The gifted Gruff Rhys might be best known Stateside as the quirky frontman for psychedelic rockers Super Furry Animals or even his Mercury Prize nominated side project Neon Neon, but the lanky Welshman just released his excellent third solo album Hotel Shampoo.
Rhys has also been the go-to guy of late as a vocalist, collaborating in recent years with bands and artists like Gorillaz (with De La Soul), Danger Mouse and the late Sparklehorse, Mogwai, Simian Mobile Disco and The Rascals' Miles Kane.
Rhys, who plays Glastonbury's Park Stage tomorrow, June 26, at 9:30 p.m. BST, has a summer of festival appearances ahead, including Japan's Fuji Rock, the UK's Truck Festival and Paris' Rock En Seine. In addition to gigs, he has also been debuting his documentary Separado!, a road trip journey in whichRhys tracks down a lost branch of his family in a Welsh-speaking enclave of Patagonia, Argentina ... and learns more about his poncho-wearing, guitar-playing uncle, René Griffiths.
The sometimes reticent, slightly shy, but very affable Rhys dropped by The Alternate Side and played stripped-down versions of "Sensations in the Dark," "Shark Ridden Waters" and "If We Were Words (We Would Rhyme)" accompanied by his guitar, a metronome and a Casio keyboard:
Gruff Rhys: I think it’s my first time in the Bronx.
Kara Manning: Really? Your first time?
Gruff: My great granddad came here once to visit famly and they took him to the Bronx Zoo. He used to chew tobacco and he spat a piece of tobacco into the eye of a gorilla. The gorilla went nuts and they took him straight out. My great granddad, not the gorilla.
Kara: Well, you’ve worked with Gorillaz! You have one of the most interesting careers of just about anyone I know making music right now. You began with a Welsh band called Ffa Coffi Pawb which means “Everyone’s Coffee Beans,” but there’s a play on how it’s pronounced as well. The progress of you as a solo artist, to make your own records, has come from different places over the years.
Gruff: Yeah, my first two solo records were recorded extremely quickly and I was working on Super Furry Animals records at the same time. With this album, I’m finding it more difficult to work on multiple records at once. I used to find it easy to work on lots of things at the same time and then with this record, I just recorded the album, I’m touring it and not working on anything else (laughs).
Kara: There were some tracks on this album that were pulled from a Super Furry Animals session - was it “Take A Sentence?”
Gruff: Yeah, we tried to record that one. There’s a version of “Take A Sentence” with different lyrics and it didn’t quite turn out. And [the song] is called “Space Dust #2” because I worked on the lyrics and got the structure together. There’s an early version called “Space Dust” by Super Furry Animals which we never figured out how to finish because it wasn’t finished (laughs).
Kara: I love that song. It tells the tale of two scientists who meet at a seminar and fall in love. You can hear the whole arc of the relationship in the song. What drew you to Sarah Assbring, who is El Perro Del Mar?
Gruff: I’m just a massive fan of her records and songwriting. It can be quite bleak, but she has a lot of life lessons in them. The song, “Space Dust #2” is quite dour and I was looking for the right singer to pull it off so I sent her an email and much to my surprise, she agreed to do it. I didn’t know her or anything. It took ages to work out, but in the end it all got put on record. I was very surprised and happy.
Kara: You turned 40 last year and there’s a lyric in one of the songs, I think “Vitamin K,” where you talk about “fragments of memories coming to focus.” This record, which is so beautiful and personal, seems to harken back to a lot of music that was around when you were a child. Did you come into this album with a clear path about what you wanted to do? Or did it come about very organically and loosely?
Gruff: It’s quite a reflective record. I was aware that it was going to be quite nostalgic and looking back at a lot of things. Sometimes life goes extremely fast and it was a record where I was able to take a bit of a break and figure out what I’d been doing and document it. I recorded piano as the main instrument of the album because I thought it suited the themes.
Kara: Growing up in Wales, were you listening to a lot of John Cale or Shirley Bassey or other Welsh musicians that your parents might have been listening to?
Gruff: John Cale was a kind of a musical gateway drug for me into New York junkie music because he was a Welsh speaker. He was considered a good musical starting point for people. Accidentally I got into a bad musical crowd. John Cale’s been involved in so much great music by bad boys, like The Stooges and The Happy Mondays. But also, he produced great Nick Drake things and obviously the whole Velvet [Underground] catalogue is probably most of my favorite songs.
Kara: Have you met John or worked with him?
Gruff: Yeah. There’s a film ["Beautiful Mistake"] by a director called Marc Evans where he persuaded John to come to Cardiff for a few weeks to record with Welsh musicians and that was documented. They dragged a lot of people in to work with him. He sat up in a church in Cardiff Bay and we got to rehearse with him and work out some songs. We were all incredibly nervous (laughs).
Kara: You also worked on this album with Andy Votel who you met through a Serge Gainsbourg project?
Gruff: Andy Votel is an amazing character. He collects records from all over the world and he’s put out multiple compilations of Hungarian music and music from Pakistan, Thailand, Turkey. He’s compiled great psychedelic pop and funk tracks from mostly the 60s and 70s on his label Finders Keepers and I gave him a hand to put together a compilation of Welsh language psychedelic folk music. Basically my parents’ record collection. We put that out about five years ago; it’s called the Welsh Rare Beat. He also produces a lot of great hip hop jams under various names.
Kara: Works as a DJ a lot too.
Gruff: Exactly. There were a lot of old records I wanted to sample and he’s the master of sampling records in a powerful way. I went to work with him for a few days, putting these samples together.
Kara: My little Burt Bacharach and Hal David loving heart was so excited that you used The Cyrkle's cover of “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” on “Shark-Ridden Waters.” Was that you that had brought that record? Was it Andy’s idea? It’s used so seamlessly on the album.
Gruff: What happened is that I went up to Manchester with some old Greek records that I wanted to sample and some Turkish ones as well. For some reason over the past few years I’ve been collecting Meditteranean psychedelic pop records and disco and I went to Manchester to sample them. We recorded a song called “Christopher Columbus” and Andy found loads of ship samples, samples of foghorns and things of a maritime nature. We thought we’d go [find something to eat] and there was a Turkish restaurant nearby and we got a meal and drank Turkish beers and started to talk about sharks for some reason. We got into this conversation about all things sea-faring and we went back and Andy had mentioned that he’d had this Circle record and he threw it on and it was one of those instances where you react to something instantaneously and the melodies came to me instantly, to sing on top of it. We developed that shark theme into a song so I think it’s a song from the perspective of a shark. I know its prey.
Kara: That version gives the song such a melancholy air. I remember seeing you play Rockwood Music Hall in January and you did it two ways; in that beautiful, ruminative way and then you took it where it is on the album, which is more upbeat. There’s a bittersweet essence that runs throughout this entire album, musically and lyrically. It does feel like an incredibly personal record, perhaps more than anything else you’ve done.
Gruff: Possibly. I agree. Sometimes it’s easier to articulate that on record than through lyrics.
Kara: Do you think of yourself as a shy person?
Gruff: Yeah, I’m not the most articulate speaker. It takes me a while. I’m not an amazing wisecrack or anything so it takes me some time to think things through. But with songwriting, I can have all of the time in the world and figure things out before recording them.
Kara: You have another side project called Neon Neon which was nominated for a Mercury Prize, which is huge. But it’s more dance, sleek, synth-pop oriented. You’ve also worked with Gorillaz and Mogwai. Is there any genre that intimidates you?
Gruff: I tend to get nervous around jazz-funk. If there’s any scatting involved. I don’t consider myself a singer in a way. I always find it quite … I’m sure my family thinks it’s hilarious that I’m approached by other people to sing. My ambition in life is to be a drummer and a lot of my friends are drummers and they’re better than me. I never got that gig in Super Furry Animals. I only ended up singing because I couldn’t find anyone else to sing my songs.
Kara: I can honestly say that you’re one of my favorite vocalists so it surprises me that you have an odd relationship with your own voice. How do you view it? Do you have an ambivalence to it?
Gruff: I don’t worry about it. I enjoy writing songs and I can just about hold a melody. I enjoy listening to records by other people who are not opera singers. Yeah! I try to avoid opera! I’m not into operatic sound music. Especially when it’s fused with rock (laughs).
Kara: There’s a song I especially loved on the record called “If We Were Words, We Would Rhyme.” You have great pathos and humor to your lyrics. Are you a constant scribbler?
Gruff: Yes. I jot down ideas all of the time. I always keep a book on me. I suppose with “If We Were Words, We Would Rhyme,” the title came first and I was able to write all of the lyrics by association in a very sort space of time. Which doesn’t happen with every song but it’s one of those songs that came together with the lyrics first in ten minutes.
Kara: You’ve released the single “Honey All Over” from your album Hotel Shampoo which is backed by the song “Xenodocheionology" which means a love of hotels and inns. You were a most ferocious collector of little shampoo bottles, flip flops and bathrobes [which inspired the album’s title]. When did you start the collection?
Gruff: We were signed in 1996 to a record deal and we started to tour and stay in hotels and things. It was all very new to me and I was shocked by how much stuff they gave away in hotels which is a disaster on an environmental level. It was also very excited for me to have free stuff. I decided at that point I’d start to build a hotel made of these shampoo bottles and things.
Kara: There was a great art installation of this - there’s even a video - of you building it with a glue gun.
Gruff: Yeah, it took me fifteen years to collect them and most places I stay don’t give free stuff away. When I stay in people’s house I don’t take anything (laughs). So it’s not huge; it’s about the size of a dog kennel. I built it last year, at last, in Cardiff, so I can stop collecting them now.
Kara: Where is the little hotel living right now?
Gruff: It’s in an office in Cardiff at the moment looking very unloved behind the sofa. If anyone wants to borrow it to stay in it or exhibit it ….
Kara: So you’ve stopped collecting things. Except records.
Gruff: I collect records. I’m not a completist, but I’ve got a pile of them definitely.
Kara: What are some of your treasures?
Gruff: I’m terrible. I just play them, take them off and then I forget to put them back in their cover and they get all scratched. I’m terrible at taking care of them so my favorite records I’ve completely destroyed. My ultimate is a single by a band called Y Blew from 1968, the first Welsh language psychedelic rock single. I’ve destroyed it. It’s very rare. I feel really bad. The sleeve’s completely broken apart.
Kara: Your dad, Ioan Bowen Rees, was a poet and an environmentalist and you seemed to have grown up in a rich, artistic household where you were immersed in Welsh literature and music. But you said your parents were surprised that you went in a musical direction?
Gruff: Yes, they didn’t make a living from writing. They had day jobs, but they both wrote. My mom wrote poetry and my dad compiled collections of literature and wrote mostly on political and mountaineering subjects. Any musical influences come from my brother and sister mostly. When I was growing up, they had guitars around the house and loads of records. We’d listen to Welsh language pop music and punk rock. They had loads of cool records.
Kara: You went to Patagonia not long ago and worked on a documentary, “Separado!,” which traced the South American part of your family?
Gruff: It’s an investigative concert tour, a tour film. Between 1865 and World War I there was a movement of people from Wales to an area called the Chubut in Patagonia where they were given land by the Argentinian government. The plan was to set up a free Welsh state where people were allowed to have Welsh education which wasn’t allowed in Wales at the time.
Kara: Part of your family is still down there?
Gruff: A wing of the family moved there in 1880 and we didn’t hear anything back from them for about a century. In the early 70s this guitarist [René Griffiths] who came from Argentina to Wales with long hair, wearing a poncho, singing Welsh language songs in an Argentinian accent with a Spanish guitar. He was a very dramatic figure and used to arrive on stage on horseback and jump off. Quite an amazing guy. I remember this from my childhood and seeing him on TV. As the years went by I started to think it was a hallucination or something that you have when you’re young (laughs). I researched it and found that it actually happened. The idea of the film is a kind of search by touring Patagonia. We finished [the film], it came out last year and [premiered in New York] at the BAM Festival [on June 18].
Kara: Given your travels through South America, there’s essences of samba, Tropicália and more on songs like “Sensations in the Dark.”
Gruff: Sometimes songs come about and you’re not sure why they come about. Sometimes things you do influence you a few years down the line. Things you didn’t expect. Maybe if I hadn’t been drawn to that part of the world I wouldn’t have written a song quite like this.
Kara: You’re touring with Y Niwl. Did they bring brass along?
Gruff: No! But I have a harmonica which kind of fills in a little bit but it’s pathetic.
Kara: You worked with El Perro Del Mar and Andy Votel on Hotel Shampoo and also Miles Kane of Last Shadow Puppets and ex of The Rascals?
Gruff: He played guitar on “Space Dust #2.” I kind of ended up producing some of the songs on his [solo] album. He’s an incredible surf guitarist. So I roped him into doing something on my record too.
Kara: You’ve worked with everyone; is there anyone you haven’t worked with who you’d love to collaborate with?
Gruff: Well, when I’ve recorded with people, it’s usually people I’ve met touring. It usually hasn’t happened overnight. It happens quite socially and it’s very rare that I record with people that I don’t know, El Perro Del Mar being an exception. I don’t have any wild ambitions to work with anyone really. It’s funny when unexpected things happen (laughs).
