Here by the sea, waves pounding onto the beach, seagulls squealing overhead, Gruff Rhys, 29 this July, is even more peaceful than he usually is, staring into the edge of the universe, a man about whom very little, still, is known (other than he’s the son of mountain-obsessed, politicised parents who’s written songs since the age of five and wears an Eastern watch on both wrists). He doesn’t “like to dwell very much” on himself and, thus, when asked to, the pauses in his speech reach epic, season-changing proportions. If the pop psychologists’ rumination that your earliest vivid memory creates the blueprint for your “world-view” ever after, Gruff’s was branded in his psyche aged two.
“Sitting on a window ledge trying to work out how to get down,” he ponders, “really high up. And there was no way of getting down.”
He’s been there ever since. Probably. Asked what he thinks he inherited from his parents and he says: “Noses, I suppose”. He doesn’t find his early songwriting ability (subject: getting old) remotely remarkable. “Euros Childs from Gorky’s,” he chuckles, “he wrote his first song at three, about jumping off the Severn Bridge. Heheheh. That’s hardcore punk rock.” At seven, he wanted to be a drummer so he built a kit from his “favourite buckets” until his brother nicked them all. His brother, then 15, started a punk band whose name translated as Hot Puke, imbuing the tiny Gruff with an appreciation of grizzled punk, alongside Welsh songs, reggae, Irish radio, John Peel and classical music played so loud by his dad he couldn’t get to sleep. At seven he won a Welsh national drawing competition with his unique depiction of the theme ‘Ali Baba And The 40 Thieves’, which he’d never heard of, “So I drew 40 thieves in stripy shirts trying to break into a house with loot bags and wrenches. I was completely naive.” He learned to play his brother’s guitar.
“My brother plays left-handed guitar even though he’s right-handed,” says Gruff, sinking even further down the bench, “so I learnt to play the guitar left-handed and when he moved away he took the guitar so I borrowed a mate’s right-handed guitar and learned to play it in a left-handed way. So I’ve learned to play guitar with the strings completely upside down. Which meant I couldn’t play other people’s songs. I’ve never been able to do covers. I can’t play certain chords, so I make my own up, that you don’t get in books.”
As was the case, as it happens, with Jimi Hendix. He grew up in Bethesda, a run-down 90 per cent Welsh-speaking quarry town which is a narrow valley at the foot of 100 per cent vertical mountains which means, in actual fact, it’s a big ledge. “Living on the ledge. Heheheh!” Geographically beautiful, it’s long been a magnet for “people who just dropped out, Welsh folk singers and nutters from all over the world”. It’s the kind of place where you leave school at 16 because you’re “going insane - with everything” and start a band called, in Welsh, Fuck Off Everyone.
“I used to drill myself onstage,” says Gruff, cheerily, “with an industrial drill. We didn’t start writing songs 'til later on. It was just noise. And drilling. And getting banned. I drilled the cymbals and the guitars. To the annoyance of my fellow band members.”
What were you angry enough about to drill your chum’s cymbals?
“I dunno,” he shrugs, “it’s just… human nature. That’s why the world’s so fucked up. If I look back there’s no reason why I should be angry. I’ve had an easy life! Nothing particularly glamorous, either, but I was brought up well, fed, wasn’t bullied. Eeurrgh! (Flaps hands at fluttering robin that’s attempting to alight on his head, romantically enough) They shit!”
For a few years, he did whatever it took to sustain his music, went to technical college, got kicked out “for doing fuck all”, did the odd job, went back to college and “managed to do art”. It took him to Manchester Poly in 1989. The Madchester revolution, however, eluded him: “I was always in Wales playing music, or touring in France or Holland carrying amps. I couldn’t afford nightclubs.” He was a “conceptual” art student.
How conceptual?
“Look, there’s a cave!” he shouts, in an information-swerving gambit, “em… conceptual… em. By the end I was leaving empty bags in train stations. 'Cos there were bombs going off and there were sings everywhere saying, 'Please don’t leave your bags unattended’. So I was leaving unattended bags all over the country.”
In the light of recent events, this appears, of course, as groovy a concept and bringing Adolf Hitler back from the dead, but Gruff was innocent, then.
And you did this as an act of art?
“An act of foolishness,” he says, and stares at the monastery. “Look! They’ve got a CB aerial!”
For a while, he lived in Barcelona with his girlfriend. They rented a room for £15 in the Gothic Quarter which had a hole in the wall right next to their bed where the rain came in and a farm on the roof, including a 12-year-old chicken called Pepito.
“Pepito was absolutely insane,” he wists, “they fed him human food. Lasagne and paella. He bit chunks out of people’s legs.” They went to the desert once, in the south, but he didn’t explode with all that space-insignificance-mind-quaver nonsense. “Oh, no, we just went through it on a bus”. Back in Manchester, Gruff lived in an ex-toilet factory near a roundabout in the middle of a dual carriageway. He also lived in Hulme for three years in a council flat squat.
“People getting murdered left, right and centre,” he says, shuffling in his seat. “It was alright for a while, interesting people, but then it got so violent. We used to go to jungle nights and there was such a violent undertone to everything, it was insane. The flat next door but one to mine was turned into a nightclub and someone was murdered there. And someone else in a phonebox across the way. It was… grim.”
Weren’t you paranoid and terrified?
“Yeah. It was… I was… involved in some really heavy situations. Life-threatening situations. Which I won’t get into.”
With strangers?
“Yeah.”
You had guns pulled on you?
“I don’t want to get into it. I don’t know if it has any relevance to anything.”
It certainly does. Having guns pointed in your face has a direct effect on your attitude to life, doesn’t it?
“I can’t feel sorry for myself because I put myself in these situations. When I was 16 and left home, because I didn’t know any better, I put myself into… various precarious circumstances. Em. Em…”
The sea pounds, pounds, pounds on the beach.
“But… I could’ve stayed at home. And worked. KnowhatImean? Read books. Y'know? I… took the risk.”
El Niño 2000 comes and goes.
“I’ve always been in things that are transient. It’s my choice to be in situations. And I don’t… y'know… it’s… I haven’t been brought up surrounded by guns so if I choose to put myself in a violent situation, it’s… I’m the idiot. Y'know? So. I don’t think it’s particularly a clever thing to do.”
It’s a hardcore reality thing to do.
“But… but… by putting myself there… I don’t want to get into this. Really.”
So everyone else in Manchester was E’d up in the 'love’ revolution and you were living in a toilet surrounded by guns and dead men in phoneboxes.
“Well… y'know… it was an amazing time in Europe,” he swerves, “you got the Berlin Wall coming down. Thatcher going. The revolution in Czechoslovakia. All these Balkan States becoming independent. Mandela coming out of jail. Band with silly trousers in the charts. A lot of positive music. It was pretty powerful. All within that strange year. Em…”
Seventeen generations of island monks are born, raised and die. Men colonise Neptune.
“And I started writing melodies. Heheheheh. I got into harmonies, instead of dissonance.”
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