AS ANY ROCK wife or girlfriend will know, rock stars come with a lot of baggage. You have to contend with ex-wives, past drug-busts and vengeful former bandmates. Gruff Rhys’s girlfriend, however, had to deal with a more unusual side-product of her partner’s pop life – hundreds of complimentary bottles of hotel room shampoo that the singer accumulated over 15 years of touring, both as a solo artist and with his band, Super Furry Animals.
It’s an odd habit for anyone, let alone a pop singer, to get into. Shouldn’t he have been collecting Nazi memorabilia or serial killers’ personal effects, like any normal rock star?
“Early on, when we started touring, I couldn’t believe there was all this free stuff they were giving away in hotels, because I hadn’t spent much time in hotels before getting a record deal,” explains Rhys. “So I was keeping them all, cos I was thinking, maybe we’re a flash in the pan, and at least we’ll have some free shampoo when we get dropped by the record company.”
As it turned out, Super Furry Animals were no flash in the pan: with nine critically acclaimed studio albums so far, the Welsh neo-psychedelic outfit has built up a sturdy reputation as one of the most interesting and inventive bands in rock. As his horizons broadened, Rhys’s initial freebie fervour grew into a compulsion: as soon as he checked into a hotel room anywhere in the world, he’d immediately check out the the bathroom for new items to add to his ever-growing collection.
As he approached his 40th birthday, however, Rhys realised it was time to kick the hair-product habit, so he did the obvious and most sensible thing: he brought his collection of shampoo bottles, soaps, bath gel, shower caps, slippers, sewing kits, etc to the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, and built a tiny hotel out of them, which he named Hotel Shampoo.Then he slept in it.
“It’s a really comfortable building. I was preparing for a period of austerity, you know, so it’s like a diary of the boom years, when people were staying in hotels. It’s still intact – if anyone is looking for a place to stay in Cardiff, it’s a fantastic one-berth hotel, with no amenities.”
Building a mini-monument to his obsession spurred Rhys to finish the music and lyrics for his third – and rather excellent – solo album, also entitled Hotel Shampoo. Not that he's prone to creative block, always seeming to have some idea on the go. Whether it's collaborating with US electronic artist Boom Bip on a Mercury Music Prize-nominated concept album about controver- sial motor car magnate John DeLorean ( Stainless Style), guesting on Gorillaz's Plastic Beachand on Dangermouse and Sparklehorse's Dark Night of The Soul, or making an experimental album with Brazilian musician and TV repairman Tony Da Gatorra ( The Terror of Cosmic Loneliness), Rhys always manages to find something interesting to do that gets him out of the house.
His restless muse has taken him as far afield as Patagonia to make a documentary, entitled Separado!, about his quest to track down his distant relatives whose ancestors had emigrated to Argentina in Victorian times. It's like a surreal version of the family-roots series, Who Do You Think You Are?
“When I was a young child, I saw a musician called Rene Griffiths on TV. He sang Welsh songs, and played them in an Andean style and wore a poncho, and he arrived at gigs on a horse. I was told that I was related to him and that he was part of the Welsh diaspora in Patagonia. Between 1865 and the first World War, there was continuous emigration from Wales to this one area in the north of Patagonia.
“Members of my family had emigrated there in 1880 – they left under a bit of a cloud. There was a story about a fixed horse race. And the first representative of the family to come back to Wales was this gaucho who sang in Welsh.”
Rhys is still a one-man Welsh language revival machine, so expect plenty of songs sung in his native tongue when he plays the Academy on Monday night, along with such fine pop gems as Candylion, Shark Ridden Watersand Honey All Over. On this solo tour, he's backed by Welsh instrumental surf band Y Niwl – that's them playing the new theme tune for BBC's Football Focus.
But when can we expect to hear new material from Super Furry Animals? “The band is taking a break but at some point we’ll have to start making our 10th album. It’s good to have a breather and try things out and work out how we can make a record that lives up to our other records. But yeah, I think it’s time for another completely over- ambitious album.”
Gruff Rhys plays the Academy in Dublin on Monday, tickets from ticketmastger.ie Hotel Shampoo is out on Ovni Records.
