Super Furry Animals, O2 Academy Brixton, gig review: An epic and colourful performance

The Yeti costumes made a last-minute appearance

Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals (Getty Images) (Getty Images)

Super Furry Animals have embarked on their first tour in six years to coincide with a reissue of their Welsh-language album Mwng, first released 15 years ago. It’s also a double celebration as 2015 marks 20 years since their first early recordings.

There’s a strong Welsh contingent in the audience tonight, swarming and muttering “excuse me lovely” in lilting accents -- far more polite than the usual silently shoving crowd. There’s also a distinctive lack of phones waving in the air. Refreshingly, these fans seem more focused on enjoying the moment than recording it for later.

That’s probably just as well, as the performance from the SFA’s is rather static. Dressed in white boiler suits, with a complicated array of instrumental backing (including two trumpets, two tambourines and some sort of windchime) they let the colorful cartoon background videos, flashing up album covers and trippy animations, do most of the visual work.

Lead singer Gruff Rhys is positioned off to one side of the stage and there’s very little chat from him, at one point he seems to be referencing the newly elected government, but it’s hard to make out exactly what he’s mumbling, although the specially-extended angry set-closer “The Man Don’t Give a F***” might give you some insight into the group’s political standpoint.

The epic set list takes us on a colourful journey through a diverse back catalogue which spans nine imaginative albums, touching on all sorts of genres including psychedelic rock, jazz, pop, garage, indie and glam rock, taking the crowd from a mood of heart-swelling euphoria to dark despondency and back again.

The group adeptly transition from neat little Beach Boys-inspired opener “(Drawing) Rings Around the World”, with its pleasant psychedelia-fused surfer sound and a quick and bouncy old favourite “Do or Die” through to slow, metronomic and trance-inducing tracks from the Mwng album, including carousing “Ymaelodi A’r Ymylon” and gently swaying “Y Gwyneb lau” plus some weird experimental jazz diversions.

Mid-way through, they then ramp the energy right up again with blissful “Hello Sunshine” and a raft of twinkly, esophagus-rattling numbers as Rhys puts on what appears to be a red power ranger helmet and then moves to a customised mixing deck with spiral antennae to turn the venue into a superclub with blinding lasers and body-rattling bass.

The night is rounded off with a series of SFA’s big hits, with Rhys howling like a dog over “Golden Retriever” and a slinky, sensual “Juxtaposed with U”. With a night of such varied, textured work, we’re reminded that there’s been thwarted hope among fans for years now that the Super Furries will make another album. There was no hint from Rhys that it’s going to happen but now, more than ever,in a musical landscape of homogenous music, we need their anti-establishment, psychedelic, experimental, defiantly alternative, furry fury to return.

Right at the end, as if the crowd needed any more reason to scream their lungs out, the band ditched the hazmat suits and put on their yeti costumes.