Here we are then. Thirty years on from Fuzzy Logic and the halcyon days of the late 90s. The Cold War was over! The economy was on the up! We were all middle class now! Time, and, inevitably, the course of events, has shown that the optimism of those days was a brief summer, a sunny interval, rather than just the way things were going to be from now on.
The sunshine pop of Super Furry Animals’ back catalogue still has the potential to cheer, though, and there are a lot of middle-aged men and women here who are grateful for the opportunity to spend of couple of hours revisiting those youthful days, before the mortgage payments meant having to take any notice of interest rate announcements from the Bank Of England. At the end of this there will still be the Monday morning meeting to attend, the monthly sales spreadsheet will still need updating, but for now they can dance to Northern Lites and remember what it felt like when this music was new and everything felt so very fresh.
And SFA know exactly what their audience want, throwing out one crowdpleaser after another over the course of a set focused entirely on the hits. It’s almost wall-to-wall singles tonight, with only the occasional beloved album track thrown in the mix. All of the songs are drawn from the first decade of their career, with nothing from their three most recent albums; this probably tallies with audience expectations, but prompts some melancholy reflection on the later part of the band’s career.
It’s a testament to just how rich the first half of their career was, however, that many songs unplayed tonight wouldn’t be out of place in this hits-larded set. The absence of Hometown Unicorn feels particularly noteworthy. The songs which are played are executed flawlessly, with regular outbreaks of crowd singalongs, and this is the chief component in the love that the band are being shown tonight.
The greatest part of SFA’s appeal as a live act has always been their proficiency at recreating the cloudless sounds of those early records. They do the vocal harmonies, they play the instrumental breaks as they are on the record, and you can rest easy in the knowledge that they’re never going to treat the audience to a 12-minute jazz-funk reinterpretation of one of their pop-shaped perfect classics.
For a band known for employing creative visual content, frequent costume changes and a multitude of stage props, tonight’s performance is somewhat muted. The band are dressed in civvies, the video screen behind the band mostly shows coloured abstractions, and there are no tanks onstage – although one of the giant inflatables from the Radiator era flanks the stage to the right.
The performance culminates as it was always going to, with a blazing version of The Man Don’t Give A Fuck. The fans roar at one last chance to sing along, and when the group leave the stage at the end of the song the audience unites in chants of “More!” After several minutes soundtracked by a looped techno breakdown, the band reappear on stage, in their yeti costumes, to finish the song and soak up the adulation of the audience.
And that’s it. There will be no encore, Cardiff. As they traipse out into cool drizzle, the middle-aged men and women, reality begins to reassert itself. But for a too-brief couple of hours it was glorious summer.
Super Furry Animals, Utilita Arena Cardiff, Sat 16 May
words DAVID GRIFFITHS photos TIM ALBAN
