Gruff Rhys’ latest solo album, American Interior, was released in May and he tours it in front of a full ABC to rapturous reception.
By now we know Gruff Rhys pretty well, or so we think – he’s one of the most inventive artists around today and consistently pushes the bounds of various art forms with his work, American Interior, like other work including that with side project Neon Neon, is a biopic.
The gig starts with a 10-minute outtake from a historical documentary about Madoc, a 12th Century Welsh prince who was reputed to have been the first European to have discovered America, and left native tribes there with Welsh language and complexion, some 500 years later the very real John Evans made his very real journey to America in search of Madoc’s legend.
Evans was born in a ramshackle hut near Wynfaur (said: wine-va-owr) in North Wales, described by Rhys, with gentle humour, as having “no door, mud floors, just a dial-up connection, a really simple place”.
Tempted in his early 20s by poet Iolo Morganwg (said: Yollo Morganog), a poet of the time who abandoned Evans on a fundraising trip to London when it turned out nobody else wanted to shell out for a voyage to discover something that probably wasn’t true.
Evans ended up going to America on his own, landing in Baltimore and embarking on a long and fascinating voyage which included befriending native American tribes, defecting to Spain and helping their expeditions, then mapping the Missouri and Mississippi rivers before dying in New Orleans and being buried in the same cemetery featured in the LSD scene in Easy Rider.
In a lot of ways Evans fits the bill for a Gruff Rhys biopic, he’s almost unheard-of except for a niche audience, he dedicated his life to something which didn’t turn out anything like how he’d have wanted to, and he doesn’t seem to have been an especially moral person while also avoiding being a scumbag.
All in all, his was a pretty extraordinary life lived by a pretty ordinary man; curious but not precocious, driven but not called, DeLorean and Feltrinelli both felt this reflective sting in the past.
Rhys’s musicality isn’t really talked about anymore, it’s known to be first-rate and he consistently expands on what we thought possible from both the genre and his music, some songs might amount to more than others but it’s an excellent evening.
He has a real knack for taking out-there situations and delivering honest appraisals without being either kitsch or preachy, and his humour is always gentle and unassuming: maybe this is funny, but it’s never ironic and it’s never to suggest that this guy, in the distant past, was an idiot we can mock today.
It’s a cracking evening from a cracking musician, hopefully we’ll see him back in Glasgow soon with any of his outfits, it’d be great to welcome him back.
Words: Simon Jones
Photos: Warrick Beyers
