Copyright

The Friday Project

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by The Friday Project 2015

Copyright © Ric Rawlins

Ric Rawlins asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008105235

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780008113377

Version: 2015-01-16

Dedication

To Marianne and Acorn

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Dramatis Personae

Prologue

Chapter One: Mountain lessons / Hot Puke / The pirates of Bethesda / Citizens band

Chapter Two: Festival time / The wildest man in North Wales / Heavy metal hoax / Ffa Coffi Pawb

Chapter Three: Ankst Records / Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci / Why aren’t we making techno? / The long walk home

Chapter Four: The teacher / Rock and squat / Cardiff in the sun / The rave

Chapter Five: SFA Soundsystem / The man don’t give a dub / Rhys says adios / Into space

Chapter Six: Birth of a ringtone / London turns on / Moog Droog / The wisdom of Robert Plant / Outlaw aircraft carrier

Chapter Seven: Tour of Cornwall / The number 23 / Fuzzy Birds / Outlaw hunting / Something out of Killing Joke

Chapter Eight: Fired from a cannon / Hanging with Howard Marks / Meet the press / Baz

Chapter Nine: Turning Japanese / F-16 Jetstreams / Cian-do attitude / Off the map

Chapter Ten: Painting demons / Bouncy castle licence / S4C on the attack / Overtaken by a wheel

Chapter Eleven: Rise of the Shinto gods / Air panic / Gringos in the mist / Unbridled freedom

Chapter Twelve: Deep sleep earthquake / Big trouble in Bogotá / Death to the monarchy

Chapter Thirteen: William Hague’s letter / Ice hockey hootenanny / Britpop turbulence / Electric harps

Chapter Fourteen: Taekwondo music / Love letter to El Niño / Das Koolies

Chapter Fifteen: Placid Casual, Acid Casuals / Bear in a vice / Gods and monsters

Chapter Sixteen: Kamikaze at Glastonbury / Bouncy ghetto blaster / Mash it up / Creation goes down

Chapter Seventeen: Recovered histories / The Roman road / Smoking goats / Pop strike / America

Chapter Eighteen: East coast negotiations / Lost in time

Chapter Nineteen: Intermission / Experiments with earthquakes / The Skull God / Furrymania / Yeti psychosis

Chapter Twenty: Wasteland Gods / Travels in a space buggy / Pizza trippin’

Epilogue

Footnotes

SFA Mixtape

Song Title Translations

Thankyous

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

With the band’s consent – and hopefully not too much distress from anyone I’ve forgotten to ask – some of the sections in this book have been ‘cinematised’: that is to say, scripted up and CGI’d into narrative-friendly shape. That said, everything you’re about to read is based on the subjective truth of interviews taken during the research process. It’s also worth noting that, although this is a book in the English language, many of the conversations replicated here – particularly those spoken by the band – would have originally taken place in what Gruff describes as a ‘cracked youthful version’ of the Welsh language.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

SUPER FURRY ANIMALS

Cian Ciaran

Dafydd Ieuan

Gruff Rhys

Guto Pryce

Huw Bunford

FFA COFFI PAWB

Gruff Rhys

Dafydd Ieuan

Rhodri Puw

Dewi Emlyn

WALES MOVERS AND SHAKERS

Gorwel Owen

Record producer

Rhys Mwyn

Founder, Anhrefn and Recordiau Anhrefn

Dafydd Rhys

Brother of Gruff Rhys, founder of Pesda Roc festival

Emyr Williams

Co-founder, Ankst Records

Rhys Ifans

Actor, fanzine writer, Super Furry Animal

LONDON MOVERS AND SHAKERS

Brian Cannon

Photographer, filmmaker and creator of imagery

Alan McGee

The boss, Creation Records

John Andrews

Marketing manager, Creation Records

Dick Green

Super Furry Animals representative, Creation Records

Andy Saunders

Press officer, Creation Records

Ian Mahoney

SFA tour manager 1995–8

PROLOGUE

There, blinking in the darkness, were five shaggy-haired individuals in dressing gowns. The Super Furry Animals had woken up in a rural cottage at four in the morning, with only half-remembered instructions to help themselves to coffee. As they all sat around a large oak table, the one with dark hair suddenly flopped onto its surface with a primeval groan. He was shaken awake again.

A sixth man swaggered in wearing only boxer shorts, smoking a pipe and ticking off the final checklists from his notebook. His name was Ian Mahoney. He was the tour manager.

‘Right!’ clapped Mahoney, joining his comrades at the table. ‘This is where we are.’

He placed a cornflake over a small village in South Wales called Penybanc.

‘And John is waiting for us on the farm … over here.’

He placed another cornflake two centimetres below.

‘John has got the armed vehicle. We will rendezvous with him at 0600 hours – which gives us one hour – then we will mount the vehicle and drive across here …’ he slid the cornflake north, ‘and the festival is over here!’ It landed over a small village called Llandeilo. ‘Any questions?’

The singer tilted his head like a curious dog.

‘Good. Now let’s go! Go! Go!’

It was getting light as their car skidded up the muddy banks of the farm. The kitchen lights blinked on, then John Andrews of Creation Records stepped out of the cottage in a dressing gown, pulling it over his head to avoid the drizzle. He smiled into the headlights and waved the car along through a small flock of sheep.

The car finally parked in the corner of a field, twenty feet away from another vehicle: this one considerably larger, and covered by tarpaulins. John cackled to himself and threw some wellies on, then trudged over to greet the band.

‘Glad you could make it,’ he said, fist-pumping them one by one. ‘The beast is waiting patiently!’

‘Good to hear it, John! Do you think the media suspect anything?’ asked tour manager Ian.

‘I’ve not heard a whisper, Ian, and I don’t expect to – at least until we reach the A4.’ He suddenly looked quite thoughtful. ‘Then we will probably be arrested.’

Twenty miles away in a huge green field, the annual National Eisteddfod was creaking into action. Tents were being raised, harps were being tuned, and the sun was shimmering through the bright blue sky.

The Eisteddfod festival is said to have its origins in the druidic rites of the twelfth century, and its stated purpose is to turn artists into bards, under the judgement of the Arch Druid. Renowned as a patriotic event, the Eisteddfod enforces a Welsh-language-only policy for its artists, and on this particular day, it was enforcing the policy in the fields of Llandeilo.

Down by the side of the main stage, a television crew dressed in Hawaiian shirts were interviewing the festival’s spokesperson.

‘So what can we expect from today’s festivities?’ asked the young presenter, grinning through his sunglasses.

‘Well, as usual the Eisteddfod festival will be priding itself on the very best in Welsh-language arts and entertainment,’ said the spokesperson, ‘plus, hopefully we will be anointing some bards into the druidic order, which – as you know – dates back centuries.’

‘And what do you make of the controversial decision to invite the Super Furry Animals to play?’

The spokesperson’s eyes misted over, as if he had detected a subtle change in temperature. ‘The Super Furry Animals? Well, of course they are a matter of national pride too. And what’s more, we’re delighted to have them!’

‘But haven’t they been known to sing in English on occasion?’

The spokesperson folded his arms. ‘The Super Furries will be on their best, Welsh-speaking behaviour today. I can assure you of that!’

Eight miles away, the army tank rolled over the hill. Attached to its missile turret were twin speakers pumping out a steady techno groove. The tank had been painted bright psychedelic blue, with thick yellow letters spelling out a simple question above its headlights: ‘A OES HEDDWCH?’fn1

The manhole lid flipped open and Gruff appeared, squinting through the sun at the tents on the far horizon. The techno was loud up on top, and it seemed to phase left and right according to the direction of the wind. ‘Festival wind!’ he thought, making a mental note of this strange audio phenomenon.

Down below, his bandmate Cian was cueing up ‘Sail On Sailor’ by the Beach Boys on the decks, while Daf tapped his drumsticks against the gun controls, raising nervous eyebrows. The other band members sat in the darkness, dimly lit by flickering neon light.

‘It’s fucking dehumanising down here!’ shouted Guto over the tumbling noise of the engine.

‘What do you mean?’ yelled Daf.

‘Well, it’s pretty cramped, isn’t it? – I keep banging my head!’

Daf lit a cigar and leaned into Guto’s ear. ‘They are pretty cramped,’ he yelled, ‘but at least they scare the shit out of the other cars!’

John and Ian of Creation Records were in the front compartment – and feeling increasingly uneasy. In the far distance they’d noticed a police van parked by the festival gates, and John had begun impulsively stroking his chin.

‘Let’s not do anything to make them feel nervous,’ he said.

‘Such as driving up to them with a military-grade weapon?’ asked Ian.

‘Mmm,’ said John.

Ian stopped the tank, looked again at the map, then made an announcement. ‘Well I think we’re going the wrong way anyway. Take a look at this.’ He sprawled the map onto John’s knees and pointed at the festival region. It showed that although they were heading for the main gate, the artists’ field was significantly closer: two fields to their right.

‘That’s interesting,’ said John. ‘Can we turn around?’

Half a mile ahead, a small group of police officers were starting to hear traces of the Beach Boys in the air. One security officer stepped forwards, looked through a pair of binoculars, and began muttering obscenities.

‘I can’t turn around, John, there’s traffic all around us,’ said Ian.

‘Well … we’ll just have to drive up to the police then. Maybe they’ll be nice. In fact, I have definitely heard that the police are nice around here.’

As John said those last words, a strange smell began leaking into their compartment. Ian looked confused for a second, then suddenly terrified – as a trickle of smoke wafted up his nose. John jumped up and pulled back the curtains, but he couldn’t see the passengers: the dope smoke was too thick.

‘Holy mother of Moses,’ uttered John.

Up the road, the Celtic harp recital was just beginning. Lime cordial was being served, while the festival spokesperson stood to the side of the stage, preparing to make his final TV appearance of the day.

‘Ah, those lovely harps,’ he sighed. ‘Did you know that this festival dates back to the druidic ceremonies of the twelfth century?’

‘Yes, I had heard something about that,’ smiled the presenter. ‘Right – shall we begin the filming then?’

‘Hang on!’ interrupted the spokesperson. He narrowed his eyes, as if sensing a distant threat. Then he whispered: ‘What is that terrible noise?’

The rumble seemed to almost come from deep underground, but then it turned aggressive, feral. An old man sat in his deckchair began bleating and waving his stick in the air. The spokesperson chewed his fingernails. Then it dawned on him what the noise was: ‘The Beach Boys!’

The tank was rumbling downhill at quite a slow speed, but it was also shaking uncontrollably as it hit all the bumps in the field. Behind it was the brown gate. The brown gate was good. Ahead of it was the blue gate, though – and nobody quite knew what the blue gate was all about. Ian and John started babbling.

‘Look!’ shouted John. ‘A gap in the hedge – straight ahead!’

Ian squinted at the hedge. ‘That’s not a gap!’

‘It’s the field we need, Ian. Head towards it, just head towards it …’

He put one hand on the wheel.

‘Get off my wheel! Look at your eyes – you’ve got the eyes of a madman!’

They burst through the hedge, slammed up a steep incline, and stopped. The tank stood motionless for a few seconds, silent except for the sound of gently creaking metal and a cool breeze.

Inside, Cian lit a match. ‘Rats,’ he muttered, lifting a vinyl to the light and tracing a scratch with his finger. After a quick check to see if everyone was OK, Gruff lifted the hatch and peered out. Looking across the field, he could see a big tent at the far side, with the sign ‘ARTISTS’ ENTRANCE’ next to it. He looked back down into the tank, where the quiet sneeze of laughter had overcome his bandmates.

‘I think we’re in the correct field,’ he announced.

The rest of the day panned out well for the festival: bards were appointed, ale was drunk, eighteenth-century costumes were worn, and the tank finally found its home – in a field where teenagers could boogie to Cian’s techno.

Later in the evening, the festival spokesperson wandered down to the stage where Super Furry Animals were playing. He slurped on a ginger ale while tapping his feet and humming along. One thing seemed curious, however: the crowd were singing along to an instrumental performance. Stranger still, although some were singing in Welsh, others were singing in English and … was that even Japanese he heard? He walked into the audience and spotted a girl handing out lyric sheets.

‘Would you mind if I took a look at this?’ he smiled, grabbing a pamphlet. At the top of the first page was an illustration of a dragon screwing a man up the arse, while the lyrics below were printed in a variety of translations, a different one on each page. Finally, a simple instruction: ‘SING ALONG IN WHICHEVER LANGUAGE YOU LIKE’. The spokesperson put his quivering hand over his mouth, then looked back at the stage.

The contradiction of voices as they blended into one another made for an almighty sound – indecipherable, certainly – but also a strange kind of international language.

It was a misty morning in 1974, and four-year-old Gruff Rhys was being carried up the side of a mountain, perched on his dad’s shoulders. Once they’d reached a level where they could see the valley before them, his father put him down and pointed up to where the rocks hit the mist.

‘That, Gruff, is the peak of the mountain!’

Gruff nodded.

‘Unfortunately, my lad, the peak of the mountain is the most boring part. But! Take a look over there, at the dip between the rocks. Do you see?’

He pointed slightly further down, to where a pathway seemed to wind its way cryptically between the hills before disappearing round the corner.

‘Those are the passes – the gateways between the mountains!’

Gruff nodded.

‘It’s along those passes that you’ll find different peoples meeting and interacting with each other. Historically they are a link between cultures … a connection between the towns.’ He put his son back on his shoulders and set off again.

‘It’s not the peaks of the mountains that matter, lad,’ he announced. ‘It’s the gaps between them!’

Gruff’s family had recently moved to the slate-quarrying town of Bethesda from Cardiff. This had mainly been because Gruff’s dad had taken a job as county secretary in nearby Caernarfon, but Bethesda also appealed because it was a Welsh-speaking area.

‘My grandfather had lost the Welsh language by one generation,’ says Gruff today, ‘so my father spoke English with him and Welsh with his mother – and could never imagine speaking to either of them in any other language.’

By contrast, both Gruff’s parents spoke to him, his brother and his sister in Welsh: the family was going back to its roots.

Gruff’s father, Ioan Bowen Rees, had two main passions: he was a committed public servant, and he loved the Welsh mountains. The two themes came together in the books that he wrote, in which the freedom of the mountains provided a convenient metaphor for his political philosophy. Ioan was widely regarded as a fair man who could rise above petty political games, a left-wing internationalist who disregarded the obsessive self-worship of his country as insularism. His politics were forged during an era of social tension and cold war propaganda, and he shared his thoughts openly, telling one interviewer that ‘the battle for Wales is the battle for all small nations, all small communities, all individuals in the age of genocide’.

Gruff’s mother, Margaret, ran the local Welsh-language playgroup. She was also a teacher who shared her husband’s love of writing, and had composed a book of poems. According to Gruff, ‘She did one book, a book of sonnets. If I remember correctly most sonnets have fourteen lines, but she specialised in thirteen-line sonnets.’

At home, the music on the stereo was a curious mixture. Ioan was a record collector who despised pop, instead preferring the ‘proper music’ of composers such as Wagner, who’d be blasted from the speakers at full volume. And yet, strangely enough, reggae was deemed acceptable, as was Welsh-language pop. National radio stations such as Radio One were cut off by the mountains surrounding Bethesda, but Gruff and his siblings found other ways of discovering international pop music: the frequencies of Irish stations would occasionally travel across the sea, transmitting the disco hits of the 1970s alongside the occasional Celtic fiddle ballad.

At the age of six, Gruff learned that Planet Earth was about to come to an abrupt end. One day, he and his cousin returned home from messing about in the fields to discover a book that Gruff’s brother had left lying about. ‘TIME AND THE GALAXY’, boomed the title. Flicking through the pages, their curiosity turned to morbid horror as they came across an illustration of the sun crashing into Earth, melting human civilisation into a pool of lava in the process. Underneath was a simple caption: ‘The fate of the sun.’ Understandably, the kids were devastated.

‘At this time we hadn’t even realised that our parents were going to die,’ says Gruff, ‘so we were completely terrified at the thought of this massive event. Unfortunately we didn’t read the book any further, so we were oblivious to the fact that it wouldn’t happen for a really long time.’

FURRY FILE: GRUFF

BORN – Hwlffordd, 1970 (‘In the hospital’)

CHILDHOOD SUPERPOWER – Hallucination

CHILDHOOD SUPERWEAKNESS – Pasties

CHILDHOOD DISASTER – ‘I had a ticket to see Gary Moore and Phil Lynott at the Manchester Apollo, when I was thirteen. And my parents decided I shouldn’t go to Manchester on my own at thirteen to watch a heavy metal band … and then Phil Lynott died a few weeks after. That was a bit of a scar’

CHILDHOOD VICTORY – Discovering music (‘It was a defining change of pace’)

BAD BEHAVIOUR – Covering school books with cartoons. ‘I got a detention, then didn’t turn up to that, then I got detained for a whole term … based on a cartoon’

TEEN REBEL ICON – Lou Reed

TEEN GROOMING TIP – Not grooming

GEEKY PASSION – The Velvet Underground (‘From the age of thirteen that was my specialist Mastermind subject’)

FIRST SONGWRITING ATTEMPT – ‘Rydwi’n Mynd Yn Hén’ (‘It was about getting old … I was five’)

BEACH BOYS VALHALLA – ‘Feel Flows’

Rock and roll education came early. Gruff’s older brother Dafydd formed a band called Chwd Poeth, meaning ‘Hot Puke’, who were barred from performing at school after they’d apparently vomited on the audience at their first show. Inspired by such cavalier behaviour, Gruff began collecting plastic buckets to play the drums on, eventually finding one that sounded uncannily like a bass drum. Unfortunately the drummer from Chwd Poeth agreed, and stole it to use on stage himself.

One October morning, Gruff’s school announced that the world’s first Welsh-language horror film would be projected in the sports barn. Gwaed Ar Y Sêr (‘Blood on the Stars’) was about a group of choirboys who invited celebrities to their church then gruesomely slaughtered them. The nine-year-old kids screamed with delight at its gory scenes, although Gruff found himself more interested in the short film they screened afterwards to calm everyone down. It was a concert documentary about a popular 1970s Welsh group, called Edward H. Dafis. They were performing a grand farewell show – their last before breaking up for ever.

Gruff stared up at the flickering Super-8 images, and slowly grew more and more mesmerised by the peaceful acoustic meditations of the band. When the spool eventually ran out, he looked up and asked a teacher: ‘Which of the music players was Edward H. Dafis, miss?’

‘Ah, Gruff,’ smiled the teacher. ‘I don’t think any of them are called that. That’s just the name of the band!’

Impressed, Gruff decided that Edward H. Dafis were his favourite new band. However, this was to be short lived: the week after, they were replaced by another folk-rock group, Ac Eraill. ‘They were like a boy band, but a folk boy band with long hair,’ says Gruff today, describing them. The following week he discovered another band to add to his list of Great New Bands – and when he couldn’t find another the week after, it was clearly time to form one himself.

That Saturday, Gruff’s mum drove him to the youth club. A local teacher had come up with the idea of training kids to play rock, encouraging local groups to donate their old instruments in a co-operative scheme. The strategy was, at least in part, successful.

‘We’ve got five drum kits and, er … well, we’ve got five drum kits,’ said the man behind reception. ‘Shall I put you down for drum lessons?’

After a few hours of bashing out crude rhythms, Gruff noticed another kid being dropped off outside. During the lunch break, Gruff would discover that his name was Daf, and that – coincidentally – he was also there for drum lessons.

‘My dad took me to the club,’ says Daf today. ‘I didn’t want to go because I was super shy at the time, so he forced me. On that first day Gruff and me started learning to play drums together. We were both twelve and lived about forty miles apart from each other.’ Despite the distance, Gruff and Daf got on well enough to make a Goonies-style pact: they agreed that, should one of them ever need the other to play drums, they would be there.

In summer 1983, Gruff’s brother attended a pirate radio conference in Birmingham. Upon returning home to Bethesda, his parents opened the door to find him armed to the teeth with illegal contraptions which, he said, would facilitate the pirate radio takeover of North Wales.

Within twenty-four hours, he’d recruited Gruff to the cause. Suddenly a strange combination of guitar-based jingles and Python-style sketches were being broadcast from the peaks of the mountains. This was, in fact, literally the case: the mountaintops provided the best signal for the transmitter, so Dafydd would scale them by night and hide the device among the rocks, sourcing the frequency so that they could operate from home.

There followed two weeks of successful broadcasting, until one night Dafydd burst through the door of his brother’s room with a mildly disconcerting smile. ‘We’re on telly,’ he panted.

The two of them jumped downstairs to catch the evening news, with Dafydd leaning so close the light flickered on his face.

‘Tonight the police are engaged in a manhunt for the pirates of Bethesda: the illegal DJs who are transmitting on the exact same frequency used by the local police force … and causing mayhem.’

‘Awesome!’ Dafydd laughed. ‘We’ve been broadcasting on the police frequency!’

He switched off the lights and crawled over to the window. Down in the night below, two police cars were projecting their headlights up the steep curves of the opposite mountain. ‘They know the transmitter’s up there,’ whispered Dafydd.

The pirates’ days were numbered, but Bethesda’s underground radio scene was just getting started. Citizens band radio, or CB as it was commonly known, was a form of short-wave communication made famous by Hollywood movies during the 1970s. American truckers used CB to communicate in Smokey and the Bandit, while the cops in The Dukes of Hazzard used it to bark at each other while speeding through Kentucky. Now, for reasons that nobody could quite explain, the teenagers of Bethesda were using it to communicate between the valleys.

It was 1982.

‘Your basic CB system is quite crude,’ said the moustached man at the car boot sale, holding up two pieces of scrap metal to an audience of bewitched children. ‘You just slot this bit into here … then plug this wire in here … then talk through this bit over here!’ He burped. ‘Excuse me, children. Now does anyone have any questions?’

‘My father says it is illegal!’ announced one kid.

‘Well,’ said the moustached man, leaning in with a glint in his teeth. ‘I guess your father just ain’t cool then, is he?’

Within weeks, CB was more popular than ET. As soon as night descended on the valleys, entire networks of teenagers began transmitting messages to one another, using codenames to protect their identities from the police. The police, meanwhile, would be stationed on the other end of town, listening in from their vans. As far as they could fathom, an underground criminal network had come to town; it would be some weeks before they realised it was just a bunch of kids.

Meanwhile, the codenames grew ever more mysterious: Gruff became known as ‘Goblin’, while the weediest kid in school renamed himself ‘The Black Stallion’. It was communication chaos – a kind of primitive social network – and the more it continued, the more an interesting side effect emerged: since all the coded language had been inspired by truckers in American movies, a weird hybrid language began to develop that was part Hollywood bandit-speak, part Welsh tongue.

With the young people of Bethesda engaged in their social network experiment, it wasn’t long before groups started linking together, joining the dots and forming new realities on the ground. One such manifestation was the emergence of a live music boom, organised almost entirely by left-wing political groups.

Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society) was the most prolific: their young activists put on gigs to raise cash and awareness for the miners who were being stung by the Thatcher government, while campaigning for equal status for the Welsh language. Their guerrilla activities included artfully manipulating English-language signs, in a cheeky style that would later become popular with organisations such as Adbusters. Their ideology was simple: ‘non-violent, direct action’.

‘Welsh-language culture back then was kind of an outsider thing – you were out there,’ says Emyr Glyn Williams, co-founder of Ankst Records. ‘Now obviously you can get a government grant for all sorts of things, but in that time the “living Welsh culture” was kind of free and independent, and it was based around things like the rock scene.’

The local CND group got involved in live music too, as did a collective of student promoters from the nearby university town of Bangor. The result was a sudden cultural explosion which spawned a new generation of hedonistic, radical Welsh-language pop groups.

Gruff and his brother were smack bang in the middle of this melting pot. By 1984 the former had graduated from biscuit tins to full-sized drums and was playing in a band called Machlud. Meanwhile Dafydd was the manager of a local pop sensation: Maffia Mr Huws. Known as the fab five of North Wales, they inspired countless imitators with their commercial songs and healthy teeth.

As Gruff explains today: ‘They were formed around two brothers whose parents had moved out: they were left to raise themselves at a very early age! And the house turned into a 24-hour jam session. They became incredible musicians and a magnet to loads of other kids.’

Dafydd’s management of the local pop sensation wasn’t the only thing he had going for him: one day he had the idea of staging an outdoor music event in the heart of town. The Pesda Roc festival would take place on the site – now a rugby pitch – where, in the thirteenth century, Prince Dafydd had trained his troops to prepare for battle against the Normans. It was a mischievous, genius idea – and battle was indeed about to commence.

Traditionally there weren’t many rock ’n’ roll freaks in Bethesda; the working-class quarry town had been mostly insulated from the punk craze while developing its own modest subcultures. However, when Pesda Roc kicked off it brought the whole zoo to town, with the high street suddenly crawling with greasy aliens, biker gangs and proto-ravers.

On the first night of the festival, Maffia Mr Huws were headlining the main stage while Gruff and his best mate Rhodri decided to hang back with a few beers. Suddenly from the shadows, a gang of outsiders approached – led by a teenager with a peroxide mohawk.

‘Good evening!’ came the charming burr. ‘I’m Rhys Ifans and these are my cronies. We were just handing out free copies of my fanzine Poen Mefwlfn1 – and were wondering if you’d care for a copy?’

‘Thankyou!’ said Rhodri, taking one.

The Mohawk took a suspicious look around the park, chewing on his cocktail stick. ‘Not a bad festival you have here,’ he mused. ‘Although I must say the locals haven’t exactly held us to their bosoms. One person even attempted to beat the shit out of me …’

‘Ah, sorry to hear that,’ said Gruff.

‘Not a problem. To be honest, it was probably my own fault. I shook him by the balls, you see.’

Gruff and Rhodri nodded slowly.

‘Right, we’d best be off. If you see a man with a spade coming this way, please pass on my sincerest regrets.’

He let out a howling laugh, and scuttled away with the gang.

‘What a charismatic man,’ said Rhodri. ‘Who the fuck is he?’

‘I don’t really know,’ said Gruff, ‘but my sister calls him “the wildest man in North Wales”. People talk about him as if he’s some sort of folk legend.’

‘The wildest man in North Wales? Christ, he must be mental.’ Rhodri collapsed against a tree. ‘So what was it you were talking about a minute ago – about the songs you wrote?’

‘Ah, yeah,’ said Gruff. ‘Basically the walk to school is ridiculously boring, so I’ve started coming up with a few melodies in my head, and working them out on my brother’s guitar.’

‘Hang on, though,’ said Rhodri. ‘Your brother’s guitar is left-handed, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And you’re right-handed?’

‘Yeah, but I’ve learned to play right-handed on the left-handed.’

Rhodri blinked, then went eyeball to eyeball with his friend. He explained how it was time to form a band, how the pop world was opening up, and how together they could mess with people’s heads. In the distance, they could hear Maffia Mr Huws drawing the cheers of a thousand people in the night. It was time to form a pop group.

The cards fell easily enough, with Gruff becoming the band’s vocalist, and Rhodri finding his place on guitar. The next job was to find more members, and first to volunteer was a local teenage prankster called Andrew Roberts. Andrew was a heavy metal fanatic with a reputation for insane publicity stunts – a reputation that was about to prove particularly useful.

On the day of their first school gig, disaster had apparently struck: the first band had pulled out, threatening to render the whole concert redundant. Andrew had an idea, though, and volunteered to open as a solo act. An hour later, he strode on stage in a spandex jumpsuit and performed a virtuoso heavy metal guitar solo.

‘The audience’s jaws dropped,’ says Gruff today. ‘He was on his knees giving it everything.’

So hypnotised were the crowd, in fact, that they didn’t notice a discreet wire connecting his amplifier to a cassette recorder. ‘He’d tape-recorded obscure heavy metal solos from his record collection,’ explains Gruff, ‘then fed them into the amp. I think he was miming to Gary Moore solos.’

Backstage, Gruff and Rhodri were getting butterflies. It was ten minutes until stage time, and to compound matters, Gruff still hadn’t decided whether he was a left-handed guitarist or a right-handed one. Panicking at the eleventh hour, he suggested a different route altogether.

‘You want to play an electric drill?’ said Rhodri.

Gruff showed Rhodri the drill.

‘Jesus,’ said Rhodri, studying the power tool. ‘OK. Tell you what, I’ll play the guitar and you sit next to me, drilling into my instrument – like this.’ Rhodri demonstrated the act. ‘But wait,’ he suddenly added. ‘What about the safety implications?’

‘Well,’ said Gruff, ‘if I drill my guts out and die on stage, at least it’ll be entertaining.’

After a few weeks they decided on a name: Ffa Coffi Pawb. It was especially endearing to Rhodri and Gruff because, when pronounced fast enough, it bears a passing resemblance to ‘Fuck Off Everybody’ – although its literal meaning is the more family-friendly ‘Everybody’s Coffee Beans’.

Inspired by New Order, the Velvets and Welsh-language post-punk, Ffa Coffi Pawb began to make crude recordings with a drum machine. In their heads they were John Cale and Lou Reed, learning how to piece songs together for the first time. It wasn’t long before a cassette had been created, which they proudly called Torrwyr Beddau Byd-Eang Cyf,fn2 and attempted to sell at the local pub. Their sales pitch was simple: they would dare people to listen.

‘You’ll regret buying this,’ Rhodri warned a local farmer. ‘The quality is terrible! The music is offensive!’

The farmer, charmed by this ironic self-deprecation, bought the tape and returned home only to discover the horrible truth: that the music, patched together on a ZX Spectrum, was indeed terrible.

Ffa Coffi Pawb didn’t immediately make waves, but their rock ’n’ roll reputation was secure when they were almost busted, at a gig in Bangor. ‘Andrew was miming, I was drilling and a saxophone player was playing free jazz over the top,’ remembers Gruff of the concert, ‘and somehow the police got involved because some kids had broken into the canteen tills while we were playing. Our reputation was tarnished because we had apparently inspired an act of lunacy.’

Their fortunes were about to turn around. A local punk rocker called Rhys Mwyn was getting pissed off that nobody was getting off their arses to create the music scene. He’d already founded a band, Anhrefn, which everybody loved. He’d then started a label, Anhrefn Records, which everybody also loved. The only confusing thing was that nobody loved it enough to try it out themselves. ‘Don’t they know how easy it is to set up a cassette label?’ he thought.

Devising a plan to empower the masses, Mwyn put up posters calling for the most creative musical minds in the area to meet on a weekly basis, so they could swap philosophies, create labels, and make the scene.

Anhrefn were one of the most inspirational groups around – proactive, subversive, almost Dadaist in their sense of humour. What’s more, they offered an alternative to what could sometimes seem like counter-productively negative politics.

‘A lot of Welsh culture was defined by being anti-English in the 1970s,’ says Gruff today. ‘We’re talking about countries that were once at war, so the atrocities were endless, and the conditions that the Welsh people were expected to live in for centuries after those wars were horrendous. But that’s not an excuse to feel animosity for the English people or the English language – it’s about finding the positives in yourself and getting on with your neighbours. People are tied by blood, family, habits, collective TV viewing … and punk bands like Anhrefn were challenging people to be proud of their own identities without disparaging other people’s right to have one.’

When Gruff saw the posters, for him it was a no-brainer to attend Mwyn’s meetings. The discussion group became known as Pop Positif, and it was here that Gruff and Rhodri were to meet the George Martin of their careers – a man whose production skills would tower over the coming decade of Welsh indie coolness. Gorwel Owen was ten years older than Ffa Coffi Pawb, and considerably more musically advanced. He’d dabbled with house music since 1983, and had a reputation as a maverick producer.

At the meeting, Gorwel flipped Gruff and Rhodri a pound for their cassette, and phoned them back the next day. ‘Come to my studio tomorrow at noon. Bring your guitars.’

Gorwel was on a whole new level. For a start, he knew how to work drum machines – which in the age of New Order appeared to be the future of rock and roll. However, he was also a focused man with a no-nonsense attitude. ‘He made sure we didn’t perceive the studio as an extension of our social life,’ says Gruff of his first experience with the producer. ‘It was very studious. For a while we were scared to swear in front of him – we didn’t want to disrespect him, but he was very encouraging.’

For his part, Gorwel was aware that he’d met a sharp bunch of minds. ‘It’s quite rare for a group to be both exceptional songwriters and to have a really open approach to experimenting with recording,’ he says now.

Their first recordings were broadcast almost immediately as a session on BBC Radio Cymru. This wasn’t quite as momentous an achievement as it might sound: at the time, anyone who’d recorded a decent-quality Welsh-language demo could reasonably expect to have it broadcast, thanks to the variety of media set up to keep the language flowing (and the relatively few bands that were taking advantage of it).

During the summer of 1988, Ffa Coffi Pawb evolved into the line-up that was to last the rest of its lifetime. There was Rhodri Puw on guitar, Dewi Emlyn on bass, Gruff singing and Dafydd Ieuan on drums: Gruff had stayed in touch with Daf since their time sharing drum classes at the youth club. After being reunited, the two became musical allies and moved in together.

FURRY FILE: DAF

BORN – Bangor, 1969

CHILDHOOD SUPERPOWER – Flying, swimming

CHILDHOOD SUPERWEAKNESS – Not being able to fly or swim

CLASSROOM DISASTER – ‘Sneaking off to school at five years old in my paisley pyjamas, ’cos I thought I looked like Gary Glitter’

CHILDHOOD VICTORY – ‘Realising that a man-made, invisible, supernatural, totalitarian being, that demanded to be praised lest it condemn you to eternal torture in hell, was a bag of shite’

TEEN REBEL ICON – Ffred Ffrancis, Welsh Language Activist

TEEN GROOMING TIP – Tooth brushing

GEEKY PASSION: Pigs (‘I wanted to breed them and make money’)

FIRST SONGWRITING ATTEMPT – ‘Llanaelhaearn Lleddf (Blues)’,1979

BEACH BOYS VALHALLA – ‘Till I Die’

LIFE WISDOM: ‘Don’t be a cunt’ – Jim Jeffries

As the eighties gave way to the nineties, Ffa Coffi Pawb’s songwriting continued to blossom: Rhodri was inspired by the early work of Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses, while Gruff and Daf began thinking about the craft of pop music, reasoning that every great tune should kick off with a memorable hook.

Gorwel remembers a philosophy that they adopted at this time: ‘I recall them saying that “the studio is just a vehicle for the songs”. That’s very true, of course, but they also understood that the opposite was true: that songs can be vehicles for experimenting.’

The experimenting was paying off too: for one matter, Gruff finally resolved the dilemma of which way round to play the guitar. Trained left-handed, but in possession of only a right, he simply flipped the guitar upside-down.

As 1991 dawned, the runway for Ffa Coffi Pawb was clear for take-off. Not only had they settled on a ‘fab four’ line-up and started writing great songs, but they had an occasional harmonica player too: the Wildest Man in North Wales. From the beginning, Rhys Ifans had a strong belief that he was going to be a professional actor; but of all the musicians he dabbled with, he was undoubtedly the most rock ’n’ roll.

One winter’s afternoon, the band had just finished soundchecking at a small club in Porthmadog when Rhys and Rhodri went outside to see what the crowds were like.

‘Crikey,’ said Rhodri. ‘The only thing missing is tumbleweed. I guess we’ll be playing to the sound engineer again.’

‘There, there, Rhodri,’ said Rhys, slurping a cocktail with a twinkle in his eye. ‘It just so happens that I know precisely where to get a massive crowd from. You go back inside and set up with the band, and I’ll be back in five minutes with an audience.’

‘Five minutes?’

‘Five minutes,’ winked Rhys.

He jogged down the street to a crossroads, then stopped and looked around, smelling the wind for signs of life. Suddenly a cheer resonated from a bar called The Headless Ram. Rhys swung through the door and coughed loudly.

‘Good afternoon, ladies!’ he said, silencing a roomful of leather-bound men. He cleared his throat and started again.

‘Word has it … that there is a rather good biker rock band playing just round the corner at the club tonight. The best biker band in North Wales, in fact!’

The bikers stared at him. One of them folded his arms.

‘And apparently it’s free beer too. I’ll be going now.’ He grinned and slowly began to crab-walk out again.

That night, Ffa Coffi Pawb performed their pop music to a gang of confused, hairy men. As the final notes rang out to reveal an eerie silence, it became apparent that some sort of reconciliatory gesture was required. Rhys stepped up to the microphone. ‘Would anybody like to buy a tape?’

‘It’s ten past three in the morning, this is Radio Cymru and that was Ffa Coffi Pawb! Now we’ve got something a little bit different for you, a new band from Pembrokeshire. They’re only fifteen years old and this is their first ever session. One word of warning, though: I’ve got a sneaky feeling the lyrics to this one are in English … do you think we can get away with it? Put it this way: it’s the middle of the night, so if you don’t tell the BBC, I won’t. Let’s have it for Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci.’

Before 1991, Welsh bands had relatively few choices regarding who to sign with. The biggest contender was the major label Sain, which had put out some decent folk albums in the 1970s but was by now deemed deeply uncool. As Gruff explains, ‘They’d got into Aled Jones and choirs, sheep farmers singing Elvis songs in Welsh … they were like a dinosaur back then.’ At the other end of the spectrum was Rhys Mwyn’s punk label Anhrefn: it was established and hip – but also radical, niche and somewhat limited in reach. There was clearly a gap for a label that could sit between the goalposts; and that label was Ankst.

Ankst Records was set up as an independent operation by Alun Llwyd, Gruffudd Jones and Emyr Glyn Williams while they were students at Aberystwyth University. The three of them were music fans rather than musicians themselves – indeed, they had no desire to become musicians – and therefore they were free to stay in the background and concentrate on nurturing artists.

‘Ankst were absolutely crucial,’ says Gorwel Owen today. ‘They created a space for the creative process to happen, which is one of the most important things that a label can do.’

The founders of Ankst quickly established it as a launch pad for the new generation of Welsh pop, folk and hip hop – and, being massive fans of Ffa Coffi Pawb – soon approached them with a record deal for two EPs.

‘Gruff is one of those natural musicians – he’s never going to stop writing pop songs,’ says the label’s co-founder Emyr Glyn Williams. ‘Even back then the songs were catchy, clever, psychedelic and musically ambitious. He wanted to make great albums, as he still does now. So for us it was a safe bet to help them, and work with them. They were one of the best bands around at the time, and we were big fans.’

Although Ankst had initially run a Welsh-language-only policy, the emergence of bilingual bands such as Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci had prompted them to reconsider. ‘I think it was the bands that changed Ankst,’ says Emyr. ‘We responded to the circumstances, particularly with Gorky’s because they were bilingual from the beginning, and quite naturally so.’

Ankst were super-enthusiastic about Gorky’s, a band of teenagers from Carmarthen, South Wales, with massive potential. Getting them played on Radio Cymru was another matter, however: it was left to rebellious, late-night DJs like Nia Melville to play them. ‘She had great taste,’ says Gruff. ‘It wasn’t anything to do with language, it was just whether she liked the music or not. Radio Cymru scrapped the show after a year because they thought it was too weird – they couldn’t see how pioneering it was.’

Oblivious to the arguments happening around them, Gorky’s mixture of folk, psychedelic Dadaism and Fall-inspired rock immediately clicked with a young audience both in Wales and England, and suddenly the NME and John Peel counted themselves among the band’s supporters. This was something new.

‘The NME had looked to Wales on and off before this,’ says Emyr. ‘It would usually be an overview with a few bands, but then those bands would never really have careers – they’d never be able to make the albums and keep going. And the interest would be “We’ve done our article on Welsh bands now” – and that would be it.

‘With Gorky’s [the music press] saw what we saw: they were a young, extraordinary band – and I think some of the journalists fell for them, like they became their favourite band. The Welsh thing never got in the way for them, because Gorky’s weren’t stridently political like other Welsh bands, they were quite different.’

While Gorky’s were attracting the attention of the London music papers, Ffa Coffi Pawb had arrived at the end of the road. Over the course of two albums with Ankst their sound had evolved into blissful, reverb-drenched bubblegum pop, owing as much to The Jesus and Mary Chain as to Big Star. However, where this melodic direction had once felt fresh against the backdrop of avant-garde and punk bands, the band eventually came to suspect that they’d become too conventional – and were letting audience expectations lead the way.

Rhodri attempted to head off this suspicion by rebelling against melody: under the influence of dark industrial bands like Nitzer Ebb, he began playing sets full of gnashing distortion and droning single notes.

This was a new lease of life for the guitarist, but it wouldn’t be long before a more literal lease of life – the arrival of his first baby – would distract him from the band. Increasingly, Gruff and Daf were beginning to find themselves alone in the studio to cover what instruments they could. The band’s convictions took a further knock every time they heard the weird electronic music coming off Gorwel Owen’s stereo: surreal, progressive music with samples and twisted beats. By these standards, the band that Gruff and Rhodri had started five years previously sounded suspiciously traditional.

Ffa Coffi Pawb played their final gig at the Builth Wells Eisteddfod in 1993, with Gorky’s supporting and just over a thousand people in attendance.

In the sleeve notes to their final album, Hei Vidal!, they addressed the conundrum they faced directly – but also hinted at the future: ‘I mean for f’sakes it’s 1992, and what are we? Mods, rockers, post-mod rockers? Why aren’t we making techno records?!’

Later that summer, Gruff was sitting on the roof of a train – speeding briskly through the luminous green forests of Mid Wales. Sitting up alongside him was a teacher he’d met at the party below – a party which they both agreed was crap.

The plan had been simple: Gruff would assist a band of hedonists in transporting a crate of booze between Llanuwchllyn and Bala, after which he could either crash at the party or split with his share of the crate. Something had gone wrong, however: the hedonists had drunk the booze on the train, and subsequently gone out of their minds. Gruff and the teacher – who was equally embroiled and equally confused – had no option but to sneak politely out of the window.

Still, the roof of the train was a serene place to be, and while the teacher explained that he, too, played in a band, Gruff experimented with lifting a beer up to his face, using the force of the wind to surf it towards his mouth.

Suddenly, however, the train began to puff to a crawl. Gruff raised an eyebrow at the teacher.

‘Let’s get down!’

They sky-dived back through the window, kicked the cans under the seats and neatened their shaggy hair. Seconds later, the guard came in and slammed the door behind him.

‘Right, lads,’ he said with vaguely sadistic enthusiasm. ‘Who’s been sitting on my train then?’

After a few seconds’ pause for thought, a hand lifted up from behind a seat, and pointed at Gruff. Then another hand appeared, pointing at the teacher. The two accused could not quite believe what was happening: this was not Spartacus. This was the opposite of Spartacus.

‘Right! You two, out!’

Gruff and the teacher stood in the middle of the tracks as the train pulled away, slowly coming to terms with their new environment. The situation didn’t look promising: the horizon stretched for miles with field and forest, the sun was fading, and to make matters worse a crow was hopping about in front of them.

‘We’re fucked,’ concluded the teacher. ‘That crow is definitely a sign that we’re fucked.’ The two of them estimated that it was an hour’s walk to Bala, although they could probably hitch their way in half that time. The road was deserted and the sun was setting. They began to walk.

‘And that’s how I really got to know Gruff,’ says Bunf today. ‘It was interesting that it was him and me, for almost no apparent reason, meeting like that. You couldn’t have made it up.’

FURRY FILE: BUNF

BORN – Cardiff, 1967

CHILDHOOD SUPERPOWER – ‘My Puma football boots’

CHILDHOOD SUPERWEAKNESS – Sweetcorn

CHILDHOOD DISASTER – Burning down parents’ living room

CHILDHOOD VICTORY – Winning a womble in a raffle (‘I believe it was Great Uncle Bulgaria’)

BAD BEHAVIOUR – Perennial daydreaming

TEEN REBEL ICON – Gianluca Vialli, Juventus and Italian striker (‘He had a sneaky cigarette while he was a sub during the World Cup … the commentator Barry Davies didn’t know what to say’)

TEEN GROOMING TIP – Leather jacket

GEEKY PASSION – Sharks

FIRST ATTEMPTED SONG – ‘Swn’ (‘It means noise … I had no idea what I was doing’)

BEACH BOYS VALHALLA – ‘Good Vibrations’

LIFE WISDOM – ‘Never judge a book by its cover’

Bunf was the guitarist in a band called U Thant. All the posters said that U Thant were a punk band, but somewhere along the road they’d taken a left turn into space-rock territory, and now Bunf was armed to the teeth with psychedelic guitar pedals.

Totally uninterested in learning the blues, playing hyperspeed solos or even being technically any good, Bunf was instead on a mission to find his own sound. Three heroes, at the time, were pointing the way.

‘Tone-wise it was Mick Ronson,’ he says of the legendary glam-rock guitarist. ‘In terms of stage presence it was Chuck Berry, and [I wanted] the pacing of George Harrison’s solos. To be honest, I never did crack Chuck Berry.’

When he wasn’t being a psychedelic rock star, Bunf worked in education – and following two years at a primary school, he’d graduated to being head of art at a secondary near Pontypridd. To the kids, Bunf was a source of dazed amusement, arriving late in the mornings to find that they’d already registered themselves and started without him.

‘I managed to get the two most responsible girls to help out,’ he says now. ‘If I was five minutes late they would take over the register. It’s not what you’re supposed to do as a teacher, but in a way I think they enjoyed it, because it empowered them to take responsibility … in my own sick way I taught them a lesson!’

The other teachers at school, however, viewed Bunf with suspicion – and the feeling was mutual. Organised religion and discipline were the twin forks of the school’s philosophy, with the deputy heads in particular displaying an evangelical streak. It wasn’t the religion that bothered Bunf, however; more the school’s insistence that religion alone could save kids from a life of poverty. ‘We were in a really hard, deprived area which had this enormous lack of hope,’ says Bunf, ‘and it was inadequate to suggest that it’d be OK if you followed that path. The kids were beyond that.’

When possible Gruff and Daf would catch the teacher in action with U Thant, and it wasn’t long before they got to know another member of the group who seemed a like-minded kind of person: Guto Pryce, their dark-haired, square-jawed bass player.

FURRY FILE: GUTO

BORN – Cardiff, 1972

CHILDHOOD DISASTER – ‘Having to make do with a hand-me-down pink Raleigh Commando bike instead of a BMX’

CHILDHOOD VICTORY – ‘Bunnyhopping that Commando’

BAD BEHAVIOUR – Cross-country running fraud

TEEN REBEL ICON – Diego Maradona

TEEN GROOMING TIP – Dungarees

GEEK SPECIALITY – Oink! comic

FIRST SONGWRITING ATTEMPT – ‘Mynd Am Dro’, 1978 (‘It was basically a rip-off of a Welsh song about two dogs that go for a walk in the woods and lose a shoe’)

BEACH BOYS VALHALLA – ‘Big Sur’

LIFE WISDOM – ‘Bunf once told me: “Don’t eat anything bigger than your head”’

Guto had grown up on a diet of punk and melodic pop, supplied to him respectively by The Damned and ELO. His earliest encounter with the bass guitar was watching the French TV superstar Jean-Jacques Burnel, who not only played bass, but also knew karate; very cool indeed.

Like Gruff, Guto’s adventures in rock and roll started early. ‘It’s funny,’ he says today, ‘I don’t think you can do it now, but back then you could start a band and easily get on TV, then pick up a cheque for £140 at the end of the day. So you’d form bands just to get on telly, earn a bit of money.’

After a couple of years playing Ramones covers in a garage band, Guto signed up for U Thant. For some time the group enjoyed playing the ‘rock ’n’ squat’ scenes of Eastern Europe, and at just seventeen years old found themselves playing in the former East Germany. ‘It was quite nuts really,’ says Guto, ‘and an eye-opener when you’re seventeen. We were playing to a bunch of Iron Maiden fans every night, classic punk rockers – they’d seen Camden Town on a postcard and thought “I want to be zis!”’

At the dawn of 1991, U Thant were comfortably nestled in their home town of Cardiff. However, before their counterparts in Ffa Coffi Pawb could join them, a brief geographical diversion was about to occur: Manchester.

Gruff and Daf moved to the city of dance music together, in an attempt to kick-start their art educations at the university. To their delight, the acid house scene was in full bloom – and for a few months they embarked on a hedonistic holiday in the ‘second summer of love’, checking out the 24-hour nightclubs and casually noting the latest techno sounds.

Yet Daf soon became contemplative and, disillusioned with art education and spooked by the suspicion that he was neglecting his one true calling, music, he decided to move back to Cardiff. Although the move separated him from his best friend, it was a pivotal decision: the flat he was moving into would shortly become the arts lab of the Super Furry Animals.

Daf unpacked his bags on the wooden floors of 12 Column Road, Cardiff on 5 June 1993. Moving in alongside him were his girlfriend Debbie, Rhys Ifans, and Rhys’s strange Polish girlfriend who enjoyed shoplifting. Before they could get round to settling in, however, the phone rang. It was Bunf.

‘We were thinking about taking some acid, and then going to watch the dinosaurs at the museum,’ he said. ‘Would you like to come along?’

Daf put the phone down and smiled at his girlfriend. ‘Fucking ’ell, I think I like this guy!’

That night, the acid was far too strong, forcing them to walk very slowly and carefully back to Bunf’s flat, under the watchful eye of strange lights emanating from the traffic. Inside, Daf switched on the living-room light to reveal a labyrinthine city of guitar-effects pedals on the floor. They had entered Bunf’s space-rock HQ.

‘Pedals,’ whispered Daf, pointing at the floor, the wall, then the ceiling too. ‘Pedals,’ he repeated. ‘Everywhere!’

It was Cardiff’s hottest summer for twenty years, and the surf was definitely up: living in the capital, Daf got to sample the countryside raves that were exploding in its satellite countryside. There was also an additional benefit to living in the city: he got to hang out with his younger brother, Cian – a film student living up the road in Newport.

FURRY FILE: CIAN

BORN – Bangor, 1976

SUPERPOWER – Flight

SUPERWEAKNESS – Sleep deprivation

CHILDHOOD DISASTER – ‘I was caught with my trousers around my ankles in primary school, when the fire alarm went off. I had to go on yard in my pants and all had a good laugh at my expense’

CHILDHOOD VICTORY – ‘Winning the Albert Owen shield with Pentraeth FC’

BAD BEHAVIOUR – ‘I never got caught!’

REBEL ICON – Diego Maradona

TEENAGE GROOMING TIP – Eyeliner

GEEK DISCLOSURE – Lego

FIRST ATTEMPTED SONG – ‘I remember recording myself doing raspberries into the tape machine when I was about six years old’

BEACH BOYS VALHALLA – ‘Forever’

Cian was too young to go raving, but he was nonetheless an acid house fan. One track that proved particularly influential to the young teenager was the Snowman mix of ‘Humanoid’ – in part a rave version of The Snowman soundtrack – by an early incarnation of The Future Sound of London.

With Orbital also making regular appearances on the turntables, it was only a matter of time until Cian started to make his own dance music, making his earliest recordings onto DAT tapes. As Cian explains today, it was a time of experimentation and creation.

‘I had this teacher who’d say something like “Ideas are a penny apiece, it’s how you execute them that makes them special.” Which was frustrating at the time because I thought all my ideas were worth something, and it seemed like he brought you right down: anyone can have an idea! But it influenced me from that point on, not to get hung up on an idea – the next one would always be better, and if you get a good one and execute it well … that’s where the magic is.’

By the time Cian had started to apply this magic to samplers and synths, his older brother was going out and dancing to them.

One night in June 1994, Bunf, Guto, Rhys, Daf and Gruff – who was down from Manchester for the weekend – partied at Cardiff’s Hippo Club until 2am, then jumped into Bunf’s Ford Fiesta and set the coordinates for the heart of a rave. In those pre-satnav times, their journey into the countryside was a challenge in itself: first they drove out to the outskirts of Merthyr, then they sped up the dual carriageway before finally pulling up in a floodlit Asda car park, along with thirty or so mysterious vehicles.

Daf wound down the window and spotted a tall, dreadlocked man shouting at the cars like some kind of crazed traffic controller.

‘That’s him, that’s the man,’ he said. ‘He’s the one telling people how to get there. HEY! YOU! WHERE ARE WE HEADING?’

‘South exit, follow the convoy!’ shouted the dreadlocks, prompting Bunf to rev up the engine and fall in line.

Several miles later, they were zooming through a wide stretch of moonlit countryside, spiralling in and out of the cover of forest. There was just one problem: it was becoming increasingly difficult to tell which cars to follow: the trail of ravers was running cold, diluted with regular traffic. Stuck for a solution, the car pulled over and Gruff got out to have a listen. At first, there was only open sky, cricket chirps and wind. But then:

OOM OOM OOM

OOM OOM OOM

OOM OOM OOM

The sound of muffled drums rolled towards them, then rolled back again. ‘Festival wind!’ thought Gruff. Rhys came out to offer a second opinion, and they both stood there a while, surveying the ambience. ‘It appears to be coming from the direction of the trees!’ announced Rhys in a Shakespearean accent.

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