Gruff

Sadness Sets Me Free is, by his own estimate, about the 25th album from Gruff Rhys, if you include his work with Super Furry Animals and all of his various side projects. As with so much of what has gone before, it’s a finely balanced mix of melancholy and joy: heavy subjects and a lightness of touch. They Sold My Home to Build a Skyscraper – about cultural spaces being razed to make way for luxury flats – is a case in point, its downbeat lyrics (“They floored my people down with sandpaper”) at odds with its gloriously…

Noel Gallagher recently stated that Super Furry Animals were the best band to come out of Wales. Do you have any wild stories from the 90s involving Oasis or other Creation Records’ bands? RobJ1982Plenty of wild stories! We were in an incredible situation, where we grew up listening to records on Creation as teenagers and then got signed by the label. I pinched myself many times. Oasis took us on tour and were generally really warm and generous to us. We had front row seats for some of the madness.When we played the…

Gruff Rhys has never been shy of an ambitious recording project – a concept album about the life of Welsh explorer John Evans, say, or making an accompanying theatre production of his 2007 album Candylion, or sneaking into a condemned recording studio to make a record in its final days. By comparison, his latest solo album, Sadness Sets Me Free, is a relatively back-to-basics effort. At the end of a tour in Dunkirk in 2022, the Welsh iconoclast and his band hot-footed it to La Frette studios on the outskirts of Paris and…

One afternoon a few years ago, Cate Le Bon opened an email that made her shake. Before she knew what was happening, she was crying. “It isn’t like me to have that kind of reaction to something,” she says. Its message was simple: “John Cale is looking for you.”Le Bon was raised 30 miles or so from Cale’s home village of Garnant in Carmarthenshire, but the invitation to play with his band at the Barbican in London during the spring of 2018 reached her at a furniture-making school in the Lake District, where she was studying…