Video: Gruff Rhys, ‘Frontier Man’

S.Lo on April 12th, 2018

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Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys has released the video for “Frontier Man,” the first single off his fifth solo album, “Babelsberg,” to be released on June 8 via Rough Trade.

Shot by Ryan Owen Eddleston and edited by Dylan Goch (with Kliph Scurlock starring at the beginning as ‘Man Throws Bottle’), the video features Rhys in the role of a troubadour musician and environmental defender as he picks up a carelessly littered plastic bottle and takes it along his wanderings amongst the hills and valleys of Cardiff, Wales (“and the Cardiff of the imagination”), dressed in a bright red poncho and accompanied by a donkey. “I go in search of a bin through the deepest recesses, and frozen tundra of my mind. Discarded plastics will destroy the earth and may well have destroyed this video clip but rest assured, as predictable as it may be — it was all just a daydream,” said Rhys in a statement to his fans about the video. The imagery is perhaps reminiscent of his recent film projects with Dylan Goch, 2010’s “Separado!” about his quest to find the descendants of emigrated members of his family in Patagonia and 2014’s “American Interior” about the early Welsh explorer of the Americas John Evans.

The song itself is a whimsical orchestral masterpiece. Buoyed by the 72-piece BBC National Orchestra of Wales masterfully arranged by Swansea based composer Stephen McNeff, Rhys and his band — drummer Kliph Scurlock (ex-Flaming Lips) and multi-instrumentalists Stephen Black (Sweet Baboo) and Osian Gwynedd — casually rock bossa nova style. His velvet deep vocals bring the varied cultural and musical threads together with a fleck of self-deprecating British wit as he sings, “On the frontier of delusion / I’m your foremost frontier man … When the dinner isn’t ready / I’m your uninvited guest.” “I suppose ‘Frontier Man’ is about the pitfalls of whimsical behaviour and the cult of personality,” said Rhys of the song.

The album was recorded over a whirlwind three days before producer Ali Chant’s studio was to be demolished the next week, another casualty to luxury real estate development. To name the album, Rhys “was looking for a name that evoked the Tower of Babel — people building towers to reach an idea of heaven (but maybe creating a kind of hell — I’m an atheist by the way!).” A road sign he took note of while on tour provided the answer.

||| Watch: The video for “Frontier Man”