Unfortunately due to an overrunning salon appointment Betty missed the start of this, although having the main act on at 8.20pm on a Thursday does seem a bit early, so no idea about the support act (though one of them came on to sing backing vocals later on) – and missed first few numbers of Gruff’s trawl through his well-received but typically eccentric ‘American Interior’ album. He jumped around the sequence of the album a bit, talked a lot (essentially an extended Welsh shaggy dog story, see more details below) and threw in some songs from previous solo efforts as well.
The very polite audience indulged Mr Gruff some downright whimsical banter, a slide show and a number of props, including the giant fake cacti on the stage. He had a four piece backing band of some talent, the drummer nicked from a recent version of The Flaming Lips BM believes, and played mainly acoustic guitar with some keyboard effects from time to time.
The ‘American Interior’ project had been at ABC1 last year as a film (another very eccentric occasion BM heard) but this was the first full-band version to hit Glasgow. The album is a song cycle and tells of a Welshman (related to Rhys, an ancestor) in the late 1700s who hears talk of a Welsh-speaking tribe in a remote part of the “Amercian interior”, an area at the time being discovered and conquered by the various colonial powers. We may never know how much truth is held in this story of the brave Welsh adventurer (depicted on film and in puppet form onstage). Although willfully obtuse in narrative and confusing on detail, the picture painted of an unexplored America, however removed from the reality of the day, does catch the imagination and is a stark contrast to the modern all-enveloping nature of modern day “US culture” (hullo, MacDonalds, oops hullo lawyers, goodbye MacDonalds). The story would not work however without the quality of the songs.
There are a lot of laughs as GR laconically tries to describe the story, with props, reenactments of key moments and signs (“Applause” etc).
There are lush songs, often Beatles-ish, occasionally the band giving it some welly, in a folk-psych rock idiom mainly, and Gruff’s voice is an instrument of wonder, singing mainly in English with a couple of oldies in Welsh. It does however make BM hanker for the uncontrollable, often unpredictable and sometimes anarchic, energy and talent of his previous collective Super Furry Animals, possibly the best band to come out of the Britpop era (with apologies to Radiohead and the Manics, but you see SFA were actually on Creation for a while…). However they have been on indefinite hiatus for a few years now, and Rhys is not about to revisit their material in nostalgia any time soon. He looks a bit (studiedly no doubt) like a trainee teacher in his jumper and jacket, you kind of wonder if he and Jarvis Cocker are both ploughing the same “used to be a rockstar, getting older now, really quite talented, can I do something else now, maybe a bit more intellectual, mainly?” furrow of Arts Council funding, “projects” rather than albums etc. – nothing wrong with that though.
Towards the end and for the encore he brings out some ‘Hotel Shampoo’ and ‘Candylion’ numbers (although BM would have to say the title track of that album has always been a bit of a dirge, sorry)
‘Gwm Mi Wn’, ‘Gyrru Gyrru Gyrru’ and ‘Sensations In The Dark’ all feature in the encore and are probably among his best songs, a couple from the current album might get onto that list but time will tell. The fun he has manipulating his voice and the overall tempo during the middle of those three, combined with the ridiculousness of the repeated vocal reminds BM again of those 20 minute techo wig-outs that SFA were capable of, nights where almost anything appeared possible, musically at least.
So it’s good to see this singular troubadour doing his thing in Glasgow, you would think he’d be an obvious Celtic Connections booking but maybe not – SFA certainly had some authority issues to say the least!
Either way, come back soon, perhaps with Bumff and the others?
- Ibibio Sound Machine - 4 February 2025
- Broken Chanter / Raveloe - 31 January 2025
- Mogwai - 27 January 2025