Sleeping Gruff

“I was hitting 40 years old and I thought 'What should a man of my age be playing?' It seemed obvious to me that I should be making an album of piano ballads with saxophone.” Gruff Rhys's delivery makes it extremely difficult at all times to tell if he's being serious or not, but he's insistent that Hotel Shampoo, the third solo album from the Super Furry Animals' frontman, is what he says it is. “People think I'm taking the piss. I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but even [current single] Shark Ridden Waters – which is out already – that's got a piano hook. Making an album based around the piano doesn't mean it has to be based all around power ballads...although some of the songs are actually power ballads, with saxophone. Some of it's quite earnest and more of it is a distortion of who I am.”

Rhys, typically of his renowned humour (this is a man given to driving around festivals in a blue techno tank and wearing yeti costumes on stage), has adorned this latest release with an accompanying back-story, which has a wry, cutting edge to it. The title is taken from Rhys's large collection of miniature shampoo bottles and other complimentary hotel products acquired over fifteen years of touring the world. In the accompanying press release, he claims that these products are “like diary entries, triggering memories of all those buildings and random people I've met, and inspiring songs on the album. I like a lot of albums from the 70s made by washed up rockstars. Millionaires making albums like Pacific Ocean Blue by Dennis Wilson. Completely overblown Fleetwood Mac records. The difference being I'm not a millionaire – I'm not from an era where records sell...or something.”

A mini-documentary of Gruff actually 'building' and then sleeping in the hotel is currently on his website (The Gruffington Post), and though the bottles are all apparently full, Rhys defensively insists that he “did in fact, use some of the stuff.” There's a plan to franchise the hotels in the States (“definitely budget, I'm part of the Easyjet-set”), but of course, Rhys has a knack of mixing the surreal with the serious. “In a way, it's fragments of autobiographical observations from the past 15 years. These are magnified views of aspects of myself, not a literal, earnest collection of biographical songs, but there's an element of that. The whole time I've been touring has mainly taken place during the economic boom, which is over, but was a kind of superficial age. So, it's like looking back at the boom years, and all I've got to show for it is this hotel – built out of disposable shit that I've kept. So at least if the shit hits the fan I've got somewhere to put my head down for the night.”

It's been a hectic couple of years for the musician. Nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2008 for his electro-pop concept collaboration with Boom Bip as Neon Neon, last year saw him premiere an acclaimed documentary, Separado! about his time in Patagonia meeting his ancestral family. This was soundtracked by an experimental album (The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness) made with Brazilian artist Tony da Gatorra. He laughs fondly when pondering the notion that this album seemed to rub people up the wrong way. “Well, in the context of other records I've ever put out – they're mostly extremely melodic, harmonious, and quite trippy – this was about volume and dissonance, so you're only going to enjoy it on that level, like, when you're very angry. It's not an album that's going to work in the background as coffee table music.”

In 2007, after releasing his second solo LP, Candylion, Rhys said he was “breaking up as a solo artist,” so what made him get the band back together? “Well, I suppose that was just a cheap stunt,” he deadpans. And The Furries on hiatus [according to a report in The Guardian late last year], is that another such stunt? “We're not on hiatus; we never made that announcement so I'm not sure how that got out there. Last summer was the first year we didn't do any festivals since 1995 – we were knackered. We're just going to take our time before releasing another album and let people catch up with some of our back catalogue. We're trying to sort out a couple of reissues and a book. I mean, we don't really know how to put books out, but it's something we hope will come off.”

Rhys, explaining how much he's looking forward to touring the new album with Y Niwl, the instrumental north Welsh act he calls “the world's highest altitude surf band,” does admit that even after his substantial time in the industry, still finds some of the trappings that go with it “weird – absurd even.” By way of example, he cites the process of making the video for Shark Ridden Waters – seemingly set in the Riviera featuring a man obsessed with technology and social media – set in the 1960s. I wanted it to look like a Godard film, [specifically 1965's Pierrot le Fou about a man escaping a humdrum existence in Paris] but with social networking, so I was looking for an object which would look like what an iPhone might have looked like in the 1960s [it's a red box with buttons, but very chic]. So, it was fucking nuts making the video, all very glamorous, but it's really nothing like my life. I suppose this album is about the aspects of my life that aren't normal, and I've magnified them, tried to send them up a little, but mostly I live in a terraced house in Cardiff with kids.”