaked-out, absolutely uncompromising statement. Let the sample loop. Let the synths soar. The man still don’t give a f*ck.
CREDITS:
Host: Yasi Salek
Guests: Chlöe Walsh
Producer: Liz Sánchez
Audio Editor: Adrian Bridges
Additional Production Supervision: Justin Sayles
Theme Song: Bethany Cosentino
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Transcript 16,955 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:25 Speaker 05 What's with this band, anyway? I don't get it. Can you please explain? Wait, like, fansplain? Never heard this band in my life. Oh, you haven't? I'd love that. Really? Why? Yeah, I love this song. Oh, I don't know that one. Fansplain, fansplain, fansplain. I really hate this band. Whatever. I'm their biggest fan. Fansplain, fansplain, fansplain. Fansplain. Fansplain.
2:04 Yasi Salek? Hello and welcome to Band Splain. I am your host, Yasi Salek. This is usually a show where I invite an expert guest to help me explain a cult band or iconic artist. Today's episode has a bit of a more narrow focus, and it is about one single perfect song. And that song is "The Man Don't Give a Fuck" by The Super Furry Animals.
2:35 Yasi Salek? You guys, this is gonna be such a great episode for the type of listener who enjoys hearing me mispronounce things. Like, if it's ASMR for you, like, I love when Yasi says things wrong, Hive. You're eating today, babe. Because they're Welsh. We'll get into it. My guest today is not Welsh, she's Scottish, returning to the pod, to much fanfare and adoration. Please welcome Chloe Walsh.
2:58 Speaker 05 Hi.
2:59 Yasi Salek? Today she's Chloe Walsh, though.
3:03 Speaker 05 I'm not Welsh. Before any Welsh people complain, I am not Welsh. I don't pretend to be Welsh.
3:09 Yasi Salek? Respectfully, thank God, because, like, indiscernible, sometimes, that accent. But I love it. It's gorgeous. I feel like I'm listening to Bjork describe her dreams, you know? I'm like, I don't know what you're saying.
3:23 Speaker 05 They're a bilingual bunch. They could, they make themselves understood.
3:29 Yasi Salek? Chloe, before we jump in, can you tell me, because this is your choice, just to be clear, of perfect song, because that's how this works, what makes this a perfect song to you?
3:39 Speaker 05 So really, I'm just trying to Trojan horse a Super Furry Animals Band Splain into perfect song, because you had no plans to do The Super Furry Animals in this season, and that, to me, is very wrong.
3:53 Yasi Salek? It's the way you say that makes me sound villainous, whereas I love The Super Furry Animals, is just a simply, there's a bandwidth issue.
4:02 Speaker 05 I do also know that, you know, the more albums someone has, the harder it is for you. And they have nine. So in the interest of brevity, we pick this one. And so of all their songs, I wouldn't say this is their best composition, being as how it's built around a loose sample. Yeah, but it is 100% their anthem. And it's the song, as far as I'm aware, they've closed almost every show with in the last half of their recording output and touring output. It's their anthem that they have released twice.
4:43 Speaker 05 Once as a single very early in their career, it was their fourth ever single. And then again, years and years later, as a sort of live recording, because it had become, it taken on such a life of its own. It then became an 18 to 23 minute opus. And they released that again. It's a song that kind of grew with them and they worked on in a live capacity for years.
5:09 Yasi Salek? Yeah, I feel like it's sounds like from what I read that it is, what I read in the Google Doc that you prepared, because you're the best guest that's ever existed, respectfully to every other guest, who I love you very much, but this, you really won above and beyond, that it's like a perfect prism through which to like, explain the band, which is what we're, what we're doing here. Cause they're, well, I was gonna say their most successful song was Something For The Weekend. But I'm gonna tell you a little surprise that I learned. The song that they put out, Juxtaposed With You, which is a 20, now a 24 year old song, but still it was their 13th ever single.
5:55 Yasi Salek? That, for whatever reason, has 11, almost 12 million streams on Spotify, which is nearly more than three times as many as Something For The Weekend. Inexplicable. What happened?
6:09 Speaker 05 Yeah, I, I was.
6:10 Yasi Salek? It's one of those things like, why?
6:12 Speaker 05 That surprises me. Maybe it's been used in a film or something. TikTok, I don't know. So they did actually, sorry Spotify. They did actually hold their music off of Spotify for a long time. So their Spotify numbers.
6:26 Yasi Salek? Or maybe off.
6:28 Speaker 05 Or maybe off. I think maybe The Beatles got onto Spotify before the Superfreak Animals did, but I think commercially, maybe their biggest song was Ice Hockey Hair.
6:40 Yasi Salek? Oh.
6:41 Speaker 05 But no, going, if we're going by Spotify, yes, I noticed that too, juxtaposed with you.
6:46 Yasi Salek? It must be like a harness your hopes pavement situation where it's like just randomly has an internet.
6:51 Speaker 05 Yeah.
6:51 Yasi Salek? You know, Half Life or whatever. I feel like I was most familiar with something for the weekend, but famously I also love ecstasy or in the past loved ecstasy. So that really resonates with my heart and soul. That's all.
7:03 Speaker 05 In the UK, I think they had pretty big hits. They have an interesting pulpitish fact about them, which is that they've had the most top 40 hits with, without ever reaching the top 10 ever in the UK. They had Hello Sunshine was a big one for them. It's Not the End of the World was a big one. They've had a bunch.
7:23 Yasi Salek? That's probably a great middle ground of success to occupy where you don't have to like become mentally ill from fame, but probably you're doing okay financially.
7:35 Speaker 05 We would hope, we would hope.
7:36 Yasi Salek? We would. Yeah. I don't know. Those Yeti costumes, they don't fucking buy themselves is what I'm saying. That's an expensive costume budget.
7:43 Speaker 05 Yeah. Yeah. They definitely had a sort of KLF type ability to be very over the top and probably could have made more money if they been so stunt-y in their projects and videos.
7:58 Yasi Salek? Well, they were in it for the love of the game.
8:00 Speaker 05 100%. There's a prankster element that they obviously all enjoyed.
8:05 Yasi Salek? So The Man Don't Give a Fuck, it came out December 2nd, 1996. Just to like place us in time, this is just two minutes before Britpop dies its official death. Things are changing quite rapidly, but they are coming still into the world that was.
8:26 Yasi Salek? Pretty well dominated by, at this point, Oasis on the same label as Oasis, because they also get signed to Creation. Also, just to place them in the world, here's two little quotes that I wanted to pull from. One from Melody Maker 1996. Before we identify the band members, this is Daf, we'll get into that. Daf said, "We are the descendants of people who went to castles with pointy hats." And then it appears like, um, can you just like collaborate on that? And he's like, "Jesters, they told stories, you know, or sang them. In Edinburgh, the people in Edinburgh drink so much that they wear skirts, la la la la la, and everyone will go, bloody hell. It's the same tradition, man. You can't incur the king's wrath anymore, but you can still get dropped by the record company,
9:11 Yasi Salek? which is the same thing. That's a vibe." And then there's also, this is not a quote from anyone in the band, this is a quote from, I believe, their Latvian bus driver on tour in 97. "I'm not driving these English scum anywhere," hence him not knowing the difference between Welsh and English. "They are totally insane, uncontrollable. They are fucking wild animals. Give me an armed guard. Yes. Give me two ex-Red Army boys and then I'll drive them. Ha ha. I'll drive them to hell. Ha ha ha ha. Yes, one more bit of crazy drug talk and brack, brack. Ha ha ha. Kill the vermin. Kill all of them." So that's the vibes of the Sinbri-Furry Animals around this time from just my reading.
9:55 Yasi Salek? But you were, you were experiencing it IRL. Does that, does this all add up to you? Court jesters who wanted to be murdered by their Latvian tour coach driver?
10:06 Speaker 05 So I would say they were very much, they were a hedonistic vibe. And they actually came together as friends from raving and going to illegal...
10:22 Speaker 05 House music rave techno parties.
10:24 Yasi Salek? Sure.
10:24 Speaker 05 And so they really knew how to enjoy themselves. Absolutely. That Latin bus driver did not know how to enjoy himself.
10:32 Yasi Salek? That guy was not down to clown. Although he also sounds absolutely fucking insane. So who can say?
10:38 Speaker 05 And they were sort of on a, you know, I didn't, I did meet them later on. By the time they made Rings Around the World, which is probably their most lauded album, number five, I got to know them very well, but until then I had never met them. So this early incarnation of them was probably, you know, closer to the rave years. And I imagine they were, couldn't believe it. They got signed to Creation Records, which was funded by Sony. And they were just off to the races. They were having adventures, which is sort of what they, they planned to do with their career in the first place was Sonic and physical adventures.
11:20 Yasi Salek? Physical and mental psychedelic. Okay. Before we get into the song, because like you said, we're Trojan horsing the story of the super furry animals into this one song. Griff?
11:33 Speaker 05 Griff Reese. Yep.
11:34 Yasi Salek? Reese.
11:35 Speaker 05 Reese. Yeah.
11:35 Yasi Salek? That is the lead vocals and guitar, the front man, if you will, born July 18th, 1970. He's a Cancer. In Haverford West, that one was kind of easy. Chloe left me this really helpful note that says in Welsh, the letter U is pronounced as an I, which I was like, so like, yes, that makes sense. But then I got to the next.
11:59 Speaker 05 It's not always true. I'm sorry.
12:01 Yasi Salek? This man's name is H U W. Chloe.
12:04 Speaker 05 I know. It was very misleading. His name is, shall I do these? I can do these.
12:08 Yasi Salek? Is it like Hugh?
12:10 Speaker 05 It's Hugh. It is Hugh. It's Hugh Bumford.
12:12 Yasi Salek? Hugh Bumford, also lead guitar and vocals. He was born in Cardiff. He's the one they call Bump.
12:20 Speaker 05 Bump, commonly known by everyone as Bump.
12:23 Yasi Salek? Gito Price on bass. Kian Kirin, keyboard, synths and various electronics, born in Bangor, Wales.
12:32 Yasi Salek? Dafid.
12:33 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
12:34 Yasi Salek? Like David, like David. Ewan?
12:37 Speaker 05 I actually can't help you here. I don't know if it's Owen or Ewan.
12:40 Yasi Salek? Ewan.
12:41 Speaker 05 Ewan, maybe?
12:42 Yasi Salek? Ewan, yeah, that sounds maybe close. Um, he is Kian's older brother, but why do they have a different last name?
12:48 Speaker 05 I can't explain it. I don't know.
12:50 Yasi Salek? Well, that guy's from now on is known as Daf.
12:53 Speaker 05 Griff also has a different last name from his father. Maybe it's.
12:56 Yasi Salek? I wrote a note about this. I said, why are their last names spelled? It's not even a different last name. It's literally the same last name, but spelled differently.
13:02 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think, well, Griff is spelling it the Welsh way and his dad spelled it the English way.
13:07 Yasi Salek? Got it. A lot of this episode with so much love and respect to the super furry animals who I do love is just gonna be me trying to figure out Welsh things. Okay, so Griff grew up in Bethesda, which is a quarry town. The area is 77% Welsh speaking, predominantly Welsh speaking in the mountains of North Wales. So this is quite close to Liver, to Northern England, to Liverpool and Manchester.
13:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's, it's easier to get to Liverpool and Manchester on the train than it would be to get to Cardiff, which is the capital of Wales, because that's in South Wales. And I don't think there's a train line.
13:47 Yasi Salek? Got it. So his dad was named Ewan?
13:50 Speaker 05 Ewan.
13:51 Yasi Salek? Ewan. We got it. It wasn't either of the things that I thought of. Eon?
13:56 Speaker 05 Bowen.
13:57 Yasi Salek? Beyond. No, Eon Bowen Reese. I mean, his dad sounds like Dosaki's man vibes, most interesting man in the world, a poet, an essayist, a polemicist, a mountaineer, an internationalist, and a white robe druid of the Gorsud of Bards. What in the fucking Lord of the Goddamn Rings is that, babe?
14:22 Speaker 05 Cool. Imagine being able to say that your dad was a druid of. Thing.
14:26 Yasi Salek? I mean, now being a white robe, anything has kind of a icky connotation here in America, but that's a little different, I guess, back in Wales. This was a society of Welsh language poets, writers and musicians. It's really like, you know, the people who are upholding the Welsh tradition in the arts.
14:46 Speaker 05 Cultural curators and saviors, I guess.
14:49 Yasi Salek? He was very smart, went to Oxford on a scholarship. He campaigned all his life for Welsh rights. I have here, and I keep saying my notes, but they're really your notes, that he did not believe in the narrow view of nationalism, glorifying one country over another, rather that the quote, "Battle for Wales is the battle for all small nations, all small communities, all individuals in the age of genocide." It was a fucking real one.
15:16 Speaker 05 He sounds really cool. He wrote books. I mean, Griff's mom sounds cool, too. She wrote poetry. Really interesting family, for sure.
15:27 Yasi Salek? He climbed every hill in Wales and wrote a poem about each one.
15:30 Speaker 05 Yeah, put out a book of collected poems and prose and paintings, I think, of Welsh mountains. And loved the outdoors, a man who loved nature.
15:42 Yasi Salek? I mean, Wales is, I've only been there one time and I was 18 years old, but I, the one thing I really remember about it is how gorgeous it was.
15:49 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's beautiful.
15:50 Yasi Salek? So beautiful, the scenery. Griff is the baby of the family. His brother and sister are much older, like 10 years or so. You have a note here, and I think I totally agree, that late in life, children are special. I think that's true. I also feel like maybe it's because they're sort of left to their own devices in a way that other children usually aren't. And that kind of gives them all this like breathing space to like become super individuals. It's just my, my working theory.
16:19 Speaker 05 I, I kind of, I kind of thought it was the opposite is because the parent, the parents are sort of wiser and cooler and. You know, less likely to know parents with similar aged children so they children spend more time with older people rather than being sort of put together with kids their own age. They end up listening and hearing more interesting stuff.
16:43 Yasi Salek? But also, especially even if the older people are just their own siblings because 10 years of an age gap isn't a lot much older person to sort of learn from.
16:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, the friends I have who have children with maybe like a seven year age gap, the youngest kids are the sort of smartest, most immediately articulate, interesting children because I think they've just they've listened and heard more. I don't know.
17:07 Yasi Salek? I agree with you on that also. I feel like we're almost saying the same thing, but it's just a slightly different.
17:12 Speaker 05 No shade to the older siblings.
17:15 Yasi Salek? Yeah, to first children like myself who are absolutely ruined by every part of existing. Yeah, that's fine. I know my cousin Lily, shout out Lily. She is a late in life child and she's my favorite cousin. I hope my other cousins aren't listening. Honestly, probably none of them are listening.
17:29 Speaker 05 They heard Super for Animals. They turned it off.
17:31 Yasi Salek? They were like, who? So Griff said his parents were into music, but they were, quote, suspicious of Anglo American rock and roll, which they saw as imperialist propaganda. I thought that was interesting. I feel like, isn't rock and roll sort of most traditionally a rebellion music?
17:50 Speaker 05 So I really actually understand this because my dad, although he's about 10 years younger than Griff's dad, similar. So my dad's Scottish and he really liked American music. He had American music, but there was a feeling that American culture on the whole was doing kind of two things. One, it was trampling all over any other kind of culture. It was just becoming way too prevalent and sort of squashing everything else. And two, was coming from a bad place. And I think this is like a 60s thing.
18:26 Yasi Salek? Yeah, he all he did point out Anglo American, which kind of implies like, okay, well, they've stolen from the African American rock tradition and thus like that in and of itself is kind of imperialist. Yeah.
18:38 Speaker 05 Yeah. Yeah. And the 60s, people became very suspicious of the government. There's that amazing podcast that. That came out about how the CIA were actually funding West German rock bands to write sort of anti Soviet songs. About Winds of Change podcast?
18:59 Yasi Salek? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
19:02 Speaker 05 So they weren't maybe wrong. I mean, my dad took it a bit too far. He would not let me watch Scooby Doo because all the, all the, when they finally pulled the mask off, the baddies at the end of Scooby Doo, they were always Eastern European, which my dad said was coded for, you know, socialists and communists. You know, I do, I kind of get this 60s, 70s thing of being very suspicious of this culture that was sort of rolling over everything else.
19:30 Yasi Salek? But they would, again, cool parent alert, they would allow reggae and African music into the house, but Griff said that his meatloaf seven inch went missing.
19:41 Yasi Salek? His dad was like, there will absolutely be no fucking meatloaf in this house. You'd better believe that. So you're grounded. He also said, my parents took me to gigs when I was very young. I remember them taking me to see the Welsh language folk band.
19:52 Speaker 05 We're not going to be able to do it.
19:56 Yasi Salek? In 1974. I was four. By the time I was six, I was fully committed to a life of music. That's so sweet. He said his older brother and sister were teenagers. So, yeah, because he was more in 1970. So in 76, 77, when punk was sort of sweeping culturally across the nations, he was too young, but his siblings were like prime teenage age to really like get hooked. His brother formed a band, a punk band, because that's what you did when punk happened. You went right out and formed a band and his was called P W C Poth. P W C is Pick Poth means hot puke. Love that. Actually, such a sick band
20:38 Yasi Salek? name. And he would, Griff would collect buckets to make a little drum kit because he wanted to play with them. So sweet. But then the real drummer in Pick Poth took his buckets away to use for his own drum kit. He was like, I'm gonna be confiscating those, babe. I need them for my set. Pick Poth got banned from playing in the school because they were spray painting naked mannequins the color of puke and singing presumably negative songs about the teachers.
21:08 Yasi Salek? They were into Slaughter and the Dogs, that's Manchester band, right? The Undertones and the Sex Pistols. Griff learned about the punk ethos and the activism part of that when he was older, because I guess when you're seven and you're just trying to play on some...
21:23 Speaker 05 Buckets.
21:24 Yasi Salek? Buckets. It's not, it's not politically motivated.
21:28 Speaker 05 I thought this was really funny. There was a band that really, I think this is the band maybe that inspired his brother to start Hot Puke, I'm gonna call them. There's a band called Old Dog Fernig, which means ferocious mice. They had a song called NCB, which John Peel used to play, apparently. And NCB stands for the National Coal Board. Wales being, you know, having loaded coal mines, not in North Wales, they had quarries, but in South Wales, a lot of coal mines. And so the song was about being at school and the teacher saying, what do you want to be when you leave school? And they didn't know, and being advised to go to the NCB.
22:09 Speaker 05 So it was kind of a no future type of, type of song that John Peel played. And so that was pretty big for Welsh language punk band to be on BBC Radio One. And maybe inspired his brother to have his own Welsh language punk band.
22:28 Yasi Salek? I haven't watched that John Peel, that like short one hour documentary in quite some time. Also, I didn't read the book. I really need to read the book. But like, what the fuck was John Peel on? Was there just like a person whose whole job was to sit and open every tape that was mailed to this, like, because how in the fuck are you finding NCB by the Welsh punk band? I'm not doing it, ferocious mice. You know, like, that's not, they weren't, you know, the buzz was not buzzing all the way from the Welsh language punk band down to John Peel's ears.
23:03 Speaker 05 I think he did it himself. I mean, I'm sure he had producers, but he was definitely sifting through. Now, I don't know, because I don't, was I born at this point? I was born at this point, but I wasn't listening to John Peel as a toddler. How often his show was on? I think when I was a teenager, it was maybe weekly. So he did have the rest of the week to listen to things and figure out what he was gonna play.
23:27 Yasi Salek? Sure, sure. Well, again, as, as always with every episode, hats off to John Peel. Griff also went to a rock workshop that was organized in a youth club when he was a kid. It was like a rock school. It cost three quid and he decided he wanted to play drums. The bucket thing stuck and that's how he met Daft because Daft was also in the drum workshop. And he said, we met through the beauty of rhythm.
23:52 Speaker 05 It's nice. There were 12.
23:54 Yasi Salek? In the same interview, Daft said, I can't talk English to Griff. I mean, I can, like I can wank with my left hand, but it doesn't feel quite right.
24:05 Yasi Salek? That's good. And then Griff said, when I was in school, my English was so bad that my teacher asked my parents to speak to me in English at home, which was such an ignorant thing to ask. Mind you, he also told them to take me to a psychiatrist. They thought I was fucking nuts.
24:22 Speaker 05 He definitely, you know, I know all of them and his English is, of all of them, he speaks more slowly.
24:31 Yasi Salek? Yeah. When I was watching the documentaries and there's like parts where he's talking in an interview and he has to like, ask the others, like he like loses a word, you know, and he's like, turns around and says something in Welsh like, what's blah, blah, blah. And then they go, you know, como se dice. Except in Welsh and the guy's like, oh, then he's like, deny.
24:52 Speaker 05 Yeah. Oh, yeah.
24:54 Yasi Salek? I think it was deny.
24:55 Speaker 05 It was deny. I know they're on, they're on, they're in the van. People should understand it is unusual to only speak Welsh. It's, I think 14% of the population speak Welsh at all. And, you know, they're bilingual for the most part. So to only speak Welsh is quite unusual.
25:15 Yasi Salek? So he's about 14 or 15 when the miners' strike happened, which is obviously hugely influential on many young people in bands and older people, the Clash and all these people. And it was Thatcher time. And just to check in again, we love Margaret Thatcher, right? That's like, yes, we'll make Obama poster with hope, but it's Margaret Thatcher, like Shepherd Ferry style.
25:36 Speaker 05 You did say on the Manchester episode that the doll was the Medici's of.
25:43 Yasi Salek? I mean, I stand by that.
25:46 Yasi Salek? The Dole was the Medici's of Britain. We don't even have any Medici's anymore.
25:50 Speaker 05 One thing that she did, which was really bad, was she, she, she stopped allowing people signing on the Dole under eighteen and getting housing benefit, which would pay your rent under eighteen, which, as you can imagine, a lot of kids are in sort of quite dangerous situations and being sixteen and being able to leave that was, is an incredible thing. It's a sort of life-saving thing to be able to leave a violent home.
26:14 Yasi Salek? Sure.
26:15 Speaker 05 And she just, she just scrapped all that to save money. So she was truly loathed by the, by the youth of the UK and
26:24 Yasi Salek? She seemed like a real bummer.
26:25 Speaker 05 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's one of many, many terrible things that she did, but yeah.
26:30 Yasi Salek? This is like, they hate to see a girl boss winning, you know, I have to say.
26:35 Yasi Salek? Okay, so we're getting politicalized outside of the Welsh politicizing on top of, we hate Margaret Thatcher, the miners' strike, unions, it's all, it's all coming through. In nineteen seventy-nine, there was a referendum on devolution, which is self-rule and creation of an operational government other than Westminster, that failed by popular vote. So they voted against themselves.
27:02 Speaker 05 Yeah.
27:03 Yasi Salek? We do be doing that sometimes. That's, guess what? That keep going on forever.
27:08 Speaker 05 It does seem that they were annexed hundreds of years ago and basically England just claimed them as part of England, like a region, completely ignoring the fact that they had their own language, culture, everything.
27:21 Yasi Salek? Once again, they do be doing that.
27:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, but then slowly, they sort of unraveled themselves. They have their own national sports teams, the Welsh, they have, you know, so they kind of slowly but surely worked their way out of that. But in the sixties and seventies, they were still pretty under the thumb. They have their own parliament now that works in tandem with Westminster, but as do the Scots now. But at that time, they didn't. And so when that referendum failed, I think there was a small element of people that thought, that looked to Northern Ireland and the IRA and sort of said, well, we can be We need to take things a bit further. And so there were acts of violence aimed at the English, English properties and wells,
28:07 Speaker 05 or whatever, English politicians and super furry animals and Griff and the rest of them. That was very not what they were into. And that, I think, is where this tagline of nonviolent direct action comes from. They kind of took that on board as aligning themselves with a sort of change through action, but nonviolence, the sort of, you know, Martin Luther King, Gandhi type.
28:36 Yasi Salek? Sure.
28:37 Speaker 05 Thing.
28:37 Yasi Salek? Sure.
28:38 Speaker 05 Which became something that they print on their records and scratch into the runout grooves.
28:44 Yasi Salek? It's a full red string board psychoness to go back to see what these poor whale, whatever, before they even called Welsh people, how many different times they were invaded and taken over by various contingencies of people. It's quite interesting. Probably all sort of deposited some of their, you know, culture there and left it all wrapped up into.
29:12 Speaker 05 You know, Wales is, it's, it's, it's to the far west of England and it's surrounded by three sides by the Irish Sea. So it's not quite an island, but it's, you know, if you're going to invade by boat, it's quite easy to do that to Wales.
29:25 Yasi Salek? Vikings.
29:25 Speaker 05 Yeah.
29:25 Yasi Salek? Hello, we're here. We don't have time. I know this is ban's plan and you're like, we need to actually map out the entire history of Wales, but we're just not going to do that today. That could be a different episode. Just know that nonviolent direct action, as a result of all of these sort of political streams of inspiration are coming in Griff's mind and heart.
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30:37 Yasi Salek? Okay, so when he's 17, Griff goes to Gwinid.
30:40 Speaker 05 Gwyneth. Two D's as a TH.
30:42 Yasi Salek? Give me a break, babe. Gwyneth Paltrow Technical College in Bangor to study art along with Daph. But they moved out of their houses to go there. It's a big deal. It's like 30 minutes away, but they were like, okay, we're leaving home. He said it took him, quote, "years of failure to complete the art course." And then he moved to Manchester to study for an art degree at the Polytechnic when he was 19.
31:06 Speaker 05 They both did, I guess, but Daph left early and Griff stayed to get his degree. Yeah.
31:12 Yasi Salek? Griff was like, have you seen to this place, the hacienda, babe? I'm not going anywhere. This is the best place on earth. This is.
31:17 Speaker 05 Ah, it's 1991. Yeah, see, if you, if Jeff Bezos built you a time machine, wouldn't you, 1991 at the hacienda?
31:26 Yasi Salek? That's what I've been, 1990, actually. When Loaded came out. That is where I need to be. Yeah, what a fort- I'm sure that was like a pretty fortuitous event in the artistic formation of Griff and Daph's minds and hearts.
31:45 Speaker 05 I'm sure they went there because of, you know, what had been coming out of their New Order and all the rest of it.
31:52 Yasi Salek? Yeah, Joy Division before, and we always talked about Slaughter and the Dogs and Buzzcocks. There's a lot of cool stuff. So they're raving, babe. They be raving. We know they were raving. I'm just gonna take a side note to just say that if your favorite drug is ecstasy, I fuck with you already. I just like, you know, like, there's like- A nice chart of how you might be based on your favorite drug in my mind. And ecstasy is like top class for me. I'm like, yeah. You love having your heart open.
32:22 Speaker 05 It's the love drug.
32:24 Yasi Salek? You love dancing. It's all good until you deplete all your serotonin and you have to take up residence in the bell jar for a few years and then that gets a bit rough going, but.
32:34 Speaker 05 Yeah.
32:35 Yasi Salek? Amongst us, you know, but it's like your favorite drug is cocaine.
32:38 Speaker 05 Ooh, ooh, ooh.
32:39 Yasi Salek? You know, like, emergency, je telephone la police, you know, or if it's like meth or even like weed, like respectfully, I'm like, okay, then, you know.
32:48 Speaker 05 I, I think they were pretty into weed as well. There's some like early tracks of theirs. They had a song called Smoke It, Smoke It, I Just Wanna Smoke It.
33:03 Speaker 05 They were into weed as well.
33:04 Yasi Salek? This band that they form is feels weedy.
33:07 Speaker 05 It's Fafafy Pow.
33:10 Yasi Salek? Fafafy Pow, coffee beans for everyone.
33:13 Speaker 05 Yeah.
33:13 Yasi Salek? But it sounds like fuck off.
33:15 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's, it's either coffee beans for everyone or everybody's coffee beans. It's one or the other in Welsh, but it sounds like, they, they put those words together because it sounds like fuck off. Fafafy.
33:27 Yasi Salek? Fafafy Pow.
33:28 Speaker 05 Which they started when they were 16 or so. So that's a very funny thing for a 16 year old to come up with. Fuck off everyone.
33:38 Yasi Salek? That's really good. It's, it's not as good as hot puke, respectfully, but because that's top, that's really top notch, but it's good. Daff had already fucking been in a goddamn touring band and.
33:50 Speaker 05 It's Anthrin.
33:52 Yasi Salek? Anthrin.
33:52 Speaker 05 Anthrin.
33:53 Yasi Salek? Disorder.
33:54 Speaker 05 Yeah.
33:54 Yasi Salek? Anthrin.
33:55 Speaker 05 And I had not heard of them.
33:57 Yasi Salek? What a poser you are. You hadn't heard of Anthrin? We all know about Anthrin.
34:01 Speaker 05 It's fun to say. So I think they were from the same quarries, North Wales quarries area. Welsh language punk band and Daff somehow, he must be, I mean, he's a great drummer, but he must have been very good, very young. Cause they end up having him as their drummer.
34:18 Yasi Salek? Like you said, not a heavily populated area. So I'm just, I'm just thinking maybe the competition wasn't super stiff. Like it's, it's always hard to find a drummer for your band in any place, let alone the rural quarry areas of Wales.
34:35 Speaker 05 Yeah.
34:35 Yasi Salek? So I'm not trying to diminish his skill.
34:38 Speaker 05 The singer of Anthrin, his name is Rhys Moyn. He was frustrated with the lack of music scene and he started a weekly discussion group called Pop Positive, where he was trying to get more kids or people to join and, you know, put on shows or start bands or whatever. And
34:58 Yasi Salek? Right.
34:59 Speaker 05 Griff joined this group of this weekly discussion group. And meanwhile, Anthrin was a big favorite of who?
35:08 Yasi Salek? Jonathan Peel.
35:10 Speaker 05 Jonathan Peel. And he would play their music and he traveled to Wales to see them, apparently. And they played on the Tube, which was so huge at that time. We had four channels, maybe only three at that time. That's huge. That's national television. So they played on the Tube. They were interviewed on the Old Gray Whistle Test. I watched a bit, there was only a clip of that I found where they were kind of explaining why they sing in Welsh. The interviewer says, What would you do if a representative of a major record company said they'd release your records worldwide, but you'd have to sing in English?
35:46 Speaker 07 Let them shove it up their, you know, get stuff. There is no reason why we should have to sing in another language. We are Welsh. We sing in Welsh. There's no reason why we should have to justify it.
35:56 Speaker 05 And they said, you know, you wouldn't ask an African band to start singing in English. And the interviewer said they probably would.
36:04 Speaker 05 So
36:04 Yasi Salek? They really, literally probably would.
36:06 Speaker 05 Yeah. But it's, you know, sticking to your guns, knowing that you're limiting your audience, knowing that you may never make any money out of this because
36:15 Yasi Salek? You mean like making five hour long podcast episodes?
36:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly like that.
36:21 Yasi Salek? Me being Welsh. I'm the Welsh punk band of podcasters. Sorry, go on.
36:27 Speaker 05 It's a political act to stick to your native language is what they were saying. And we're here, we're here to do that. So that was a big thing for Griff and for Daff, obviously, to get to be in a touring band and.
36:43 Yasi Salek? But it's also so cool that even with that, those limitations, they got on the two of the three or four places on national television that bands went.
36:51 Speaker 05 I think there was only three. So there was the old Grey Whistle Test, The Tube and Top of the Pops.
36:56 Yasi Salek? Yeah. So that's incredible. I mean, you're an friend.
36:58 Speaker 05 Anthrin.
37:00 Yasi Salek? You, you're putting on a special phone voice when you do it, but.
37:04 Speaker 05 That's my Welsh accent, Anthrin. So they had Faffi Pow at the same time, all the way through college.
37:13 Yasi Salek? And you guys, here's a spoiler, that band fucking rips. It's so good. Can I understand a single word? Of course not. They're singing in Welsh. It limits my ability to sing along. Chloe, though, told me she can sing along and I would love her to please demonstrate singing along to any of the songs.
37:30 Speaker 05 I'm not going to, but you know, you don't need to know what the words are. This is how the rest of the world gets into American Anglo-American imperialist.
37:39 Yasi Salek? That's true. I do sing Bumble Leo to myself all the time and I'm Bumble Leo, Bumble Leo. My Spanish is not good, but I, I really enjoy it.
37:49 Speaker 05 It's like singing along to the Cocteau Twins. Do we know what she's saying?
37:52 Yasi Salek? Such a good point. And I can't really sing along, honestly, to that at all on any level.
37:59 Yasi Salek? But yeah, they're really good. You, you said that they're like a Welsh language, Jesus and Mary Chain, which I think is pretty spot on.
38:06 Speaker 05 Yeah.
38:07 Yasi Salek? A little bit less feedback drudge.
38:09 Speaker 05 They, they, they had a few albums and I think they went through a sort of.
38:13 Yasi Salek? Four albums, seven years and four albums.
38:15 Speaker 05 Yeah. And so some of it's a little bit glam. There's one that's a little bit shoegazed. The Jesus and Mary Chain one is probably my favorite. It's very, they were very into Velvet Underground and Lou Reed. They were really good and they looked cool. They were very cool.
38:36 Speaker 05 So the interesting thing about Fakafi Pow is they got into this circuit of minority language punk rock bands who exist all over Europe.
38:50 Yasi Salek? I did not know this was real, not that it was real, but that it existed.
38:55 Speaker 05 It's fascinating. You could do hours on this, but we'll try and be brief.
38:59 Yasi Salek? That would be a heavily, heavily streamed episode, I'm sure.
39:04 Yasi Salek? Yasi's five hour episode on the European minority language punk rock circuit.
39:11 Speaker 05 I would listen to, so Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, the areas of France, areas of Spain, I guess Basque area and Catalan, they all have their own languages and there's, there was, there probably still is bands that just sing in regional languages and they all play for each other. They sleep on each other's floors. They tour with each other and they play venues that are not always venues there, you know, people's houses or town halls or pubs and they're playing to a built in audience because these people are coming to see every band that's on that circuit. And it sounds amazing. Imagine spending your
39:54 Speaker 05 teenage years traveling Europe. Griff did an interview where he said he learned to make salad dressing in a high rise council flat in Bordeaux in France after sleeping on the floor of this other band and being taught how to make French dressing in the morning. So, I mean, what a, what a life.
40:15 Yasi Salek? This is like a really ignorant question, but are the languages, because I know they're all, I know, I say I know, but I know just about from six minutes ago, that they're all from like a Celtic family and then even more specifically like a Bretonic family, Welsh Breton and Cornish.
40:32 Speaker 05 Cornish, yeah.
40:34 Yasi Salek? Is it close enough that they can understand each other or are they all speaking to each other in English?
40:40 Speaker 05 So, you know, super furry animals are big friends with Mogwai.
40:43 Yasi Salek? Right.
40:43 Speaker 05 And Mogwai, some of them, some of... Parents speak Scottish Gaelic. And from what I understand, Griff can understand that. It's not exactly the same. I think it's a lot like Scandinavian languages.
40:58 Yasi Salek? Hmm, something I'm also deeply unfamiliar with.
41:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, the Danish can understand the Swedish and speak to the Finnish, but it maybe has got different grammar or looks different.
41:09 Yasi Salek? But Sure.
41:10 Speaker 05 You know, the vocab, there's so much crossover.
41:13 Yasi Salek? Can't wait to get so many letters from
41:15 Speaker 05 I can't.
41:16 Yasi Salek? Cornish speakers.
41:17 Speaker 05 I can't attest to Catalan being anything like Welsh. I don't know. But I do know that Cornish and Breton and Gaelic and Irish Gaelic, which is, I guess, just Irish, they call it. But there's enough of a crossover that there's, you can, you can figure it out if you speak them. The, the, the other thing about the minority language punk rock circuit was that it was all, a lot of the people that were putting on these shows were also heavily involved in other political actions. So they would be into anti-apartheid and the campaign for nuclear disarmament and the anti-vivisection league, which was really big in the eighties.
41:59 Speaker 05 And so they would, sometimes the opening for their bands would be a lecture, you know, or somebody having some sort of political meeting and then they would come in and play.
42:09 Yasi Salek? Yeah, this is like if Discord had, was like eating fine cheeses and delicious wines on their, on their punk house tour circuit instead of trying to find vegan food in Cincinnati or whatever.
42:24 Speaker 05 Mediterranean Discord.
42:26 Yasi Salek? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Ian McKay, do you, do you even know about the European minority language punk rock circuit? I'm sure he absolutely does and he's probably been on it.
42:36 Speaker 05 I mean, it sounds incredible. Someone should make, if not a documentary, like a, like a fictionalized biopic of these bands. I would watch it.
42:46 Yasi Salek? You can't stop coming up with ideas that are gonna sweep the nation and blow out the blockbusters. Brad, are you listening? We're gonna go to Brad with our, our trillion dollar idea of a new music biopic about the European minority language punk rock circuit.
43:07 Yasi Salek? It's in six languages and it's subtitled.
43:10 Speaker 05 It's, imagine being seventeen and being swept up on.
43:14 Yasi Salek? No, it sounds so fucking cool.
43:16 Speaker 05 Get in a van and drive to Spain. It sounds awesome.
43:19 Yasi Salek? It's literally the polar opposite of the Jesus and Mary Chain getting in a van and going to Brussels and getting extremely angry that their french fries have sauce on them.
43:29 Speaker 05 Yeah, they did not enjoy the traveling and the adventure. They're anti-adventure.
43:36 Yasi Salek? Yeah, anti-adventurous foods, anti-sauce. You mentioned this band, For Coffee Pab, would use drills to drill into metal onstage because they'd seen some German noise bands do that?
43:52 Speaker 05 So Griff wrote in one of his books that they didn't really have a ton of instruments, but they had the idea to use the drill. And so they borrowed one member's dad's drill. He figured out there was, if he wore a particular sweater, the drill would get so tangled up before it could do anything, it would go into automatic shutdown. But it looked like he was drilling straight into his stomach, which was like an early onstage gag prankster element to his music.
44:23 Yasi Salek? Prankster. I do appreciate your bilingualness that you switched to sweater when we all know that in your parlance, it's jumper.
44:32 Speaker 05 It is jumper.
44:33 Yasi Salek? And I appreciate, I appreciate that. Okay. And also, at the same time, as he's drilling into his sweater sleight of hand and giving political speeches in the Catalan region of Spain, he was also traveling outside of Wales to see bands like the aforementioned Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, and Spacemen Three. You noted here, which I quite liked, he liked how they wouldn't speak to the audience at all.
45:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, he admired that. He thought, he said in his book, he thought that speaking to the audience was patronizing.
45:07 Yasi Salek? Mm hmm, mm hmm. You have an entire subsection on the Welsh language, which I don't know that we can like fully get into. But I do want to talk, I do want to mention that part of the politicizing of this was because you mentioned the Welsh language is in danger of dying out.
45:24 Speaker 05 Yeah, it was in danger of dying out when the the English government at some point in the early 1800s, late 1700s, decided that the Welsh were sort of unruly. And a way to control them was to stamp out the language. It's what they did also in Scotland, also in Ireland, right? So they decided to stamp it out. They made it, English was, became the lo, the language of the land. And all schools had to teach in English, just in English. And no teaching of Welsh was allowed. And one of the things that they did, which I think is horrific, is you want to talk about the Welsh not?
46:02 Yasi Salek? I don't totally know what that is, but is like, I just, you have a really scary picture here of like, an absolute, like, the most Anglo child I've ever seen, like blond hair, little white dress with her head down with like a little WN sign around her neck, like a, like she's like in the corner.
46:22 Speaker 05 Yeah. So what they would do, I thought this was so evil. This is like English imperialism at its finest. So what they would do is they had these chunks of heavy wood and they would have burnt or engraved on them WN or Welsh no, right? Can't speak Welsh on a piece of string. And if a kid was heard speaking Welsh at school, they'd have to wear it around their neck. But even worse than that, like a dunce cap, you know, for the day. But if that kid heard another kid speak Welsh, they got to pass it off to that kid. So basically they're telling on each other.
46:58 Yasi Salek? Right, they're, they're in making a cop culture, a narc culture.
47:02 Speaker 05 Exactly, turn, turning them against themselves. And then who, whichever kid at the end of the day had it would get the belt. So you were desperately trying to palm off this thing onto other kids by policing them so that you didn't get the punishment at the end of the day. That's so sick, isn't it?
47:22 Yasi Salek? Yeah, it's not good.
47:23 Speaker 05 It was in danger of dying out as most of the Celtic languages are. But because the Welsh managed to.
47:32 Speaker 05 Campaign and work for progress. By 1939, there was a few Welsh speaking schools opened.
47:39 Yasi Salek? And all of the super furry animals were raised in those.
47:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah.
47:43 Yasi Salek? Welsh speaking families and Welsh, or at least one, one or the other one to Welsh school.
47:49 Speaker 05 But by seventy seven, they had the BBC started Radio Kimaru, which is all Welsh language. And in nineteen eighty two, they got a Welsh television station. But this is an insane amount of time to wait to be able to watch media in your own language in your own country. That's crazy.
48:06 Yasi Salek? You, you said that you got that in Scotland and you would watch Welsh cartoons?
48:11 Speaker 05 So in the morning, for some reason, on Channel Four, S4C, which was the Welsh, is the Welsh language television channel. They would show Postman Pat and maybe Iver the Engine, which was a Welsh cartoon about engines, pre Thomas. The track engine. And they would show it in Welsh. I guess just to have it on, maybe, maybe Gaelic speaking kids could understand it. I'm not sure. But yeah, that was on in Scotland.
48:42 Yasi Salek? You also said that there's like a Welsh stereotype that like Welsh people are like hill people, right? Like country bumpkins, like villagers. We have a word for it in Farsi. It's dehauti.
48:53 Speaker 05 Right. So in the seventies, when I was a kid watching TV, there would be sitcoms and the Welsh. It was the same with the Irish characters too. They were few and far between, but when they did turn up, they were particularly naive or, you know, slow in the uptake. There was definitely, they were stereotyped as being unsophisticated, sort of.
49:16 Yasi Salek? What was the stereotype of Scottish people?
49:19 Speaker 05 That drunk, so most everyone that was Scottish on a. On a sitcom or a sketch show would be, you know, falling down drunk.
49:27 Yasi Salek? That's a real Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man meme moment for me personally. From the country of England that has like six pubs per mile or I don't know, kilometer over there, but whatever you guys want to say. They're like, they're like, no, but they're drunker than us. We're drunk, but they're drunker.
49:48 Speaker 05 Yeah. So, you know, the English, we know what the English think about themselves, right? So, pretty steadfast in their depiction of the other kingdoms, people being lesser than them in popular culture.
50:03 Yasi Salek? There's a great quote here from Grif about whether he writes in English or Welsh. And he said, Welsh is my first language. My favorite melodies are the ones that come with words attached. So if they come in either language, I won't change them. I'm surprised I've made so many English language albums, but I'll always do Welsh language ones. People ask me if I dream in Welsh and I'm like, I don't think language is anywhere near my dreams. I don't know what's going on with them. All right. So the coffee pal splits up and then Grif forms a new band with Daf called Super Furry Animals. That's right. We finally had Super Furry Animals. Let's fucking go. They team up with people from a band called.
50:43 Speaker 05 I think it's just Youth Thent. Youth Thent.
50:46 Yasi Salek? Youth Thent.
50:47 Speaker 05 This is Gitto and Bumph. Yeah.
50:49 Yasi Salek? And then they added Daf's brother.
50:51 Speaker 05 Kian.
50:52 Yasi Salek? Kian, who was in a band called WWZZ. There's not even a fucking vowel on there. Wzz.
50:58 Speaker 05 I don't think that's Welsh. I think that's just like techno.
51:01 Yasi Salek? But how can, how can you ever tell?
51:03 Speaker 05 Yeah. I think I would say that wiz.
51:06 Yasi Salek? Wiz. Okay. And I love that you found a YouTube of one song that has 13 views and it's good is your note.
51:12 Speaker 05 It's 15 now. Yeah. It is good. Kian was too young to go to raves, but he was make, he loved techno. So he would make it himself at home. He was into Orbital and he would make his own dance music.
51:25 Yasi Salek? That's really cool, actually.
51:26 Speaker 05 And so when Daf left Manchester and moved to Cardiff and they started talking about having a band, they involved Kian. They're all incredible musicians, but Kian is the sort of secret sauce of the Super Furry Animals electronic wig out.
51:43 Yasi Salek? Yeah, all right, Wiz. There's 56 people that subscribe to the Wiz Topic YouTube channel, so just know, there's a small but mighty contingent of people holding, flying the flag. Griff said, "We started talking about being in a band in 1993, and we started playing shows in 1995. We started with the ambition to maybe play internationally and to make music that was some kind of sonic adventure." "There was lots of songwriters in the band, but when we started, we were also very hedonistic, so we would be the last people standing at 6 o'clock in the morning at the party. We formed a band because we got on social and had similar habits. We wanted to make a band that combined our love of songwriting and our love of club culture and dub music and electronic music." You noted here, which I liked, that they played their first ever shows, opening for, say it, because you love "Say It" so well.
52:26 Speaker 05 Anne-Fran.
52:27 Yasi Salek? Who asked them to do an electronic set for them in some shows in France, not anywhere in France, on the...
52:34 Speaker 05 In Brittany.
52:36 Yasi Salek? In Brittany, where the punk, the punk circuit, the minority language punk circuit. Here's something that I had no idea, and I really enjoy it as a big Notting Hill fan, that the earliest incarnation of Super furry animals featured the actor Rhys
52:52 Speaker 05 Ifans.
52:54 Yasi Salek? Ifans on lead vocals. I didn't know that. Who's the most famous Welsh person of all time?
53:00 Speaker 05 Uh, Tom Jones.
53:02 Yasi Salek? "Not unusual to be loved by anyone." He was not born Tom Jones, was he?
53:06 Speaker 05 Oh, no, it's actually Anthony Hopkins, Catherine Zeta-Jones.
53:10 Yasi Salek? This is like, when I find out people are Canadian, I had no idea. Well, Rhys Ifans is not the most famous Welsh person, but to me is very famous, because, once again, I love Notting Hill. He's done a lot of other things.
53:22 Speaker 05 Yeah, Harry Potter, Spider-Man, maybe? He's, yeah, he's a very successful actor.
53:28 Yasi Salek? House of the Dragon.
53:30 Speaker 05 He was the first singer, and they met him at a festival when they were still 15 or 16, and he rocked up with a completely bleach blonde Mohican.
53:41 Yasi Salek? Hmm.
53:42 Speaker 05 And...
53:43 Yasi Salek? Hell, yeah.
53:44 Speaker 05 Griff had heard of him from his sister, who had called him "the wildest man in North Wales." He was probably like 18, but she called him "the wildest man in North Wales."
53:54 Speaker 05 So he was one of those like local legends. His fame preceded him and they had all sort of heard stories of him. He was a bit of an oddball. So he, um, he was their first singer.
54:07 Yasi Salek? Yeah, and they recorded, the first ever recorded song was with him singing and it was called Of No Fixed Identity. And you can actually hear it now because they released it two years ago to raise money for an organization called Save the Severn Estuary.
54:29 Speaker 05 Kian is, um, big into campaigning for clean waterways and anti-nuclear dumping. And he released it to raise money for that campaign.
54:39 Yasi Salek? It does feel like we should all just be on the same page about nuclear dumping being bad. Doesn't it? Like, it just seems like that's, should be a unified cause, but you know, every day you're surprised by differing interests.
54:54 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly.
54:55 Yasi Salek? The name they said came after they were coming down from an acid trip. And they can't remember who came with it, but they think it might have been Grease. He really gave a lot to this band, a spirit, a name. The first thing they ever released, Dim Brice, Dim Chuis. That's not how you say it.
55:17 Speaker 05 I think that's good.
55:18 Yasi Salek? Well, it's actually a very lovely song. It's atmospheric. I did listen to this one a couple of times. I quite liked it.
55:33 Speaker 05 They recorded it for Radio Kimaru and it's very electronic, almost sort of beta bandy in terms of its, uh, its mood music and not really a rock song with vocals.
55:45 Yasi Salek? No, it's great. Griff said, "In the early incarnation, there was kind of two bands. It was at the peak of rave culture in the UK. So our social life was based mostly around electronic music. We had a sequencer, a drum machine, a few cens, and there was a loose collective that would take this equipment to parties. We did a few tours of Super Furry Animals, playing improvised electronic music." But simultaneously, we were always in bands playing conventional instruments. I've been writing songs for most of my life. It was really weird. We were in our mid twenties, we'd been playing music for a decade. We put this one EP out and did a couple of shows playing this more songy material. And suddenly we were getting record contacts thrown at us. We thought it was like a joke after being ignored, but not particularly bothered about it for a decade. We never took it fully seriously.
56:27 Yasi Salek? Our attitude towards record companies is always, wow, let's take advantage of this ludicrous situation because it's not going to last. Great attitude. Let's talk about them getting signed, record labels coming left and right. So they had released these two Welsh language EPs on an indie label and based in Cardiff called Inkst. And in 1994, Creation Records, your former employer, had hired a Welsh A and R man. Shout out Welsh Mark, Mark Bowen, friend of the pod, who had seen the Super Furies play in a club in
57:02 Speaker 05 Eboristwith.
57:03 Yasi Salek? Thank you so much. Which is in West Wales in March of 1995. He had convinced Alan McGee's partner, Dick Green, who controlled the purse strings, that they were worth signing. I like, there's a quote from Mark, Welsh Mark, later on that he said at this point, he felt that everyone was sick to death of smiley Britpop and wanted more interesting music.
57:28 Speaker 05 Hmm.
57:29 Yasi Salek? Do you feel that was true in 95? I mean, I think it probably was for you in your heart, but.
57:33 Speaker 05 Yeah, you know, Britpop, as it's become to mean, was not that significant to me. I went to see those bands. Obviously, I was working at Creation when they signed Oasis. I saw Main Road, I saw Nebworth.
57:49 Yasi Salek? The way you say it, so tired and sad when there's just people out there being like, and just paid $6,000 for a ticket.
57:57 Speaker 05 To the Rose Bowl, yeah.
57:59 Yasi Salek? Not even to the Rose Bowl, to go to like Cardiff.
58:03 Speaker 05 I am.
58:04 Yasi Salek? To go see them, I was like, this is the first show. And you're like, yeah, I was at fucking Main Road, whatever, it was cool, I guess.
58:11 Speaker 05 It was good. I have to say I pulper wonderful. It just all the bands that came after that, the bands that got sort of swept up with that. You're looking at Sleeper and Shed Seven and Supergrass and there's hundreds of them. That was not really my thing at all. So.
58:26 Yasi Salek? Shed Seven, shout out who had a number one album last year.
58:30 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah. But there was so, there was Gene, there was, there's, there honestly, you couldn't, there's hundreds of them. That was not where my interest was really at that point. I was having much more fun going to see Underworld, working with the Chemical Brothers.
58:45 Yasi Salek? Oh, yeah.
58:46 Speaker 05 People say Britpop, they think of this type of music. But for me, it's a time, it's a period of time. It's a sort of era of time in London when I lived there. And so the more interesting music that was happening was, you know, and it wasn't maybe coming out of London, but Portishead and Tricky, Massive Attack, Left Field. There, there was just so much going on that was not this sort of Uni and Jack rock and roll music that was, I thought, more interesting at the time.
59:19 Yasi Salek? It's also like such a fake term that means nothing. Like, you make a great point. It really just refers to a time.
59:25 Speaker 05 Yeah. And within that time, obviously, you had Oasis and Blur and Pulp, but you also had really interesting other music that was happening that I thought was.
59:36 Yasi Salek? Yeah, well, also concurrently, besides these like amazing sort of electronica bass bands that you're talking about, which are so cool, there was also Primal Scream is making albums, you know, Jesus and Mary Chain is consistently making albums at this time. There's a lot of other stuff going on, but people do like to, not like to, I mean, Oasis made so much fucking money. And it was on the back of Oasis's money that we even get some super furry animals. So.
1:00:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, for sure.
1:00:06 Yasi Salek? Dafting my cap once again. I love this story that you told me before, but I just really enjoy it that so. Welshmark and Dick Green bring the super phrase to London to do a gig at Camden Monarch.
1:00:21 Speaker 05 I think it was the Water Rats. I saw conflicting information, but yeah.
1:00:25 Yasi Salek? It was supporting quote unquote from McGee's book Pearl Lowe's terrible band Powder.
1:00:32 Speaker 05 Powder, yeah, I remember Powder.
1:00:34 Yasi Salek? Daisy Lowe's mom catching strays in Alan McGee's book. He couldn't understand a single syllable of word that they sang and thought they were singing in Welsh. He said later, I thought I was signing an out and out Britpop Blur kind of band. Little did I know I was signing the Beach Boys meet Gong meets Isaac Hayes on a fucking acid trip. And also because he couldn't understand them, he went up to them and said, you should try singing in English. And they were like, we were singing in English.
1:01:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, they did a five song set in English, I think for the first time ever. And he was like, try singing in English.
1:01:11 Yasi Salek? I don't want to like side with Alan McGee on this one, but like simply from watching that documentary you sent, I did start to dissociate a little bit because even when they do speak English, it is just, it's like a secret third thing where you're like, oh, and that's not a negative thing. It's simply, I could see Alan McGee maybe being like, I don't know what you guys are saying. He does also in his book, call them the last great creation band.
1:01:43 Speaker 05 Oh yeah, absolutely.
1:01:44 Yasi Salek? Which I think is a fair one. You also had a cool little Yossi style note here. Producer Chloe really did the work on this one. That Griff had had played, he had like filled in for someone in a band called Emily for one show in London in 1988. And they were opening for Alan McGee and Dick Green's old band Biff Bang Pow exclamation point. One of the worst band names to ever exist.
1:02:11 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:02:12 Yasi Salek? The next night was this doing it for the gigs, Creation Records All Dayer. It's like a precursor to a little festival. Is that what, a little club festival?
1:02:22 Speaker 05 It was to go with this, um. Compilation album, doing it for the kids, which was kind of the thing that had broken creation through in a big way as a, you know, an indie label worth paying attention to. It had felt Primal Scream, House of Love. It kind of really set the label apart in terms of their roster. Everybody had it. Everyone's, you know, cousin and big brother had it. And so they did this show, doing it for the gigs. There was lots of bands all day. And because Griff had been there to fill in for this, somebody in this band, he obviously got invited along. And so he went to that armed with a cassette tape of Fuck Coffee Pow.
1:03:08 Yasi Salek? Gave it on to Mr. McGee.
1:03:10 Speaker 05 Tried to, but Alan, I think, rejected it because he was watching the bands. And he said he was, Griff said he was wearing sunglasses inside at the gig. And when Griff tried to give him the tape, he sort of told him, no, it's not the right time.
1:03:27 Yasi Salek? You just never know. You can never know. I liked this. This is something I found in a Melody Macar article. Same kind of as Walsh Mark, talking about like what they were sort of going for when they're making these first songs for creation, ultimately their first album. Daff said, Sean Ryder sang about the cut of his jeans or going out with someone because they're dirty. Things that anyone can relate to anywhere across the world, except for me, of course. But he didn't sing about living in a big house in the country, which means fuck all to anyone.
1:04:02 Yasi Salek? Can't even call it strays. Like Blur is absolutely just shot at straight by many bands during this time. They're like, we love this and this, but like fuck Blur.
1:04:12 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:04:12 Yasi Salek? He also said, all those bands in Britain now with absolutely no imagination at all beyond a nice guitar sound and a nice drum sound. They say, oh, we're into this, in this tradition, but they're not. Just listen to all this mediocre, banal bollocks that comes out these days. They have absolutely no idea what's happened, no idea of moving forward at all. And then Bump said, they're too interested in getting radio play. They think they can do it by getting the right drum sound, the right guitar sound, getting the right producer in. We didn't. And then the band looks at him and he goes, yeah, and okay, we're not getting played by anybody.
1:04:46 Yasi Salek? But I could see, I mean, A, like, they're obviously not interested in, like, courting the charts, but also I could see, like, given what we've spent hours talking about, about the Welsh spirit and tradition and politicization that is, like, forming the nucleus of this band, that they would not like a band who was like, "Oi, mister, you me mother, chimney sweep, Union Jack." And they were like, "We don't want any of that. You can keep, keep that all the way."
1:05:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, they would not be relating to that at all.
1:05:19 Yasi Salek? Poor Noel Gallagher catches a lot of heat for this, but he didn't bring that Union Jack guitar out until later. Really, the most egregious perpetrators of this were kind of Blur in the beginning.
1:05:29 Speaker 05 Hmm.
1:05:30 Yasi Salek? And Select Magazine, who splashed that big old Union Jack behind Brett Anderson. All right, let's talk about their first English language song. "God!" exclamation point, "Show Me Magic." You had me at hello with this song title. Best song, one of the best songs I've ever heard. You know that it's the first mention of pet hamsters? Oh, do you mean Stavros the hamster? That's right. Stavros was Bumpf's hamster and the inspiration for the song Fuzzy Birds as well, directly. Stavros, quote, "came into Bumpf's life and it was a very beautiful moment for us." Because we all loved Stavros. He was a funky hamster. He had special tricks where he would slide up chairs. I had a dream that Bumpf had wired up his wheel to make electricity for his house,
1:06:15 Yasi Salek? so I wrote a song about it. This is about fuzzy birds, but I just wanted to bring in some hamster content. But it dawned on me that it was also a song about the slave and the enslaver. He took a dream about Stavros the hamster and made it into a metaphor about slave and enslaver.
1:06:30 Speaker 05 This is why they're the greatest band in the world.
1:06:32 Yasi Salek? It's basically Stavros shouting for workers' rights.
1:06:36 Speaker 05 It's also, it flips from telling the hamster to run faster on the wheel to generate electricity to then the perspective of the hamster asking for more food to be able to do that.
1:06:51 Yasi Salek? Sure.
1:06:59 Speaker 05 This is Fuzzy Boards. It's on their first album. But yeah, hamsters, animals, tortoises.
1:07:05 Yasi Salek? Golden retriever.
1:07:06 Speaker 05 Golden retrievers, turtles.
1:07:08 Yasi Salek? Cuttlefish.
1:07:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, there's, there's a lot of animals in.
1:07:12 Yasi Salek? In the Super furry animals.
1:07:15 Speaker 05 Yeah, there's a lot of weird. Can you imagine Noel Gallagher singing from the perspective of a enslaved hamster? In a song? No.
1:07:23 Yasi Salek? Can you imagine Noel Gallagher singing from the perspective of anything or a person?
1:07:29 Yasi Salek? That's simply not part of the Oasis charm, if you will. I, I was actually hoping I could find one, but I didn't. I, I just would actually love to hear Noel Gallagher give a little rip a few quotes about the Super furry animals. Like, I want to know what he thought about it.
1:07:43 Speaker 05 He liked them. So he, they, they played with them. They took them out on tour. Obviously the label's new signings. Super furry animals said they had a, you know, front row seat to some of the insanity rated the peak of their popularity.
1:07:58 Yasi Salek? I really would love to hear them, like, have a little convo.
1:08:02 Speaker 05 It's reported that he said they were the best Welsh band.
1:08:05 Yasi Salek? Poor Manic Street Preachers over there is not, they were like, hello.
1:08:10 Speaker 05 And they, Super furry animals would say it's not a competition.
1:08:14 Yasi Salek? Right. They're non, nonviolent, non-competitive.
1:08:17 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:08:18 Yasi Salek? You're right. He, he loved them. That's great. Good, good, good on you, Noel Gallagher. This first thing on Creation was actually Hometown Unicorn. This song is wonderful. It is a gorgeous, dare I say, goddamn gorgeous and beautiful song. It's so dancey. It's so fun. I guess riddled with references to Frank Fontaine, a Frenchman whose friends reported to the police in 1979 that they had watched him be abducted by a ball of light. And then he turned up eight days later in a cabbage field, claiming to have been examined by aliens on a craft. Later deemed a hoax by the police, who the police are just not open-minded, if I must say. I, I believe Frank Fontaine.
1:09:00 Speaker 05 I think, I think Griff Reese believed Frank Fontaine, too.
1:09:04 Yasi Salek? Yeah, because Griff Reese has a beautiful mind.
1:09:15 Yasi Salek? This was popular, right? Hometown Unicorn got single of the week by the NME, and that was chosen by the guest reviewers Pulp. We love Pulp. So Pulp also had good taste. People love the super furry animals.
1:09:27 Speaker 05 They do.
1:09:28 Yasi Salek? The band's band. Griff said of, is this of Hometown Unicorn? "It was a reaction against all the punk rockers we used to hang out with. A lot of our friends who were like three or four years older than this came totally from punk rock and used to tour a lot with those bands. We almost started writing songs about things like unicorns to wind them up." And hamsters, stop, I'm a hamster. So "God Show Me The Magic" hit number 33 on the charts. "Something For The Weekend", really a fucking all-timer, man. Throw that shit on and tell me you're not just like...
1:09:56 Speaker 05 It's a joyful love letter to drug-taking, and it's fantastic. Did you watch the video yesterday? They were all in a sort of science lab. Yeah.
1:10:05 Yasi Salek? Yes, and there's a great melody maker where he's like, "What's going on here?" And they're like, "We've never taken drugs. I don't know what you're talking about."
1:10:13 Yasi Salek? Like, but you're in a lab. Like, "Yeah, we don't know how to make drugs. We make wine. We're very interested in wine."
1:10:25 Yasi Salek? And then "If You Don't Want Me To Destroy You", which is like this sort of pretty and tender gorgeous little ballad, also hit number 18. "Something For The Weekend", top of the pops. I love also that they used some of their signing money, I think a large portion, to buy these ridiculous ass instruments, including a flying V guitar, which is what Griff is playing.
1:10:44 Speaker 05 Yeah, they spent almost their whole advance on stupid guitars that they then found out wouldn't stay in tune. So they were useless.
1:10:52 Yasi Salek? Noel Gallagher is just collecting like Johnny Marr's guitar gifts that are like so cool. And Griff is like, "That one looks so cool. It's a V. Can I have that one?"
1:11:01 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:11:02 Yasi Salek? Ah, there's pictures of them in the doc, but you guys can't see them. Go ahead and give it to Google.
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1:11:54 Yasi Salek? You guys, it's arrived. Are we perhaps an hour in? Yeah. But it's time to talk about the man don't give a fuck. What? We had to contextualize the super furry animal.
1:12:08 Speaker 05 It's true. It was supposed to be the B-side for "If You Don't Want Me to Destroy You."
1:12:14 Yasi Salek? Right. But...
1:12:16 Speaker 05 Alan McGee claims it was he himself who said, "No, it should be its own single."
1:12:22 Yasi Salek? He did say that. And we'll never know, because I wasn't there. This song is truly gorgeous. I love the like, high and low like tempo change, like atmospheric into like, now we're fucking Dan's party, and there's like a scream little element going on. But we need to, we need to talk about quickly the sample that it's built on.
1:12:48 Speaker 05 I've never listened to Steely Dan.
1:12:50 Yasi Salek? And that is why you and I are very close friends, and I respect you greatly. Famously, I'm not a huge Steely Dan fan. That was the first episode of this podcast. So against my will, I've learned a lot about Steely Dan. It's had, they have, they had a huge resurgence, like in the last, I wanna say like, eight years or something amongst young people, which I like, just simply cannot wrap my mind around because I'm like, this is, it's not, it's like, I get it. It's, some of it, it's good, you know, like, I'm not saying it's not a good music. It's just like, whatever. We're not gonna shit on Celia Dan. There's, they have good songs. I get why people like them.
1:13:24 Speaker 05 What's their, what's their vibe? They're like hippies?
1:13:27 Yasi Salek? No, they're cocaine people. They're, they're cocaine rock. Yeah, they're like seventies. They pretty much, you know, had a big part in inventing another one of those genres that's retroactively placed on a large swath of bands called yacht rock. Their vibe was they were extreme perfectionists musically, and they would like, take a thousand takes to get the exact right sound. And they made these like musically kind of complex and technically perfect songs that were like groove based, like peg and like, they had a very popular album called Asia. There's actually a really great yacht rock documentary. I'm biased because
1:14:11 Yasi Salek? The Ringer put it out, but I do think it's very good. Our friend Bethany Cosentino is in it. The song that is the sample-
1:14:18 Speaker 05 It's a weird song. I did listen to it, obviously because of the sample. It's weird.
1:14:24 Yasi Salek? It's a good song. I mean, it's very, it's, it's cooler when I think what the Super Four Animals did to it, but also I'm more of a nineties person than a yacht rock seventies person.
1:14:35 Speaker 05 The refrain through the whole thing is a woman singing Lost Wages. Is it a woman? It's a man in a high voice.
1:14:41 Yasi Salek? I think it's a man in a hi- high voice.
1:14:43 Speaker 05 Lost Wages, what, what?
1:14:45 Yasi Salek? Lost Wages is what, is a nickname for Las Vegas.
1:14:49 Speaker 05 Oh, okay. Okay.
1:14:59 Yasi Salek? You don't hear it as much anymore, but yeah, it's a, it's a nickname for Las Vegas because obviously people would go and lose their wages gambling.
1:15:08 Speaker 05 Got it.
1:15:09 Yasi Salek? And the part that is like, you don't give a fuck about anybody else, you know, they don't give a fuck about anybody else. And the Celia Dan song is while the poor people sleeping with the shade on the light, poor people sleeping, all the stars come out at night.
1:15:31 Yasi Salek? I guess ostensibly.
1:15:34 Speaker 05 It's about nepo babies. Suppose we would call them nepo babies now?
1:15:38 Yasi Salek? Steely Dan, again, I'm gonna get butchered for this because people love Steely Dan and I'm always kind of like side eyeing them, but like, it was just like occupied an interesting place, right? Like a seedy Los Angeles, like cocaine, but also like they were famous, but they're also not, I don't know, I feel like they felt, and someone can correct me if I'm wrong, like kinda outsider-y, like they weren't the beautiful people and you can look them up and corroborate that. So I think they probably had some disdain, obviously, for.
1:16:09 Speaker 05 Well, it sounds like they have disdain for their fans because in the song they say they're like hating on these showbiz kids and they say something about them wearing Steely Dan t-shirts.
1:16:18 Yasi Salek? Yeah, they're like, we don't want you here. But yeah, it's very funny. You wrote in the doc, like, I don't know if they hippies or jam band? And I was like, absolutely not. They're not anti-capitalist. They're not hippies. They are a cocaine rock band. In fact, this is, there's an interview in Mojo in 96 where the guy asks, there seems to be a hint of British 60s psychedelic legends, Dan Thalians' chariot about your album. I don't know who the fuck Dan Thalians' chariot is. And Griff goes, there is a bit, but we listened to West Coast cocaine music as well. And Bump said, we listen and we laugh. So that is the sample that it's based around.
1:16:57 Speaker 05 It is the best bit of the song because the song seems very, it sounds like that song, you put the in the coconut.
1:17:10 Speaker 05 And you think it, you know where it's going and then at this section, it takes a little, it goes somewhere else for a minute. And this is the bit where you say they don't give a fuck about anybody else. And, you know, the super furry animals in their music, they're all about going somewhere else for a minute, right? So I can see why they would like this part of the song as well as it's just a great line to stick on a loop.
1:17:34 Yasi Salek? It's, no, it's so good. Steely Dan's frontman, Donald Fagan, was upset that the sample was featured so prominently, and he refused their request to use the time. Donald Fagan, famously very cool about people sampling Steely Dan's music. De La Soul couldn't tell you about that, whose music was literally not on streaming until, I think, this year because of it.
1:18:01 Speaker 05 Well, cocaine is not a drug for the generous, is it?
1:18:04 Yasi Salek? The sharing, um, known to be pretty litigious and not, uh, not wanting to share, which is, you know, I guess that's your right. But then eventually he did relent, right? And he said, "You can use it, but I want 95% of the money."
1:18:19 Speaker 05 Which seems like a lot. I mean, it is in the song 50 times, that one loop, but at the same time, what they do with it and where they take it is more than 5% of that song. But, you know, I'm not a, what they call musicologist.
1:18:35 Yasi Salek? You're not?
1:18:36 Speaker 05 I'm not a musicologist, and I am a socialist, so I probably have a different opinion about how you should have shared that money.
1:18:45 Yasi Salek? I'm not a lawyer either, but I, you know, I feel people should get what they're owed, but I think it worked out for everybody, given that the Super Four Animals were not really after money. And also, I think we noted that Griff was like, "Okay, well, you're gonna get 95% of fucking Jack Didley's squat because this song has the word fuck in it how many times?"
1:19:07 Speaker 05 In the initial single release, it was, it had, came with a sticker warning that was really a selling point, right? They were kind of showing off about how many times it said it on. What does this?
1:19:17 Yasi Salek? It's more than 50 times.
1:19:19 Speaker 05 More than 50 times?
1:19:20 Yasi Salek? It's not the most in a song. That distinction belongs to the Insane Clown Posse for their song Fuck the World has 93 instances of fuck. God bless ICP. But yeah, a song that has the word fuck in it 50 times plus, probably we are not expecting it to be a radio hit.
1:19:40 Speaker 05 Which it wasn't, but it did sell well.
1:19:43 Yasi Salek? Right.
1:19:43 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:19:45 Yasi Salek? It was interesting because we know you noted here that later when talking to X-Ray Magazine 2003, Griff claimed that the band, the reason that they made it a single, it was because they had allowed themselves to be manipulated by Creation, who came up with the idea, which does bolster McGee's claim that it was his idea to be the single.
1:20:06 Speaker 05 Alan, which you've probably gathered this from your years of research, he is just an old punk and he based himself on Malcolm McLaren and this sort of doing stuff for attention and trying to, you know, shock people into paying attention was a big part of what he enjoyed.
1:20:25 Yasi Salek? It's interesting because they're like, it's like they're doing similar things. Super Furry is an Alan McGee, except Alan's is just kind of purely to its own end of like attention and shock, whereas what the Super Furry's are doing, which we'll get into with The Tank, which is one of my favorite Super Furry stories, is for attention towards something, towards a message, right? More the clash than the sex pistols.
1:20:53 Speaker 05 100%, 100%. And also a real outlier of the time, as you pointed out, with Britpop sort of falling apart a bit, when Noel and Alan go to 10 Downing Street, 97.
1:21:07 Yasi Salek? Fuck Ass Blazer, yeah.
1:21:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, so this is, you know, we've had a few years of this, you know, knees up Mother Brown, sort of, we're British and that's the best.
1:21:17 Yasi Salek? Did you say knees up Mother Brown? I'm sorry, one moment, put a pin in it. I'm gonna need you, you can't just bulldoze past knees up Mother Brown, we're gonna need a little explanation there, babe.
1:21:31 Speaker 05 No one's, no one's mentioned knees up Mother Brown?
1:21:34 Yasi Salek? You're the first and I am so pleased.
1:21:36 Speaker 05 Knees up Mother Brown is like a Cockney sing-song tune, like you would sing it at a piano at a gathering and maybe like a party drinking song or there's a dance that goes with it.
1:21:52 Yasi Salek? Are you doing, are you doing the dance?
1:21:55 Speaker 05 No. It's, it's known to all British people, knees up Mother Brown, but it's definitely like a London thing. It's sung with a London accent. Under the table we must go, ee-ay-ay-ay-oh, knees up Mother Brown.
1:22:17 Speaker 05 Nisa Mother Brown is a pub song believed to date back as early as 1800s with origins in the east end of London. It's associated with Cockney culture at the end of the First World War. It's documented to being widely sung in London on Armistice Night.
1:22:33 Yasi Salek? Do you know there's a Raffi version of it?
1:22:36 Speaker 05 Raffi?
1:22:37 Yasi Salek? Raffi in concert with the Rise and Shine Band did a version of Nisa Mother Brown.
1:22:44 Speaker 05 It definitely comes with the dance. If you look at the full lyrics, there's a whole section about hopping on one foot that I'm not familiar with. But yeah, what is it? Yeah, it's like a dance. People would jump around to it.
1:22:55 Yasi Salek? According to the internet, it's saying that it actually was a sexual thing.
1:23:01 Speaker 05 Really?
1:23:02 Yasi Salek? About pulling someone's bloomers down.
1:23:04 Speaker 05 It's a Cockney drinking pub song that, not to throw more shade at Blur, but...
1:23:12 Yasi Salek? Oi, Mister Yumima, but yeah.
1:23:14 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:23:15 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
1:23:15 Speaker 05 So the sort of meaningless stuff that is just, ooh, London or whatever, you know, here comes super furry animals and they've actually got a lot to say about a lot of things.
1:23:25 Yasi Salek? Yeah.
1:23:25 Speaker 05 And they're principled in a way that perhaps is not happening in other places.
1:23:32 Yasi Salek? Yeah, totally. Okay, so the single that The Tank was, was actually the one before this, that this was gonna be the B-side of it, was If You Don't Want Me to Destroy You.
1:23:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, it was recorded to be the B-side of If You Don't Want Me to Destroy You, and Alan stopped it so that it could be its own thing. But If You Don't Want Me to Destroy You came with its own sort of anti-war message.
1:23:57 Yasi Salek? And that's part of the reason they used their entire marketing budget on that single to buy a tank. A tank, a literal government army tank.
1:24:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, from, from, from the British Army.
1:24:11 Yasi Salek? I have so many questions. Like, first of all, it's like, what is, where do you go Craigslist? Like, what is the, what is the market? Do you just phone up the government and say, you got any tanks for sale, babe?
1:24:22 Speaker 05 I think probably periodically they'll sell their old stuff to crazy people.
1:24:27 Yasi Salek? Sure, okay. That's a, that's a really good idea. I think that's a wonderful and safe idea that they should absolutely be selling tanks and other military equipment to just random crazy people. But so, these crazy people put a sound system inside of it because there was a law.
1:24:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was basically designed to stop raves.
1:24:52 Yasi Salek? Right.
1:24:53 Speaker 05 So 1994, people have been raving for five or six years and they're not stopping, so.
1:24:58 Yasi Salek? Why would they? It's fun.
1:24:59 Speaker 05 Yeah, and they would often do it in, you know, fields. I went to one that was in the grounds of a Scottish castle once. It was fantastic.
1:25:08 Yasi Salek? Here it was like forests, like in Riverside.
1:25:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, but you know, public spaces, public land, warehouses, obviously it started. And so, the government came up with this Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which allowed for the police to seize the sound system to stop the party, right? Without any kind of warrant, they could just show up and unplug you and steal your decks, basically.
1:25:35 Yasi Salek? Right, bomber, downer.
1:25:37 Speaker 05 Yeah, and it obviously put an end to a lot of raves where the police would sometimes come find them and they didn't have a warrant, they couldn't go in, they couldn't take it away, but this, this made it so they could. And so, the Super Furry Animals' response to that was, well, what if you put the sound system inside a tank?
1:25:58 Yasi Salek? Can't take it now, bitch.
1:25:59 Speaker 05 Can't take it away, yeah. And so, they bought this tank with their entire marketing budget, which I think also probably included like the money to take it to radio. Like, it would have been absolutely everything to promote the single was spent on buying a tank and painting it to match the single art.
1:26:17 Yasi Salek? And then they eventually sold this to who? Don Henley from the Eagles, who apparently collects military vehicles. This is another one of those crazy people who collects military vehicles, although probably for different reasons.
1:26:28 Speaker 05 Tell me you have too much money without telling me you have too much money.
1:26:31 Yasi Salek? Where does he keep them? In his fucking palatial estate or whatever? I mean, you, you know, to the, today, I mean, I haven't checked in a while, but I, speaking of crazy people who often likes to check what the top selling albums of all time, they're kind of stuck in time, obviously, because people don't buy albums anymore. Pretty much always it's the Eagles Greatest Hits, number one selling album of all time. Not Michael Jackson, not the Beatles.
1:26:53 Speaker 05 You need an expensive hobby if you're gonna have that much money and he found one. So yeah, they, they sold it to him after a while, but they did take it to festivals and play music and inspire people to rave around it.
1:27:07 Yasi Salek? The cover art is a guy called Robin Friday showing the Vicky's.
1:27:14 Speaker 05 I call it the Vicky's. It might be Scottish. It's a, it's the V's.
1:27:17 Yasi Salek? Flying V.
1:27:18 Speaker 05 The V's, yeah.
1:27:19 Yasi Salek? Yeah. To a Luton Town goalkeeper while playing for Cardiff City Football Club.
1:27:25 Speaker 05 Yeah. And I don't, I don't know much about him. I think fans of Cardiff City are much more familiar with him. It's a great picture. He looks really cool. He's giving the finger, the British version of the finger to the goalkeeper on the opposing team. He was apparently very working class. He came from London and he had been sent to Borstal, yes, which is juvie at 16 for stealing a car radio. And then he had had a baby with a mixed race girlfriend at 17 and ostracized by some of his family. He was working as a laborer. He was, you know, having a hard time. He got into drugs and drink. He turned out to be some incredible, brilliant, technically brilliant football player.
1:28:11 Speaker 05 And so he was signed to Reading FC before going to Cardiff City.
1:28:15 Yasi Salek? Yeah. So he's like a urban legend, the people's hero.
1:28:20 Speaker 05 Yeah. Do you know who George Best is?
1:28:23 Yasi Salek? Yes.
1:28:23 Speaker 05 So he was like the lower league George Best, sort of famous for being brilliant, but sort of unhinged. And.
1:28:32 Yasi Salek? George Best is the one that built a glass house in Manchester that everyone would come and stand outside to see if they could see him?
1:28:37 Speaker 05 Oh, I don't know that part, but yeah, he was.
1:28:40 Yasi Salek? I might have to fact check.
1:28:41 Speaker 05 Quite a character. But, you know, womanizing, drinking, taking drugs. My favorite part of his story, actually, he retired from football after playing for Cardiff City. And in the eighties, he was arrested and put in prison for impersonating a police officer. Which, why would you do that? Because he was confiscating people's drugs from them.
1:29:05 Yasi Salek? So fucking sick.
1:29:06 Speaker 05 Which is such a good idea.
1:29:09 Yasi Salek? So he's a genie, he's a genius.
1:29:11 Speaker 05 He went to jail and then I think he struggled with drugs for the, he had, he had recently died. So he died in nineteen ninety with a heart attack, possibly drug related heart attack. So this was a sort of tribute to the, to him a few years later to put him on the cover.
1:29:27 Yasi Salek? There was another famous Welsh criminal that they also put on their cover, right?
1:29:33 Speaker 05 Of the first album, Howard Marks.
1:29:35 Yasi Salek? Yes.
1:29:35 Speaker 05 You guys know who Howard Marks is?
1:29:37 Yasi Salek? No, but I do now because I looked him up, but then he became like part of the entourage of the Super Free Animals, right?
1:29:42 Speaker 05 He was a sort of weed smuggling mastermind, again, like a very smart guy who, a Welsh guy who'd gone to Oxford and made all of these sort of upper class connections. Which then somehow allowed him to become an international drug smuggler, strictly speaking weed, I think. But he was sort of, was a double agent. The British government thought that he was a spy for them, but actually he wasn't. He was selling drugs. He wrote a book that came out right around the time of the first Super Free Animals album that did really well. But the, the album cover is all of his passport photos from his multiple, multiple fake passports.
1:30:23 Yasi Salek? Yeah, so cool. He came up in another band's plan, but I can't remember which one because my brain damage. So tell me, tell me about this song.
1:30:34 Yasi Salek? The world of super free animals. So it is not a radio hit, obviously because of the fucks, but does it sort of get a word of mouth life and that's how it sells?
1:30:49 Speaker 05 By this time, they've had four singles, two of them were top 20, the previous two. And this one without, with only the tank for promotion prior, this one not on the radio, it went to number 22. So they're, you know, they're making an impact. But I think what really made it their anthem is it would be played at the end of their gigs and they really worked it. Kian managed to build it into being this sort of opus of 18, 23 minute long sort of techno wig out. But they also, they began looping a Bill Hicks sample at the start of the song. So that's how it would kind of lead into the song.
1:31:30 Speaker 05 They took a line from one of his albums that come out after he died in 1997, where he's talking about Waco and David Koresh and the FBI and the Clinton administration, you know, going in and killing everybody. And he says that they say they went in over concerns of child molestation. And he goes on to say then, why aren't you having tanks knock down the Catholic church? If mole, child molestation is your concern.
1:31:59 Yasi Salek? Damn.
1:32:00 Speaker 05 Which was just a year after Sinead O'Connor had ripped up. Pope picture on Saturday Night Live is still pretty out there. She'd be saying that sort of stuff, I guess. But what he said in the standup comedy was they don't want the voice of reason because otherwise we'd all be free. And then he goes on to say, and this is, this is the segment they use. Otherwise we'd all be free. Otherwise we wouldn't believe their fucking horseshit lies, nor the fucking propaganda machine, the mainstream media, and buy their horseshit products that we don't fucking need and become a third world consumer fucking plantation, which is what we're becoming. Fuck them. They're liars and murderers. All governments are liars and murderers. And at that point, they loop that final sentence. And then behind that.
1:32:44 Speaker 05 And that sort of early aughts, they would have a sort of montage of George Bush, Tony Blair, drone bomb footage from the Iraq war, whatever it was. And then they'd go into the men don't give a fuck and people would go crazy. Because it was a very refreshing sort of anti-war statement. At a time that was just very depressing, post nine 11 atmosphere, right? And so they would then go into this and there's a huge catharsis of being, jumping up and down and singing the men don't, they don't give a fuck about anybody else. They don't give a fuck about anybody else, over and over and over and over.
1:33:27 Speaker 05 It's sort of joyful and it goes on for a long time.
1:33:41 Yasi Salek? Much like what Bill Hicks was saying, being incredibly prophetic and completely true and coming true. It's like kind of scary that they, we've always had threads of this in society and people trying to like warn against, because the lyrics outside of, you know, they don't give a fuck about anybody else. You could sub out like the word phones for televisions, right? There's nothing much to do but sit and rot in front of television staring back at me. I'm just waiting for the microwaves to wash me into the sea. Not know, we're not, not there.
1:34:28 Speaker 05 I did see them play this once at the, well, I've seen them multiple times and they always play this. But at the Auto Bar in Baltimore, it was maybe 2002, 2003, around about then. So it's not far, not long after nine 11. And so they have this Bill Hicks loop and they have this visuals, you know, with George Bush or whatever. Obviously, the place is full of like sweet, smart indie kids of the Baltimore area, but also a small contingent of, I guess, like military Baltimore being a naval base. And they went truly crazy and were heckling and throwing bottles. So the band kind of like hustled offstage
1:35:10 Speaker 05 pretty quickly and ended up like running to their tour bus. And this sort of small mob followed them and they surrounded the bus and they were throwing bottles. They were throwing eggs at one point, but where did, where'd they get those eggs? The Autobahn, but it was really, they were angry about it because it was sort of, you know, anti-war.
1:35:34 Yasi Salek? Sure. They felt it was anti their culture and families and stuff.
1:35:38 Speaker 05 Yeah. And all he's really saying is they don't give a fuck about anybody else.
1:35:43 Yasi Salek? Right, which is not untrue. They released another version, a live version, right? In two thousand and four?
1:35:50 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:35:50 Yasi Salek? The twenty-three minute live version from London's Hammersmith Apollo. And this version, because it's so much longer and so many more chorus, the word fuck is mentioned approximately one hundred times.
1:36:04 Speaker 05 So it does, it is the, it does have the record for them.
1:36:09 Yasi Salek? It should, ICP, they heard about that and they were like, mm, actually, we're gonna go ahead and.
1:36:15 Speaker 05 Yeah. So they didn't play for a long time. They haven't put out new music for many, many, many years, but they did reform in twenty fifteen and do a kind of reunion tour. And you can see some of, they played a ton of festivals. You can see some of that footage on YouTube and it is a huge sort of techno wig out. Um, there's a bit in the middle where it just goes full techno rave and they all leave the stage and then they come back on in their Yeti costumes from the Golden Retriever video and they go back into it with their flying Vs and the Yeti. It just is such a crescendo of sort of chaos and it's very joyful,
1:36:57 Speaker 05 even though the message of that song is, on the face of it, not that heartwarming, but it's a, it's a joyful, cathartic release of energy.
1:37:09 Yasi Salek? Well, it kind of goes with that, like, joy being an act of resistance. I know it's kind of a banal thing, but, you know, when sort of specifically applied can be very true, which is what was very true of rave culture, which is why the government eventually shut it down, was not because people were dying, because that was pretty infrequent, it was because young people were gathering together and unifying, and they don't like that.
1:37:32 Speaker 05 And taking mind-altering substances that made them question the status quo.
1:37:38 Yasi Salek? Yeah, but, yeah, they don't care if they take mind-altering substances in the privacy and squalor of their own homes that make them incapacitated to do or think about anything, but they don't like it when they're all together.
1:37:48 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:37:49 Yasi Salek? And being up and joyful and talking about ideas and, and having their brains turned towards kindness and love, which is kind of, whatever it is, is sort of one of the byproducts of ecstasy. It's a togetherness, it's a communal feeling.
1:38:02 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:38:03 Yasi Salek? Nobody does ecstasy by themselves.
1:38:04 Speaker 05 No, you shouldn't, shouldn't do it. I mean, maybe with at least a hamster. And I don't remember what the press said about it at the time.
1:38:14 Yasi Salek? There was one, it says, "The Man Don't Give a Fuck, a song built around a loop sample of a Steely Dan song about coked-up Californian brats of the bourgeois persuasion. The super furries turned the song round into an anti-Tory rant of such simplistic power that it rivals Rage Against the Machine's bomb track, 'Fuck You, I Won't Do What You Tell Me,' as the greatest dumb fart in the flabby face of the dominant ideology ever." Pretty good.
1:38:38 Speaker 05 That's pretty good.
1:38:38 Yasi Salek? Yeah. That was an enemy.
1:38:42 Speaker 05 Yeah. It had a resurgence during the pandemic, I guess, because, I don't know how closely you follow British politics, Yasi, but the Boris Johnson government were issuing all of these rules and people, they had pretty strict lockdown rules and people were dying in hospitals without their families, but they were sort of partying in Number 10, having, having drinks and hanging out with each other. And when that was discovered, it kind of brought down Boris Johnson eventually, but, you know, super furry animals fans sort of started a campaign to stream The Man Don't Give a Fuck, just to hammer at home that they really only care about themselves, the Tory government, and the man in general.
1:39:26 Yasi Salek? Real evergreen song, sadly.
1:39:29 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:39:30 Yasi Salek? Not gonna work out for the rest of time. And that is why it is a perfect song. See what I did there?
1:39:36 Speaker 05 Mm-hmm.
1:39:37 Yasi Salek? Chloe Walsh. Thank you for coming on this podcast for the second time. Thank you for the immense amount of legwork you did on this beloved, perfect song. Just thank you for being you.
1:39:51 Speaker 05 Thank you for talking about the Super furry animals, one of the greatest bands of all time, with me.
1:39:58 Yasi Salek? All right, come back next week for a new episode of Bandsplain.
1:40:10 Yasi Salek? If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bandsplain. Our guest today was Chloe Walsh. This episode was produced by Liz Sanchez and edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Executive producers for Bandsplain are Gina Delvac and me, Yasi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Cosentino and Jennifer Clavon and graciously recorded by Carlos Salgarza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to our producer emeritus, Producer Dylan, aka Dylan Tupper Rupert, and also Michael Hardman, Casey Simonsen, Leah Edwards, Sean Fennessy, David McDonough, Dana Myerson, Jessica Hopper, and Raw Honey. Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bandsplain on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.
1:41:01 Yasi Salek? Do you think there's Cornish on Duolingo?
1:41:04 Speaker 05 I don't know.
1:41:05 Yasi Salek? What if I devoted the next like eight years of my life to learning fluent Cornish?
1:41:10 Speaker 05 There is an artist signed to Heavenly called Gueno who sings in Cornish, and she's wonderful.
1:41:16 Yasi Salek? Okay, shout out Gueno.
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