Song 79: Ice Hockey Hair

I've been thinking about why I love the Super Furry Animals so much.

Gruff's doing a radio show at the moment called 'Resist Phoney Encores' and clearly his idea of a phoney encore includes getting the old gang back together, as the other, still super but not quite so super FAs have lost patience with him and reconvened as Das Koolies.

Good on them - the Furries were never a one-man band. However good a Gruff Rhys solo record is, it's never quite the band in its uncontainable pomp. This is the strongest sign yet that there really isn't going to be any new music from the band as a five-piece, which is a bummer.

So, I'm taking on  my favourite Furries song, and one plenty of people consider their greatest, 'Ice Hockey Hair'. ? What makes it a definitive SFA song? Why is it is so magical?

I'm thinking about the drum bit 4 minutes and 7 seconds in - that's where the secret lies. However many 100s of times I've listened to this song, that 5-second section, just when you think the song might be about to come to a close, never fails to make my heart scream with joy. What even is it? It's just an extravagant drum roll which lasts a little bit too long, it's just a rock'n'roll cliche ... and that's when  you realise that it's at these moments the Super Furry Animals are at their best, when they have earnt the right to employ a rock'n'roll cliche, and even then, can't help subverting it slightly.

Gruff Rhys can't help it. 'Resist Phoney Encores' is what he lives by. I remember him saying that the one thing he can't stand in songs is poignancy, and, to be fair, he's been almost entirely true to his word. Only on the wonderful solo album 'Hotel Shampoo' does he write anything close to straightforward love songs without a twist.

Somehow his whole career can be seen as a confrontation with his extraordinary melodic gift and the great "goodness" of his worldview.

People with those talents are few and far between ... Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, a few others ... and, no Gruff didn't have the pop voice for that level of stardom, but while those two geniuses would occasionally subvert but usually make full use of the joy and the cheesiness and let a song just be what it is, from 'Hey Jude' to 'Don't You Worry Bout a Thing', Gruff, never, never let it be ...

Think of 'Northern Lites' - their biggest hit, which doesn't get to the chorus till there've been three verses, and is about a weather system, 'Juxtapozed with You', with its unsettling vocoder and lyrics about house prices, 'For Now and Ever,' in the big, glorious outro, he starts deadpan intoning the words and you can't help laughing.

There's no poignancy. You can never stop and wallow in it.

And yet the Furries often make oddly moving music, even profound ... - who can you compare them to?

The Coen Brothers, maybe ...

or the guy in the skittles advert who makes everything he touches turn into skittles ...

'Ice Hockey Hair', a song the band almost thought was too cheesy to release, about taking advice from a woman with a mullet, it could be nothing, but they can't stop themselves turning it into something joyful and magnificent - it has 3 or 4 great tunes - they try to fuck it up, it has 3 or 4 scuzzy bits but they still sound amazing.

It's not like SFA weren't trying to be successful, they clearly were, it's just they couldn't be conventional. The nearest they came to a conventional sounding record was 'Hey Venus' in 2007, and, you know, it's got some nice tunes, but it's not quite there ...

And, you know, sometimes, compared to other artists, I guess they do sound a bit "shallow" and sometimes the evasion, the wackiness, is frustrating, but that's to be put along side the fact that they were an incredibly hardworking and innovative band - they released a lot of music, and they were ahead of the game on multimedia content, streaming, on everything really.

Gruff's "goodness" is such a big part of his writing too - it's so often political, just obliquely so, so often full of hope and anger and good causes.

I think that's all part of why those that love them love them so much.