SUPER Furry Animals are in Yorkshire tonight to perform their luminescent 1996 debut album, Fuzzy Logic, and its 1997 follow-up, Radiator, in full, in track order and back to back at Leeds O2 Academy.
The Welsh psychedelic rock band, who formed in Cardiff in 1993, are marking their 20th anniversary of their first long-player with a "re-evaluated, restored" reissue that came out in multiple formats on November 4.
Twenty years on, Fuzzy Logic has re-emerged on high-definition heavyweight vinyl, CD and digitally, re-mastered from the original tape reels, while a bonus disc, Lost On The Bypass Road, has risen from the deep well of the Super Furry archive to accompany the release.
Enlisting the help of the official Super Furry Animals archivist, Kliph Scurlock and mastering expert Donal Whelan, the recordings have been meticulously and sonically rediscovered. One of the last truly analogue albums to be produced in a pre-Pro Tools age, Fuzzy Logic has been re-mastered to capture the straight-to-tape ethos of the recording sessions at the legendary Rockfield Studios.
Super Furry Animals: "Rediscovering the thrilling alchemy found in the Fuzzy Logic vault"
Meanwhile, "laboratory conditions have been maintained" for a newly expanded compilation album, Zoom! The Best Of The Super Furry Animals 1995-2016, complementing their chart singles with selected album tracks, B-sides, personal band favourites and those that somehow strayed out of collective memory, only now to be rediscovered.
"We were a young family and found ourselves parents to two, boisterous albums, suddenly born between 1996 and 1997," says the band's tour statement.
"It was our doing; we took full responsibility and endured the sleepless nights. The time goes so fast and they are all grown up now, old enough to be taken on the road again and let them stay up late. Before that excitement began, we found ourselves rediscovering the thrilling alchemy found in the Fuzzy Logic vault and delved yet deeper to decide what made the final Zoom collection.”
There is a perfectly good reason why Super Furry Animals will perform both albums where other bands, such as The Jesus And Mary Chain's Psychocandy tour and Echo And The Bunnymen's Ocean Rain tour, have combined a set of greatest hits with a performance of a much cherished album.
Super Furry Animals: "Kliph is so comprehensive that he unearthed things we didn't even know existed," says Gruff
"The albums are both fairly short," says singer and guitarist Gruff Rhys. "So once you've performed one of them, what do you do next?! Also we released them pretty quickly in succession, just a year between them, so it made sense to do them both in one show, rather than on separate tours."
While 20th anniversaries are "healthy" in Gruff's deadpan-humoured assessment, acquiring the rights to reissue Fuzzy Logic was a tad more stressful.
"We had to find out who 'owned' Fuzzy Logic. It came out originally on Creation, who later sold everything to Sony, but when BMG 'divorced' from Sony, they were given the whole Super Furry Animals catalogue and took everything to store in California, where there was a fire!" recalls Gruff.
Was everything destroyed? "No! Our works were stored under the letter S, where they apparently suffered only a little smoke damage."
That meant any reisue could utilise the original masters, and BMG agreed to release the 20th anniversary editions. Here was where archivist Kliph Scurlock came into play.
Super Fuzzy Animals: everything becomes a bit of a blur for Super Furry Animals
"Luckily for us, our friend Kliph, who used to play with The Flaming Lips [the Oklahoma psychedelic rock band] and is a leading American 'Welshophile', had moved to Cardiff and begun to collect all our back catalogue," says Gruff.
"We were very lucky because Kliph is so comprehensive that he unearthed things we didn't even know existed: he found recordings of live shows and different takes of songs from recording sessions we'd done."
Inevitably this necessitated leaving some recordings off the anniversary reissue. "There are things that not even a completist would want to hear," says Gruff.
As for the new Zoom retrospective, "BMG came to us looking to do a compilation and were happy for us to compile it, with the stipulation that it would include all our singles with two CDs to fill, and we could choose what we considered would represent us best beyond the singles," says Gruff.
"Initially it was going to include one song we hadn't released before, but at the last minute that had to be pulled over a sampling issue, so that will be released later, but there's a track on there that originally came out in America as an extra track, some obscurities and some tracks that had been hidden on CDs that you had to find!"
Fuzzy Logic: "The songs have stayed pretty true to my feelings still today," says Gruff
Tonight, attention turns once again to Fuzzy Logic, releasing fond memories. "It was very exciting for us, quite life-changing, making that record," says Gruff.
Shattering too, as it turned out. "Unfortunately I smashed a chandelier in the house of the owners of the studio, Rockfield Farm," he admits.
Unlike that chandelier, Fuzzy Logic has stood the test of time. "For me, the songs have stayed pretty true to my feelings still today," says Gruff. "There are a couple of songs that I've written more recently that I feel I've lost connection with already, but I do feel really connected with our early songs."
Super Furry Animals play Leeds O2 Academy tonight; doors open at 7pm. Box office: academymusicgroup.com/o2academyleeds/events/865025/super-furry-animals-tickets
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