News / SFA singer’s visit
PROLIFIC Welsh musician and composer Gruff Rhys, best known as the frontman in experimental rock band the Super Furry Animals, is to kick off his September UK tour at Mareel.
Shetland Arts has confirmed that Rhys will perform a show coinciding with its annual film festival Screenplay on Thursday 4 September. He is promoting his third solo album ‘American Interior’, and his new film of the same title will be screened the same day followed by a Q&A session.
Rhys has released nine albums with the Super Furry Animals (including four top ten successes), two with electronic band Neon Neon and three solo LPs. He has carved a career out of documenting the lives of others in stories “set to pop music heavily steeped in timeless melody and wide-eyed wonder”.
The ‘American Interior’ album (which charted at numer 24 in the UK charts last month) and complementary film are said to represent possibly Rhys’ “most fully realised character study yet”.
A warm and moving story of a true outsider’s life, it follows the path set by John Evans, a north Walian who set off on a quest to find the Madogwys – a legendary tribe of light skinned, Welsh-speaking native Americans.
An untrained cartographer, the map Evans made of his journey went beyond the known borders of the United States and ended up becoming the guide for Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery Expedition (1804-1806).
Rhys’ own exploration of Evans’ life took him from a native American sagebrush ceremony in a Cardiff arts centre to the heart of Mandan country in Norht Dakota. Along the way he undertook an “investigative concert tour” that wound its way from Yale University all the way to Memphis and helped cement his reputation as a social historian and master storyteller.
Following the nine date tour and extensive research undertaken on the way, Rhys returned home as arguably the world’s leading authority on Evans’ incredible life.
Shetland Arts’ Screenplay curator Kathy Hubbard described how she came to book Rhys for the festival.
“In February 2011 I went to see Gruff doing a solo gig at Oran Mor,” she said. “He was so good, and the audience adored him. I had some Shetland Arts-headed notepaper with me as I was down there to work, so I wrote a note to Gruff telling him how we were currently building Mareel and inviting him to play there.
“I then stuck this in an envelope and gave it to the young man who was minding the concessions stall and told him very solemnly that this was an important document that he must place directly into Gruff’s hands!”
She continued: “No sooner had I returned to my hotel than Gruff had emailed saying that he would love to come to Shetland and giving he his agent’s contact details.
“Opening Mareel took longer than we thought, but Gruff performing here has never been far from my mind. When he brought out his second film, ‘American Interior’, along with a new album, Screenplay was the obvious destination.
“I made contact again, and enticed him with the fact that ours is probably the only dressing room in Britain where you could fish for mackerel outside the window. I haven’t told him that the window doesn’t open yet. Let’s get him here first!”
• Tickets for Gruff Rhys’ live concert at Mareel will go on sale this Friday at Shetland Box Office. Tickets for the cinema screening of ‘American Interior’ will go on sale later this month.
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