Words by AW Henderson
Photo by Mary Wycherley

While Wales’ claim to musical fame prepares to head out on a North American tour supported by the Fiery Furnaces this month, we had a moment to talk to bassist Guto Pryce about a slew of topics almost as free-ranging as his band’s musical curiosity. Read on to see the band’s official opinion on UFOs, the Japanese, and what’s next for Wales’ most iconic psychedelic creatures.

Hi, Guto! Am I saying your name right?
Yeah, “Git-oh.”

Excellent. How are you doin’?
Yeah, doin’ well, thank you.

Packing the interviews in today, or is it pretty relaxed?
I’ve had a mad day, to be honest with you. I got up at four a.m., went to London, to the American embassy, had an interview.

So you’re in London right now?
No, I’m back in Cardiff, which is about two-and-a-half hours away, by car.

What were you doing at the embassy?
Just get visas. You have to, to get into the states now. You have to get them in London, at the American embassy. Nobody else does that — it’s kind of a pain in the ass, but I think it went well.

So you got your visas and everything?
You hope so..

Is that specifically for the tour?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Is this the first time you’ve had to do that?
Er, no. We did it last time; we have to do it every year.

What kind of show are you going to try to put on for this tour, versus tours from the past supporting other albums? Are you going to do anything differently for the Hey Venus! material?
Song-wise, it’s a mixture. It’s got quite a lot of old songs in there. You know, expanding a record-making career, over 12 years or so…there’s 12 years’ worth of records to choose from. It’s quite an all-encompassing set.

How do you approach making a set-list now, as you get more and more material that is more and more varied?
We just…well, we struck a balance between songs that we know the audience liked and songs that we like, to keep it fresh for ourselves, whether picking up an old song we haven’t played for years or it could be new material.

That seems to be a unique challenge for bands with such a long history. For instance, I saw Yo La Tengo last night, and everyone in the audience had a different favorite song they wanted to hear.
It’s a nice problem to have. Yeah.

I know [lead singer and guitarist] Gruff Rhys is working on volume two of his Welsh Rare Beat compilation.
Working on volume three by now.

Apparently a lot of the recordings and stuff there were from an area of Wales where there were increased extra terrestrial sightings.
Yeah, in the seventies and eighties, there was a lot around West Wales. Whether it’s true, exactly, or not…there’s an American Air Force base, so, you know…these sightings tend to happen around military installations. I don’t know for what reason. But yeah, we have our own…it’s called the “Welsh Triangle.”

Welsh Triangles? What are they?
Well, you know, it’s an area around Pembrokeshire in West Wales; quite a rural, coastline, kind of rocky terrain. There’s been a lot of UFOs flying in up out of the sea.

Oh, so you mean “Welsh Triangle” like “Bermuda Triangle”?
Yeah…

I thought you meant they were like crop circles, but were triangles instead.
No, we just couldn’t think of an original shape for our UFO phenomenas.

Well, there’s only so many shapes.
I think it’s something we grew up with. You only heard a lot about it if you lived in Wales, and watched Welsh media.

Do you think UFO sightings are unique to certain cultures? In the United States, crop circles have been repeatedly disproven but there are people who still believe in them. Every different culture has a different UFO experience, I think.
Yeah! Natural animals, also, are always fascinating. We’ve got a song called “Chupacabras”, which means “goat-thing” or “blood-sucking basilisk from Mexico.” And you’ve got your Sasquatch in America, and Yeti in the Himalayas. You know, one person will see that as an alien, another person will see that as a dog, another person will see it as a hairy, prehistoric animal that’s been lost in the forest. It’s definitely fascinating. UFOs…it seems — of course with Hollywood now, the world is a smaller place. You know, Martian movies since the fifties and sixties and everybody’s heard of Roswell, so that idea’s in the brain already.

It’s sort of a shame that we’re losing some of our UFO cultures.
Yeah, well, maybe people are now thinking they came from space, where before they had some other explanation, maybe with sort of religious aspect.

Is there any sort of religious connection with the UFOs in Wales? Or is it mostly just conspiracy theorists?
It’s in the world culture of UFO hanging around. [Laughs] That just happen to be around U.S. Air Force bases.

Coincidentally…
[Laughs]

Speaking of different cultures, I read recently about the Japanese artist who did the cover art for Hey Venus! — Keichi Tanaami — am I saying his name right?
Yeah, “Kye-chee Ta-nam-ee.”

How old was he?
I think he’s in his seventies or eighties.

Wow.
He’s a proper sixties psychedelic heavy-weight. He was in The Factory in New York with Andy Warhol, and he was the first Japanese person to take LSD. Somebody else pointed out nobody else did, so he was probably the only Japanese person to take LSD in the sixties.

He seems kind of perfect as a complement for the music he did the album art for, then.
It’s since we toured two or three years ago, in Japan, we were blown away by it, you know. We love psychedelic art, anyway, and this guy had a Japanese take on it. It’s just something we suggested – he do the sleeve – and through a system of lawyers and translators, he actually said yes. Which we were pretty honored, to be honest.

He’s been around the art scene for a long time, right?
Yeah, and we were in Japan a few months ago doing some shows, and he showed up, which was really nice because before we talked through lawyers, and we actually got to meet the guy, and he’s not as scary or as formal…

Are you familiar with Deerhoof’s work with artist Ken Kagami, or Menomena’s work with graphic artist Craig Thompson? Both groups have performed live with those artists doing visual stuff along side. Is there any hope of a Super Furry Animals/Keichi Tanaami live collaboration?
That would be amazing. We’ve done…the guy who done our previous records, a guy called Pete Fowler, is a guy from Wales influenced by Japanese art, and we’ve done live things with him. On New Year’s Eve, actually, he did live art and Deerhoof played as well. Played with them a couple weeks ago…But yeah. To do something with Tanaami would be amazing. He’s an incredible artist.

Is he not too old to get up on stage?
I don’t know. He seemed pretty fit. The Japanese, they look after themselves. They live to a ripe old age, and they keep their brain for a lot longer than we do. He’d be up for it. He’d be there.

How many instruments did you use on Hey Venus! in total? I remember reading about a Turkish instrument.
We kind of buy stuff when we’re touring, a lot of instruments you come across in a store. So, we’ve got an instrument called a dulcimer, which is kind of a sixties spy-movie sound, you know, espionage vibe to it. So we picked one of those up in Chicago, actually. I’ve also got, like, an electric-sitar box. Like a drum-machine for Indian musicians. Harpsichord; used a lot of it.

You guys have covered an incredible number of genres. In light of that, do you tend to prefer to compose songs and then seek out the instrument that makes the sound you want, or do you more work with the instruments you have on hand?
We work with the instruments. We don’t have huge resources where we can just get any kind of thing. And a lot of the time we don’t claim to be able to play any of these instruments properly, either. [Laughs] We can make a noise on’em, and to our untrained ears, it’s a cool noise. In computers, you can chop it up and make music out of it. But, you know, we’re not like… George Harrison. We don’t get a sitar for, like, six months. We’re not that sort of factionist rabble, yet. It might happen. We just pick things up, and if the studio’s got a cool – like, the harpsichord came in the studio, and it just ended up on a lot of the songs because it was there, and it was more in tune than the pianos.

With all the instruments and composition styles, do you still fall along the traditional lines of a band: bassist, drummer, guitarist, singer? Or have you turned away from that?
No, we do. If we’re recording a song, we’re still going to be on the instrument each of us played. Like, you know, all along one or two of us might swap around. That’s our basis. ?DAMO? Plays drums, but Gruff might play drums on-top of that as well. It can get free-form, afterwards, but I think the basis is the five of us, like we are live.

Which type of music do you most identify with, of all the disparate styles you have tried on?
I think sixties melody pop is a common ground we’ve all got. We’ve all got different leanings in music – more electronic, or more country, or more rock – but I think we all agree on the sixties melody pop. You know, three-minute pop songs with verse-chorus-and-a-hook. Country rock, as well, for some records we’ve kind of all drifted in that direction. But I think that’s the dynamic of the band, is the five people with their different leanings.

What are your leanings?
I’m a big dub fan, for example. So I will always suggest putting more delay on something. [Laughs]

It’s always interesting to me when rock, pop, psychedelic or electronic musicians are really into dub. Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead, for example, is an outspoken fan, I think.
On the production side, the way they made records in Jamaica back in the seventies was a significant influence on us, the experimentation. But I think we’re very wary; we wouldn’t want to become a reggae band.

Dub is interesting in how it’s traveled from Jamaica to the UK with the whole post-punk movement.
Reggae and punk went hand-in-hand in the seventies, here. One’s quite an aggressive form of music; the other’s more relaxed. But there’s something between them, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the culture.

They both were used to protest a lot of the authority figures.
Yup, exactly. Then you get a band like The Clash who were obviously influenced by a lot of reggae, and went on to make pretty cool original music. We’ve never wanted to be purist, about music. Going back to the new things, like using the Turkish instrument – we like the sound of it. We’re not going to make a particularly Turkish [song]. We’re not going to make a Paul Simon record, you know, “immerse yourself in Turkish culture, try to make a Turkish record.” We’ll just follow our element, and chuck’em into our rock pie.

So you see your sound as distinctly Super Furry Animals, which you incorporate other sounds into?
I think so. I think we’ve always described what we’re into – we’re into melody and rhythm, and if both of those are songs, then it sounds good to us.

What’s coming up? Is the future going to be more Hey Venus!-style, more punk, more electronic? Where do you think yo’re going to take it?
We’ve got like two or three records in mind at the moment. We’ve found ourselves with some time off to be working with a classical conductor-arranger. That hopefully will be more of a soundtrack type musical project.

More cinematic?
Yeah, yeah. And then we’ve got another couple of traditional rock records in the bag as well.