Guerrillas In The Midwest Melody Maker 9th October 1999 Super Furry Animals are touring America - not cracking, invading or storming America, you understand, just touring - and we sneak a peek into Gruff Rhys' tour diary. September 14: New Jersey, Maxwell's "We did a warm-up in New Jersey at a smaller venue that usual. It was a jet-lagged sort of gig. There were enough hours really from landing to playing to make us feel better, but we still played a pretty shit gig. It was exciting being back in America, though. It's always a big deal touring America. We've done it before, but that doesn't detract from the enjoyment of it. "I don't start to miss home until well into the tour, but then I only miss things like friends, family, the usual. But I don't really miss anything else. "I'm too busy touring to miss much. Touring's far too exciting. We spend enough time at home as it is, to be honest, that we should savour the time we have in America touring. "I think Bunf and Guto hate to miss the Cardiff City scores when we're away from home, but they have ways of finding out the score, haha! The chairman phones them up, hahaha! I'm not sure how people in Swansea will take to us sponsoring Cardiff. The two clubs hate each other. We've probably alienated the whole of Wales outside Cardiff, hahaha!" September 15: New York, Bowery Ballroom "That was a lot bigger than New Jersey. We played the Bowery Ballroom which has a capacity of about 1,500. It wasn't your typical Super Furry Animals gig because it was part of the CMJ [American college music magazine] festival, so they were a bit cooler than usual, y'know? "Shopping? We don't plan our shopping. Sometimes there are some really good record shops near the venue, in the funky areas of town. But I didn't go out of my way to go shopping in New York. We spent three days in New York, and all the time we were trying to avoid this epidemic carried by mosquitoes which has struck the city. It turns your brain to mush. So we didn't want to catch that, haha, and got out of New York as fast as we could." September 16: Washington, Black Cat "So we went down to Washington and got hit by Hurricane Floyd instead. It was pretty weird. We were in our very nice mobile home we've got and there was water splashing around outside everywhere. Did we go outside? Yeah, we went out and flew our kites! No, we stayed indoors where it was safe. The winds were pretty strong. It was pretty funny, actually. But I think they make a big deal of it on American news to deflect from how fucked America is. They hype the weather, but then I think about 30 people did die, so... it is a pretty serious thing, hahahaha. "We obviously couldn't go out to any clubs in Washington. Last time we toured the States we went out to the odd club. But sometimes we'd stay indoors and just get drunk. It was never planned. It's pretty much the same this time. We just do what we feel after the gig. It's a spontaneous atmosphere." September 18: Boston, Middle East "The fans in Boston were just brilliant. I have no idea whether American audiences are any different to British audiences. I'm still surprised that so many people come to see us, to be honest. It's still a nice shock sometimes. It seems like one of the strangest thing. All these people that come and see us... where do they all come from? We don't tend to get many Welsh flags at American gigs, which is nice, haha. It's not as if the only people who come to see us in America are Welsh immigrants. We get a lot more Welsh people when we pay in Australia. But our audiences here are... refreshingly American. I mean, it's great seeing people from home, cos you can take the piss, have a laugh, have a drink and talk about familiar things. But we'd be achieving absolutely nothing if our audiences here were purely Welsh. "Bands come to America with the wrong attitude and absurd expectations. The British media go on about bands invading America, they always hype it up as an invasion of British bands, or British bands breaking American markets, conquering this and that, which is pretty ridiculous, really, because America is such a big country. You can't take it over just like that. The language the media use is very aggressive. There's now way we could ever have that attitude. We're just here to have a good time, to play to as many people as possible and make sure they go home liking our music. We have no expectations that we're going to be huge or anything. We're not here to crack anything, to damage anything or to invade anything, y'know? We come in peace, haha." September 21: Montreal, Cabare "I don't think anybody over here gets confused by the Welsh language songs we play live. Nobody speaks English in America anyway, hahaha. There's a wide variety of languages that people speak over here. It's one big melting pot, lots of different cultures, so it's wrong to assume that everyone speaks English. When we played Montreal most of the audience spoke French, as you'd expect them to. "Most of the people we come across are pretty well-informed about Wales. They know where it is and that it's not just a part of London or England. But Wales is a small country, so you can't expect everybody to know exactly where it is. There's lots of people in Britain who wouldn't be able to tell you what all the countries in Central America are called. We're definitely billed as a Welsh band over here. And a lot of people make the connection between us the Manics and Catatonia. But the clever people don't care where we come from, they tend to disregard it and judge us solely on our music. I mean, obviously where you come from is going to influence you in some way. But basically the geography of the band is irrelevant. We didn't form the band just because we're Welsh, we formed the band because of our joint love for melodies and songwriting and making music together and playing our music live. That's got nothing to do with us being Welsh." September 22: Toronto, Opera House "We've played there a few times before and they're always really appreciative of what we do. We can play some big venues in Canada, and we get a lot of people driving miles to come and see us. This one guy drove from Atlanta to see us, which takes something like eight hours. We're still a small band in America and Canada, nowhere near as popular as we are in Britain. But we're developing a much bigger following now, which is really exciting. "'Guerrilla' has only just been released over here and a lot of people must think it is our first album. it took ages for 'Radiator' to get released. I thin it only came out six months ago. So we have to play most of our songs from those albums, but we don't need to change the sets much because it's more or less the same sets we'd play in Britain. 'The Man Don't Give A Fuck' receives the most manic celebrations in Britain when we play live, but here it varies a lot. we get some audiences who know everything we've done and shout for B-sides, while others aren't so familiar with the material. "'Guerrilla' seems to have been really well received by American critics, and it's in lots of colleges' Top 10s. They haven't been dismissive of us at all. We tend to be marginalised a bit too much at the moment, which I don't think we deserve because we're a successful band who make good music, good pop songs. We're not just a strange bunch of nutters. "We used kazoos in Toronto to replace the trumpets in 'Demons', because we couldn't afford to have the brass section with us at every gig. They played new York, though, and to make it special we dressed them up as monks. They looked brilliant. We couldn't bring the monsters over with us either. I don't miss them, though, they stink! Other than that it's been a stripped-down version of Super Furry Animals. I think playing kazoos worked. It was a weird and wonderful replacement. But we'll have the full brass section back for our British tour." September 24: Detroit, Magic Stick "I visited the old Motown studios, which was fun. They're all shut down now, they're just open for tourists, but I'm glad I went. I saw the Detroit Tigers, the baseball team. When people talk about touring America being disorientating, they must be talking about baseball. I found it very disorientating, watching a sport I didn't understand. It goes on forever. It was the last ever match at the Tigers' stadium so it was quite a big deal, with fireworks and everything. That made it more enjoyable than it otherwise would have been. Maybe I should've gone to watch Detroit Lions play American football instead. But that goes on for even longer, doesn't it?" September 25: Chicago, Lounge Ax "We've been here a couple of weeks now, though it feels like years. But I don't want to come across like I'm moaning because I don't find touring boring at all. There's certain things you can do to pass the time. I'm reading a book about rock'n'roll landmarks in America, but we haven't visited any of the landmarks mentioned in the book yet. Going to the Motown studios in Detroit is the closest we've got. I'm also reading another book about Situationism. "And we have a betting scam going on with the PlayStation football and ice hockey games. We operate a very complex betting system, I couldn't even begin to explain things to you. The thing is, it's illegal to bet on this sort of thing in some states, so we have to be careful, hahaha! Hide the PlayStation when the police search the tour bus. All you need to know is that I'm losing quite a bit of money on this tour. I'll be completely broke by the end of it. There's lots of really clichéd things you can do when touring America, and I've always wanted to avoid those. I don't think playing PlayStation counts as a rock'n'roll cliché. "The thing is, America's a very inspiring country, y'know, a country full of extremes. You can't predict when lyrics are going to strike or anything. Like I read about chupacabras [the mythical goat-eating bat commemorated in an SFA song] in a British paper, hahaha, and there's no set routine to writing lyrics, it's pretty haphazard. But touring America does show you amazing things that you wouldn't normally see. "Everywhere you go in the world there's something great to see. I've never been to a crap place anywhere, in my whole life. You can always find something interesting, even about the dullest place." September 26: Minneapolis, 400 Bar "We've not been here long, but I've had a look around at this scooter park outside which looked really good. I've just been downtown and there's the usual glass skyscrapers. I think there's a baseball match on today. Oh shit! I've just remembered! We had Cynthia Plastercaster on our bus last night! No, she didn't go to work. She didn't have enough plaster, haha!"
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