Team Love

1. skylon
2. cycle of violence
3. candylion

biography

Candylion was raised by bears in Micronesia. Trained as a chef in Paris and following a City & Guilds diploma in desk top publishing at Tregoedwig polytechnic transformed himself into a card assembly image of his former self and arranged for the kind lady at the post depot to mail him back flatpack to his bear brothers and sisters. Safely back in the palm forest he was given lessons in exotic guitar pickin’ by a passing oxymoron. He is currently recording his first album.

Candylion’ is the new solo album from Gruff Rhys. It follows the single of the same name and is a mesmerising journey into the mind of one of our most talented singers and songwriters. It seems fitting therefore that insight into the workings behind the album come straight from the man himself…

“Candylion took form in the spring of 2006 over a fragmented 2 week period at Gorwel Owen’s Ofn studio in Llanfaelog, Wales.

My ears were happily ringing from a few months touring with the Super Furry Animals and I had a batch of mellower acoustic songs I wanted to record quickly and get out of the way before the next speaker-blowing SFA record. Once in the studio however I got carried away and found myself in a nostalgic mood, pining for some of the music I grew up listening to.

The cornerstones of this record became the soft vocal sound of Psychocandy-era The Jesus and Mary Chain coupled with the sonic sweetshop of daisy age hip hop. Coincidently I had been listening and dancing hard during this period to a lot of my parents’ old 1960’s and 70’s Welsh language pop, folksploitation and progressive rock 7 inches whilst helping Finders Keepers Records compile an album of the period which was called ‘Welsh Rare Beat’. With all these pieces of my past swimming around my brain I dropped a lot of slow-mo solo acoustic numbers and built up a bedrock of varied sounds, inviting my friend Owen over to add double bass, and Lisa Jen from the band 9bach - who comes from my home town and shares my Bethesda accent - to sing.

The atmosphere at Gorwel’s house was free and easy so I felt confident to mess around with the English and Welsh Languages; working in a 15 minute long ballad dealing with Skylon, master of the skies and even recording a duet with Lisa in really bad Patagonian Spanish which fits in with my eventual goal of killing off all the colonial languages with bad grammar.

To finish it off I searched further afield and stopped by in Brixton for a day to add some strings courtesy of Sean and Marcus of The High Llamas and finally hooked up with Mario Caldato Jr (who mixed the last 2 furry records) at his home in Rio de Janeiro for a week to mix the thing and add some percussion and flute.

I headed home with this record burning in my hand: Candylion, an album essentially of 11 songs for the acoustic guitar and voice. It was a joy and adventure to make and I hope it floats your boat along too for a while, wherever you may be going.