Super Furry Animals at Ben & Jerry’s
Friday, July 31st, 2009On Saturday 25 July Super Furry Animals played an hour-long set at Ben & Jerry’s annual Summer Sundae on Clapham Common.
They began their set with favoured opener Slow Life, the band taking to the stage in simple checked shirts as opposed to the glowing light-suits of previous years. This was a strong start, with Gruff holding up a huge “applause” sign during the harmonica solo.
The band continued this strong opening with Rings Around the World and a stirring Juxtaposed With You. There were a few hardcore SFA OK fans in the crowd showing their support, but after a day in the sun and free ice cream, the majority of the crowd was fairly unresponsive.
The crowd did manage to singalong to Hello Sunshine though, a fitting tribute to a glorious day in comparison with the rest of the summer. Super Furry fans were also treated to relatively rare outings for the superb If You Don’t Want Me To Destroy You, and Demons, complete with members of the crowd joining Gruff to sing the trumpet parts, Da-da-dur-dur-dur-da-da-dar.
Inaugural Trams involved Gruff holding up a cardboard cut-out of Franz Ferdinand’s Nick McCarthy for the wunderbar German rap. So the hits were brought out, the only slightly flabby section being Crazy Naked Girls, with its endless guitar solos, but who can really blame them, Gruff and Bunf were obviously having fun trading licks, and they had played a crowd-pleasing set up till then.
The set finished with The Man Don’t Give A Fuck, which considering the amount of families about I thought was particularly brave and rock and roll, before set closer Cosmic Trigger. The band left with signs held up reading “Thank You” and “Danke” and ”Woah!” - who could disagree with that? Keep it real SFA.