I wanted to make a protest song sounding like a love duet from the 80s, says Gruff Rhys on new solo album
AS a bright Cardiff afternoon fades to dusk, Gruff Rhys is pondering the duality of his new solo album.
“It’s good to have vinegar on the chips,” decides the engaging Welshman.
Sadness Sets Me Free finds him matching lush, uplifting tunes to darker lyrical themes.
Even its name suggests both despair and hope . . . all in the space of four words.
For the 53-year-old frontman of currently dormant Super Furry Animals, the tone is set by the lilting country twang of the title track.
“I love melodic music so much,” he tells me. “It can physically improve my day. But if the lyrics are saccharine as well, it becomes unpalatable to me.”
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Continuing his food-themed train of thought, he adds: “In the Welsh language, there’s a saying, ‘too much pudding will choke a dog’ [gormod o bwdin dagith gi].”
Talking via the customary Zoom, Gruff chooses his words carefully, occasionally closing his eyes and pausing in contemplation.
As a singer, he strikes up a gravelly groove on Sadness Sets Me Free, the song, channelling his inner Leonard Cohen or Serge Gainsbourg over a pedal steel-enriched backdrop.
When I suggest favourable comparison to those two late greats, he laughs: “Well, in my dreams!
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“I love Leonard obviously and I find Gainsbourg really inspirational, especially as an older artist now.”
Gruff has long been infatuated by effortlessly cool French pop from the Sixties and Seventies. It fits neatly into the swirling psychedelic sound he’s known for.
He recalls: “When I turned 30, I had to look for new heroes. Gainsbourg wasn’t signed until he was 30 and he went on to write 600 songs.”
The Gitanes-smoking French legend with his wonderfully lived-in voice is best known for his breathy duet with Jane Birkin, Je T’aime Moi Non Plus, but he gave so much more.
Gruff says: “He worked constantly, doing soundtracks, film scores and songs for other people as well as his own wild albums. I love the music and I love his work ethic.”
This chimes with hard-working Gruff’s own career which has taken in a similar variety of projects as well as nine LPs with the sonically adventurous Super Furry Animals.
Thanks to his various guises, Sadness Sets Me Free is the 25th album he has been involved in since starting out from his hometown of Bethesda, North Wales, with the band Ffa Coffi Pawb in the late Eighties.
Fittingly, most of the new record was laid down during three exhilarating days in Gainsbourg’s homeland.
Gruff and his band headed to La Frette Studios, situated in a 19th century house on the outskirts of Paris, where they hooked up with Maxime Kosinetz, a sound engineer he’d met while working with Algerian desert rock outfit Imarhan.
“Maxime knows how to record intimate vocals,” he says. “I didn’t have to shout and I could be restrained and understated as a singer. He could handle me almost whispering.”
Gruff had thought of Sadness Sets Me Free as his “post-pandemic album”, his testament to “starting afresh”, but admits that the lyrics prove he was “scarred by the whole experience” of the Covid years.
“There wasn’t much going on for me during the lockdowns,” he says. “Like a lot of people, I was concentrating on feeding my kids, trying to teach them — badly — and just getting by day to day.”
Gruff remembers his joy at being able to get back on tour and then to go into a studio to make Sadness Sets Me Free.
He’s thrilled with the results of his latest endeavours and says: “The musicianship shines through because we could record the album in an old-fashioned way.
“For the most part, everyone was in one room, playing together. We used acoustic instruments, double bass, piano, drums, and Maxime was able to make it sound really powerful.”
The sessions took place immediately after a tour of Spain, “so we’d rehearsed the songs live, either as part of the set or, for the more meandering ones, at soundchecks.”
Cue a deep dive into some of the tracks, starting with Bad Friend, a song we can all relate to because we’ve all let someone down.
‘They say Australia is wider than the moon’
“The song is about unconditional friendship,” says Gruff. “Life in the 21st century is so kaleidoscopic in terms of the things we need to do day by day to get by.
“Unfortunately, it’s harder to make time for your loved ones and touring as a musician doesn’t help.”
Cover Up The Cover Up takes bitter aim at lying politicians yet is gloriously playful at the same time. Gruff says: “It’s hard to put the world to rights in four minutes but I wanted to make a protest song that sounded like a love duet, like some power ballad from the Eighties.”
Then there’s a song about his immediate surroundings, They Sold My Home To Build A Skyscaper.
“In Cardiff, a lot of cultural spaces have disappeared,” he affirms. “They throw up large apartment blocks so a lot of venues and pubs have shut down, even the studio where we [Super Furry Animals] recorded.
“If this is happening in my life, it’s probably happening globally. It’s very frustrating and bad for music and art.”
Still, Gruff’s song does make room for the wonderful line, “They say Australia is wider than the moon.”
“For me, all the best lyrics come from unguarded conversations with people,” he says. “I remember my friend Neil giving me that line.” While we’re on the subject of the Welsh capital, I ask Gruff about his passion for Cardiff City FC, where he’s a season ticket holder.
“I know nothing about football and I’m a terrible player but I can walk to the stadium,” he says.
“Cardiff is where I live and it’s a better place when the team is doing well.
“I like the community of it — and the swearing.”
And does he join in the singing? “It’s my day off,” he quips.
We return to the new songs and ethereal, orchestrated Celestial Candyfloss which follows in tradition of cosmic Gruff Rhys songs.
“That’s about me looking up at the Milky Way in early August and seeing all the stars,” he says.
And what about I Tendered My Resignation? “I was trying to get the band to jam and create different grooves, not to make something too formulaic,” he answers.
“I suppose it’s about giving up on a relationship, so I tried to construct this narrative. It got really long and, in the end, quite unlistenable. So we chopped it right down — and the lyrics make LESS sense now!”
Over the years, Gruff has divided his albums between those sung in English, like this one, and others in his first language, Welsh.
He confesses: “I’m quite surprised that I’ve made so many in English but I’ll always write in Welsh as well.
“I’m from the age of Anglo-American culture. I fell in love with pop music and I wanted to try out the English language.
“For me, writing lyrics is a bit like a crossword puzzle, trying to fit words into melodies. Being able to do that in two languages has been extremely enjoyable.”
I ask Gruff if he thinks the Welsh language is in good health in 2024.
“It has more visibility today than when I started out as a musician,” he replies.
“But the communities where it is spoken are in constant crisis — like most minoritised languages in Europe, it’s extremely hard to maintain it in the age of big tech.”
However, Gruff is happy to report that “the pop music coming out of the Welsh language community is incredible. There seems to be a great new record every week.”
He singles out Pys Melyn, which he describes as a “psych-rock group”.
“They put out a very melodic album last summer called Bolmynydd and they’re going to be doing some shows with me.”
‘John Cale is a very brave and unique artist’
So, does the new breed of Welsh-speaking musicians look up to him as a trailblazer?
“Probably not, I’m an oldie now,” smiles Gruff. “I’m out of the way and this is a new generation blazing its own trail. It’s exciting to see and I’ve had nothing to do with it.”
He also spares thoughts for two established Welsh artists — John Cale, who came to fame as a member of the Velvet Underground, and is still going strong at 81, and Cate Le Bon, who produced the latest Wilco album, Cousin.
“John Cale has been an inspiration,” says Gruff. “I love how he wants to be in the moment.
“Even when he revisits old songs, he doesn’t want them to sound the same. He’s a very brave and unique artist.
“On the Welsh language track he did recently with Kelly Lee Owens [Corner Of My Sky], she got something magic out of him.”
Gruff adds: “I also love Cate Le Bon’s records. She’s great as a producer and has a nice way with people.”
Next we take a diversion through the mists of time to the seminal fourth album by Super Furry Animals, Mwng, which was sung entirely in Welsh.
Gruff says: “When we signed to Creation [Oasis, My Bloody Valentine] in the Nineties, the English language was very dominant in pop culture.
“But Creation were a really open-minded label and, by the fourth album, they were completely relaxed with us doing a full album in Welsh so they got right behind it.
“Of course they stopped trading [in 1999] before it came out but we kept the faith. After touring three English language albums, I think our audiences were ready for it.” The album proved a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic and Gruff believes he knows why.
“All great music comes from people being true to themselves,” he says. “That album even helped launch us in America — our records having been largely ignored there before Mwng.
“It was unique to the American ear. We weren’t trying to make pastiche versions of their records.”
SFA got back together in 2015 to tour the 15th anniversary re-issue of Mwng, begging the obvious question: Will there be more reunions?
Gruff says: “The plan was to do five shows around that album but, in the end, we toured for two years. We revived a couple of the other records [Fuzzy Logic and Radiator] while we were at it.
“It felt as if outside things had combined — that they were bigger than yourself and you had to go with it. But we’re not talking about it [another revival] at the moment. Who knows?”
I point out that there’s a lot of love around at the moment for bands who started out in the Nineties such as Blur. “We seem to be in an era where people don’t split up but are suspended in time and space,” he muses.
“For me, I’m writing all the time and I try not to get distracted by nostalgia but when we did get back together, it was beautiful.”
‘I’ll never take making music for granted’
For forward-facing Gruff, his life in music is a restless quest for his next song.
The final track on Sadness Sets Me Free, I’ll Keep Singing, is also its most uplifting and confirmation that retirement will never be an option.
He says: “It’s a nice place to leave a record. I love music’s power to be hopeful and to bring people together.
“I’m amazed I’ve been able to take part in so many records. It’s something I’m still obsessed with and I’ll never take it for granted.
“Ever since the first album, I’ve always thought I may not get the opportunity again.
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“This is an adventure.”
