Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys brings his volcanic show to The Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea

Gruff Rhys is talking about his latest album Seeking New Gods, but he’s perhaps being a little disingenuous.

This is from a guy who once released an album, American Interior, telling the story of the Welsh explorer John Evans who travelled to America in the 1790s in a bid to find a legendary Welsh-speaking tribe of native Americans – thus proving the myth of 12th century Welsh prince Madog ‘discovering’ the continent (Evans never found any Welsh speakers).

Seeking New Angels began life as a ‘biography’ of Mount Paektu, an active volcano on the border of North Korea and China that is sacred to both cultures.

It is the seventh solo album from the some-time Super Furry Animals frontman (more on that later).

As Gruff wrote, he began to reflect on the inhuman timescale of the peak’s existence and the intimate features that have allowed mythologies to be built around it over centuries.

Both the mountain and the songs became more and more personal to him as time went on.

Gruff speaks slowly and deliberately – sometimes you think he’s finished a thought when he’ll suddenly resume talking: ‘I was reading a book about a Korean film director and there was a passing reference to the mountain, for some reason it was a really evocative name, so I started to investigate it and ended up inspiring a whole record.

‘The album is about people and the civilizations, and the spaces people inhabit over periods of time.

‘How people come and go but the geology sticks around and changes more slowly.

‘I think it’s about memory and time. It’s still a biography of a mountain, but now it’s a Mount Paektu of the mind.

‘You won’t learn much about the real mountain from listening to this record but you will feel something, hopefully.’

‘Sometimes it's handy to have something to pin the record on.

‘Once I started, I could try and put a strict narrative to it, or, in the end I kept it pretty loose...’

So it’s not a concept album, then? Gruff skirts the question: ‘Well, there's some songs that are directly inspired by and are specifically about the mountain and others are pretty abstract – Hiking in Lightning is a bubble-gum pop song – they vary in depth!’

But Gruff says he has never been to either Korea or China, and says of the act of writing the album: ‘It's another way of travelling without actually going there, especially with the pandemic and climate change.

‘Maybe in the past I'd have tried to do a trip out there, but I felt it was enough to take inspiration from it and learn something, and write some songs.’

Given it’s rather difficult-to-access location, would he like to visit the mountain?

‘I won't push for it in particular, but if something comes up, it's always interesting to play for different cultures and in new places.

‘I'd definitely be into it.’

While the songs were inspired by the volcano, the performances came out of Gruff wanting to capitalise on the relationship he’d built with his touring band on his 2018 album, Babelsberg.

As Gruff reveals: ‘It's probably the longest I've sat on a new record. I recorded it in October 2018, and I mixed it in August 2019.

‘I imagine it would have come out at least a year earlier, but as records go, it's an album of a band playing live in the studio, pretty much.

‘There's a couple of synth and vocal overdubs, but not much really.

‘It's a record that could have been made in any year.’

Gruff had the new songs in hand while the band was still touring Babelsberg, and decided to strike while the iron was hot.

‘I felt it would be great to play a batch of new songs, just rehearsing them in soundcheck, playing them live at night, just to work them in, and the band were so good, they sounded complete instantaneously.

‘By the end of the tour I was thinking, I'd better record these quick – the band's on fire.

‘We booked three days in the studio at the end of the tour, but the studio didn't work for the first day so we recorded seven songs in two days and finished the other two up in Bristol.

‘It's a record that came out of touring, and in that sense it's a better than one usual – it's the same band playing all the parts.’

Given that it’s still his name on the record cover, did it feel more like a band effort than Gruff and a bunch of hired hands?

‘It's a pure band, and I'm very happy with the record. I suppose I call the band whatever the album's called,’ he laughs.

‘Lisa Jên (Brown) who's in the band, has sung on most of the records since (2007 release) Candylion, so… Osian (Gwynedd, piano), Kliph (Scurlock, drums) played on American Interior, I've just been picking people up gradually over the years.

‘I'm the weakest link really, I'm amazed I get to see these people play every night,’ he chuckles.

With the album release on hold due to the pandemic, how did Gruff fare during lockdown?

‘I suppose like a lot of people, my main job was as a carer or a dad – so lockdown was about washing dishes and kids.

‘Just trying to keep everyone sane and safe – there wasn’t much time really for making music unfortunately. I did what I could, but it just wasn't realistic for me. Life took over…’

‘Since it's been easing up a bit, I've been able to start recording some film soundtracks and keeping busy again, getting back into it gradually... and finally getting to put the album out!’

Back in 2016 Gruff put out a song I Love EU. With his first post-Brexit European tour pending next March, how does he feel now about it all?

‘The song was for the referendum, and it was a song about cultural ties rather than economics.

‘I really respect and agree with a lot of people's take on the left on the downside of the European Union as a kind of capitalist monster, but I think in the case of the referendum, we would have been much better off staying in Europe for a lot of reasons – from a cultural perspective and an anti-fascist perspective, and as a musician.

‘A lot of my worries about the referendum were from the perspective of a touring musician and it's a real nightmare.

‘I've got this tour coming up and it's a nightmare trying to navigate everything – all the visas for different countries and everything else. I'm afraid it's all bad,’ he gives a wry laugh.

And of course it would be remiss to let Gruff go without asking about the psychedelic-indie band he’s fronted since the early ’90s – the Super Furry Animals.

Aside from a reunion tour in 2015/6 their last album was 2009’s Dark Days/Light Years.

He says: ‘We're still working on reissues, and putting quite a few things together at the moment, but there's no talk of anything new.’

Gruff Rhys is at the Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea on Tuesday, November 2. Tickets £22.50. Go to wedgewood-rooms.co.uk.

A message from the editor, Mark Waldron.

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