This is a spectacularly overblown song that should, by all rights, collapse under its own weight – especially as the choir(s) come in at 3:58, and the whole thing starts sounding like a stoned take on a Bond theme from Bizarro World – but somehow the momentum keeps it going even as things start falling apart (I’d say around 5:11 is where it really starts shedding pieces, and feeling like a rocket that’s trying to achieve orbit). But what this song has always been about for me, is the electric piano. Seriously, by the time you reach 6:24 and there’s just the awesome jamming/collapsing piano solo, I’m gone, man. I love that so, so much. More songs should be ready to give you the full breakfast that this one does.
(Somewhat randomly, but worth pointing out: This is the lead track from Super Furry Animals’ Love Kraft album, and it definitely puts you in the mood to expect something epic. If you are listening to the album for the first time as a result of this song, I have a word of advice for you: Stop after this song. Everything else on the album is a terrible letdown after this.)
There’s something to be said for a good song that builds before your ears, adding instruments and depth as if unfolding before you. Super Furry Animals’ “Suckers” is a fine example of this, adding a particularly plaintive vocal from Gruff Rhys and the occasional aural joke as it grows into full bloom by its end (The showy guitar effect at 2:41 after the lyric about “power ballad songs”), but underneath it all, a simple little heartbroken song about the end of a love affair. “It’s over/And we’d just begun,” Rhys sings somewhere between tongue-in-cheek showmanship and sincerity, “Oh, we’d just begun.”
After the rain-themed songs over the weekend, I couldn’t resist choosing this one for today. The fact that I found myself with this song playing on repeat at some point in the last couple of days didn’t hurt, of course. There’s a comfortable feeling to this song, the slow march of it (with slide guitar, piano and constantly-present buzz in the background; it’s got a wonderfully strange arrangement, if you think about it) filled with the warmth of the vocals and gentle comedy of the lyrics (“If you fled a million miles/I’d chase you for a day/If I could be bothered”) to create something soft, unassuming and casually charming. It’s a lovely wee song, really.
There are songs you here, and just know that – no matter what else – you’ll always love their creators for. Such it was with “The Man Don’t Give A Fuck,” a song that should, by all rights have disappeared into limbo, but instead became the song that made Super Furry Animals’ reputation.
The song was originally meant to be a b-side to “If You Don’t Want Me To Destroy You,” the final single from the band’s first album, but was pulled at the last minute when Steely Dan refused to approve the sample that’s the basis for the song’s chorus (That “You know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else”? That’s from Steely Dan’s “Show Biz Kids”:
“Showbusiness kids/Making movies of themselves/You know they don’t give a fuck/About anybody else,” it goes, in a lovely 1970s accusation of a culture that’d really take root a decade later. Oh, friends, you were so far ahead of your time, and no-one really listened anyway). Weirdly, wonderfully, the band persisted in trying to get the sample cleared, eventually giving Dan’s Donald Fagan an impressive 95% of the songwriting royalties and releasing the track as their Christmas single for 1996, complete with a sticker telling listeners with sensitive ears “Warning! This track contains the word **** 50 times!”
It also contains doo-wop harmonies, sleigh bells and the first sign of the anger that would come to the fore in later releases: “Out of focus ideology/Keeps the masses from majority,” the second verse goes before it complains about “Experts, brainwashed, tumble-dried.” The result? A protest song that’s never entirely explicit about what it’s protesting, and so becomes a wonderfully versatile fuck-you to authority and oppression in general, an expression of anger as an energy that you can dance and shout to as much and as loudly as you want. Wonderfully, despite being entirely unsuited to radioplay – There were edited versions that either removed the numerous “fuck”s, or in one great instance, replaced them with someone saying “monkeys” – it made it to #22 in the top 40.
Never underestimate people’s desire to have a revolution they can dance to, apparently.
Worth pointing out: When this song was played live, at least for the period where I’d be seeing the band as often as possible, this would be the final song of the night, and would last somewhere in the region of 10 minutes or so at least, with the band leaving the stage after the song as it sounds here, but Cian Ciaran keeping the Steely Dan loop going and seeing where he could take the song from there. We’d dance for as long as we could.
I first heard this song as a bootleg, downloaded from some site ahead of the release of Phantom Power back in… what, 2002? 2003? And I remember thinking, at the time, that this really was the ultimate Super Furry Animals song – It’s got the trad band bit, with the harmonica and the electronic piano and the guitars and drums with Gruff singing sweetly over the top (Even if what he’s actually singing is somewhat less than sweet: “I see/Televisions/Pretty pictures/Of starvation,” he sings at one point, almost making it sound an attractive proposition. Also, “I see fractures/I see fragments” remains one of my favorite lines of anything, ever), as well as the techno breakdown and the 1970s retro moment and everything that the band does so well. As a song, it’s a wonderful journey, evolving from the sampled circus sounds at the start to the glamorous, Bond theme-esque strings at the end that fall apart, drip into nothingness. In many ways, it was all downhill for the band from here – Certainly, the next album, Love Kraft, was a disappointment when compared to Phantom Power – but, really, what an incredible way to go out.
There’s something about the guitar sound in “Ice Hockey Hair,” especially the opening noodling, that makes me think of songs from the 1970s, when guitarists weren’t afraid to attempt long-haired, looping beauty instead of riffs or distortion pedals or noise. I say that semi-jokingly, but there’s something appealing to me about the lack of self-consciousness in prog-rock that feels missing in the post-punk music that followed, and that indescribable something is one of the things I like so much about Super Furry Animals; a lack of embarrassment in following their musical bliss, perhaps, even if said bliss takes them into places like a seven-minute long song about table tennis and unfashionable haircuts filled with autotuned vocals (back in 1997, before they were everywhere!), Stooges-esque choruses and a wonderfully inviting schizophrenia when it comes to what decade the song belonged to. The answer, of course, was “the decade you’re living in right now.”
Now that you’re here, tell me you’re a non-believer, as the song says.
There’s no getting around it: Super Furry Animals’ “Fire In My Heart” is a wonderfully, shamelessly soppy song. For a band that seems to live to subvert expectation, play around with sounds and detourn pop history, it’s amazingly straightforward, with little wordplay or sarcasm in the lyrics (Okay, maybe “the watchdogs of the profane” isn’t a phrase you’d expect to hear in every love song, but give them some slack), and the arrangement of the song – constantly building, adding new sounds and layers with every new verse – seems similarly traditional. There isn’t any heavy hidden meaning to “Fire In My Heart,” it’s the band being sincere – or, as sincere as they can be (I still think the “Ba Ba Ba” backing vocals is over-egging the pudding for comic effect, so to speak, as is the “Ooh-oooh-oooh” ending, but both are easily forgiven) – and enjoyably saccharine sweet. More bands should just try and write love songs this simple, I think.
Despite being the “hidden track,” I’ve always been fairly convinced that “The Citizens’ Band” is one of the best songs, if not the best song, on the Super Furry Animals’ third album, Guerrilla; for one thing, it’s one of the most straightforward songs in terms of structure and production (Guerrilla felt, at times, like a reaction to the autotuning and increasing manipulation of pop music post-recording that was beginning to creep into the top 40 at the time it was released, and as a result feels at times more sterile and less warm than their other albums; I don’t know how much of that is actually there, and how much is my reading of it, mind you), and for another, lyrically it feels personal and true in a way that few other songs do, if that makes sense.
There’s a 1970s vibe to the song, for me; not just in the high notes – listen as Gruff strains at the end of the song, or during the “We all need”s in the chorus – but the flute and the shuffling drums that feel lethargic in the same way that Ringo often did. There’s something about the slightly stoned feel of the song that reminds me of “Hometown Unicorn,” the band’s first single, in a good way; it could be a song from that same era, with the slightly scruffy feel to the whole thing, the guitars simultaneously sounding like glam rock and sludge, and the most hilarious handclaps in pop music (Seriously, if you listen close, there’s just one clap every now and again, a very steady, slow pattern).
Lyrically, it feels like two songs in a way; the very specific joke about writing a song in CB radio slang (“I’m a breaker that breaks/And my handle is Goblin”) and the far more universal longing when we get to the chorus, sung with more passion – and, perhaps tellingly, more voices – as we get “Me and you/So many ways to communicate,” a lyric that always sticks in my head as weirdly and wonderfully important in ways that I can feel but not necessarily understand, but something that feels at the center of my world as I end up writing on the internet about social media for a living. So many ways to communicate, indeed; if only I could write that in the harmonies and emphasis that it deserves, that I feel every time I listen to the song.
“When fun is outlawed, only outlaws will have fun.”
There’s something about that line, spoken/sung in the middle of this song and – like much of it by that point – barely audible, lost in the noise and buzz that’s grown up around everything that’s going on as the song has gone on, that speaks to the appeal of Super Furry Animals as a band. It recalls Bob Dylan’s famous line “To live outside the law, you must be honest” (from “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” I think? Google agrees, but that’s not necessarily a sign of anything other than a lot of other people agreeing to misremember these things), but plays with it, just like so much of SFA’s music is a detournment of other music and genres (Listen to this song, after all, which starts with gentle acoustic guitar finger picking before being overpowered by powerchords, ELO-esque harmonies and a more “electronica,” to use the horrible-but-apt term, feeling as we approach the bridge). And it speaks to SFA’s attitude in general, which is a knowing playfulness, a self-aware sense of what’s going on but determined attempt not to become weighed down by the darkness and heartlessness all around. It’s not “If fun is outlawed,” it’s when, but you can tell from the line (and it’s delivery) that Super Furry Animals are perfectly prepared to break whatever laws they have to, in order to stay true to themselves, and have fun.
