Beyond the new Blur album, much of my walking about out in the real world recently has been soundtracked by the first three albums by Super Furry Animals, a firm 1990s favorite that I’ve been revisiting with no small sense of wonderment.
This was a band who, after a fun but uneven first album — 1996’s Fuzzy Logic, at turns fueled by Prog Rock, folk, and the confused directionless Britpop zeitgeist of the time — immediately reinvented itself with a single made from a discarded B-side and quickly became part of my musical and spiritual identity for a good five or six years afterwards. Listening back to all this stuff now is a weirdly, strongly nostalgic experience where specific lines or guitar licks feel like sense memories is the strangest of ways.
The discarded B-side was “The Man Don’t Give A Fuck,” built around a looped sample of a single line from Steely Dan’s “Showbiz Kids” — “You know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else” — that is repurposed as an anthem against cultural and societal oppressors that feels relentless and undeniable. It fed into the next album, Radiator, released a year or so after Fuzzy Logic but sounding like almost an entirely different band: one more comfortable in their own skins and happier being more esoteric and angry even as the hooks and the catchiness in every track only increased.
There are lines throughout Radiator that I can tell now pushed my head in certain directions at an impressionable time, listening back now: the nervy contrarian attitude of things like “Why do you do/What they tell you?” sure, but also the humor and silliness of “Marie Curie was Polish born, but French bred/Ha! French bread!” in the same song. That’s also the song that says, entirely seriously, “I live my life in a quest for information,” which to this day feels like a key to everything in my head.
All of this against music that reached outside my traditional musical interests of the era and retired my head to some degree: there are echoes and influences of dance music, of Can, and Arthur Lee and Love, and Sun-Ra and mariachi music and all of it felt like a puzzle to track down and work out at the time. Radiator came out in the same year as Primal Scream’s similarly restless, inspirational Vanishing Point, and the two together were endlessly important in pushing me out of my comfort zone.
What’s been so rewarding about revisiting this stuff (and their third album, Guerilla, which is sonically even more diverse) is that, thankfully, it still sounds as fresh, as catchy, and wonderfully, as fun as it did when I first heard it, a quarter century or so ago. It’s not the same as stepping back into my own history, but it’s at least a sign that not everything I was thinking back then was the product of an eager, impressionable, and naive mind that should’ve known better.