You can’t swear properly in Welsh. I know this, because I’m having a swearing lesson yn Gymraeg from 55-year-old Super Furry Animals frontman, and solo artist, Gruff Rhys. Gruffudd Maredudd Bowen Rhys was born in Haverfordwest in west Wales, grew up in the Welsh-speaking town of Bethesda in north Wales, and has lived in Cardiff since the 90s. His first band, aged 16, were called Ffa Coffi Pawb. The translation is “Everybody’s coffee beans”. But say it phonetically in Welsh and it sounds quite rude.
“Swearing in Welsh is a bit like swearing in Spanish, where you describe terrible things about someone’s mother or something,” Rhys explains. For example, in Spanish, “la madre que te parió” translates as “the woman that birthed you” which means, well, the MF word. “You can create offence for sure, but English is special, in that there’s all these taboo swearwords,” says Rhys. “So Welsh uses English swearwords because they are instantly offensive.”
I’ve come to Cardiff to meet Rhys ahead of his new Welsh-language solo album, Dim Probs. This is the fourth time he’s recorded an album entirely in his first language – one with Super Furry Animals (Mwng, still the biggest selling Welsh-language album of all time), and three of his nine solo albums.
Rhys has been involved in Welsh-language music since before he could shave. There’s a 2024 S4C documentary on iPlayer named after Ffa Coffi Pawb that tells the story of the progressive DIY scene he grew up in, which rebelled against Thatcherism and the orthodoxy of much Welsh culture at the time (“drinking beer in a rugby shirt,” as Rhys puts it in the doc), while celebrating the language itself. One early archive clip shows him, voice still unbroken, discussing the punk fanzine he had recently set up.
“I spoke Welsh with my friends and most of the subjects at school were taught in Welsh,” Rhys recalls. He picked up his first English (“Well, Anglo-American”) word, “cookie”, from watching Sesame Street. “There’s no wonder that I make music in the Welsh language,” he continues. “It’s stranger, really, that I’ve put out so many albums in English …”
Many of those albums came courtesy of Super Furry Animals. Formed in 1993, the band featured Rhys and Ffa Coffi Pawb drummer Dafydd Ieuan, along with Huw Bunford and Guto Pryce of Welsh-language punk band U Thant and – as unbelievable as it sounds – actor Rhys Ifans on lead vocals (he soon departed when his acting career took off). Later fronted by Rhys, the band were signed to Creation in 1996, where – legend has it – label boss Alan McGee asked if they could sing in English, not realising from Rhys’s strong Welsh accent that he already was.
The group soon built a reputation for musical experimentation and wild onstage presentation, including yeti costumes and inflatable bears, and for a period arriving at festivals in their own customised tank. They have been dormant since 2016 – their last single, Bing Bong, was released to celebrate the Welsh national football team’s qualification for the 2016 Euros – but have just announced 2026 tour dates.
Rhys’s career away from the Furries has been no less idiosyncratic. There has been Neon Neon, his electropop duo with Boom Bip, guest appearances for Mogwai and Gorillaz, and a dizzyingly varied array of solo records, including an effort inspired by a mountain on the border of China and North Korea (Seeking New Gods) and a concept album about 18th-century Welsh explorer John Evans (American Interior).
What’s it like writing in Welsh, I wonder? Do you quickly run out of things to rhyme with Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch? Or is it like Eminem, who has done a rap about how things do rhyme with orange? “It’s a playful language,” he says, after laughing at my rubbish analogy. “I think there’s slightly fewer pop cliches in Welsh – it’s still being invented as a pop language in comparison to English.”
We chat briefly about the decline of the spoken language: 50 years ago, Welsh was spoken by 80% of people in some communities; today it’s only 30%, though there has been a resurgence in recent years. And, Rhys tells me, there’s simultaneously been more activism for the Welsh language, in that it’s become far more visible, thanks in large part to the 1993 Welsh Language Act that ensured that Welsh was put on an equal footing with English in Wales. Today “even the self-service checkout speaks Welsh”, he smiles.
We’re chatting over cups of tea at St Catherine’s Church Community Hall, Pontcanna, where local odd-job man Clive has been roped into letting us in for the morning. (“You found where the tea was?” he interrupts, helpfully clearing away our dirty mugs.) Rhys’s current tour, you see, includes a run at various village, church, town and civic halls. “I was asked to find somewhere that looked like a rural Welsh venue,” he adds, of today’s photoshoot. “I’ve been to a child’s birthday party and a wedding here, so I thought: it’s gotta be St Catherine’s.”
Rhys’s tour is rational as well as romantic. “It’s just practical, really, putting out a Welsh-language album, then touring it in areas where they speak the language,” he continues. “There’s some beautiful venues. There’s a set of industrial circuits built up in the UK for pop music. Sometimes it’s great to leave those pop markets and play where you really want to. I don’t want to over-romanticise it. I’ll just be playing in villages and towns, to maybe not enough people …”
These gigs won’t be his weirdest. He’s just got back from playing Nestival, a mini-festival in the forest in Stockport with Badly Drawn Boy, Andy Votel and Graham Massey from 808 State, where he inadvertently ended up announcing the winners of a “guess the bird call competition”. Does he know his chaffinches from his song thrushes? “No. I was terrible. I didn’t have a clue.”
With Clive keen to shut up shop (“Are you aware you’re in the midst of a celebrity?” I ask), Rhys offers to give me a lift back to the train station in his father-in-law’s Jeep – his own faithful van of 20 years has unfortunately just blown up. On the way back to the car, Rhys is keen to show me around a local Welsh bookshop, where – for the first time – I hear him speak Welsh to the nice lady behind the counter. I’d like to buy a card for my mum’s Welsh friend, Glenda, who didn’t speak English until she was 16. I opt for one that says “Ti ym fy ffefryni yn bendant”. I hope it’s appropriate.
Back in the car, chat turns to other Welsh celebs. “I love Charlotte Church. We’ve done a few gigs with her. I think she did sing at one of my concerts. I really admire people who can articulate political ideas,” he says, referencing her vocal opposition to austerity and Israel’s war on Gaza. “I’m always there if she needs me …”
Rhys talks about one of his most unlikely Welsh-language projects: 2117/Hedd Wyn, the opera for which he wrote the libretto, about a group of post-apocalyptic Welsh schoolchildren learning about the life and work of the famous Welsh poet, who died at the battle of Passchendaele in the first world war. Hedd Wyn’s is a story that “has been told many times before, so I wanted to tell it differently. It was for a film that was abandoned, but we’d already recorded the opera with the 90-piece orchestra. It came out on CD but it was never performed. There’s talks of performing it, so I’ve got that on the back burner.” Would he like to release music in any other language? Rhys isn’t sure. He’s already done English, Welsh and – briefly on his 2019 album, Pang! – Zulu.
Rhys drops me at Cardiff station. There’s 20 minutes until my train, so just time to buy a stamp and post my card to Glenda. I Google Translate it: “Ti ym fy ffefryni yn bendant” – “You are definitely one of my favourite people.” Perfect. I should have sent it to Gruff Rhys instead.
Gruff Rhys’s album Dim Probs is out now. He is touring the UK throughout October, with US/Canada dates in November and Europe next March; Super Furry Animals tour the UK in May 2026.
