On the face of it, the Peth seems like a terrible idea. At a time when he has
been seemingly incapable of staying out of the gossip pages the Welsh actor
Rhys Ifans has become the lead singer of a raucous rock band.
In the past year Ifans has split up with his high-profile actress girlfriend
Sienna Miller, and been seen drowning his sorrows outside various North
London pubs as she cavorted on yachts with new lover, the billionaire heir
Balthazar Getty. He’s been spotted with a series of leggy blondes (most
recently with Kimberly Stewart, best friend of Kelly Osbourne and daughter
of Rod), taken a few slugs at photographers and turned 40.
Now he is fronting the Peth (Welsh for the Thing), a ten-strong band made up
of Ifans’s old Cardiff friends, whose debut album, The Golden Mile,
features the kind of song titles that are in danger of making Oasis look
sophisticated, such as 69 Fanny Street, Last Man Standing and Let’s
Go F***ing Mental. The queasy video for the latter, their debut single,
has been directed by Brit-art bad boy and Ifans’s drinking buddy Jake
Chapman and is footage of a colonoscopy conducted on Ifans, who last weekend
was quoted as saying: “I look better from the inside out.” It’s like a
midlife crisis turned into a public spectacle.
So it’s disarming to discover that The Golden Mile is a finely
crafted, imaginative rock album that combines the 1970s swagger of bands
such as the Faces and The Who with the washes of sound that the Beach Boys
created at their most psychedelic. On Let’s Go F***ing Mental
Ifans doesn’t sound mental at all but quite gentle, even sensitive. Last
Man Standing isn’t just a boast about being able to drink more than
anyone else; it’s a lament on the emptiness of being able to drink more than
anyone else.
It turns out that the Peth isn’t Ifans’s vanity project but the brainchild of
Super Furry Animals drummer Dafydd Ieuan, a perfectionist musician who
formed the band as an excuse to spend large chunks of his time in a
recording studio. The Peth has now turned into a live band of monstrously
hedonistic proportions, but more of that later.
The plan is to meet up with Ifans and Ieuan over a lunchtime in London and
then catch up with them at the Green Man festival in the Brecon Beacons in
Wales, where the Peth are to play a set. A tanned, smiley Ifans arrives
first, fresh off the plane from Ibiza, and is immediately charming in a
shambolic, unguarded way.
“We call it Punk Floyd,” says Ifans of the Peth’s sound, as he orders the
first of a string of beers. “The whole thing came about by accident.
“Daf started writing some songs when other members of Super Furry Animals were
doing solo projects, and I sprang to mind as a singer because we had made a
few tracks in the past. A few other people – well, eight other people – got
involved, and before we knew it we had an album.”
Much of The Golden Mile was made when Ifans turned up in the studio, by
his own admission usually drunk, and ranted whatever came to mind.
“From that mess Daf would somehow form a song,” he says. “The strange thing is
that it is actually a coherent album. It documents our state of mind over
the past two years. We’re all heavy drinkers, for example, and I’ve noticed
that there are a lot of drink references in the songs.”
One song, Stonefinger, documents Ifans’s heartbreak after the collapse
of a relationship with a former girlfriend (not, he is adamant, Sienna
Miller). “I arrived in Cardiff in a bit of a state about 18 months ago,
turned up at the studio, and what came out of my mouth is what you hear on
the song. I hadn’t written anything down. It just came straight from the
heart.”
Stonefinger is the kind of ballad that the Rolling Stones did so well
in their early 1970s heyday. Over a soaring melody Ifans’s voice cracks with
emotion as he sings: “Every bit of love I give you mock it, yes you do.” It
is the most affecting song on the album.
Initially Ieuan intended to make The Golden Mile an internet-only
release and leave it at that, but as the ten old drinking partners began to
spend more time together, the Peth built up their own momentum, taking in a
micro-tour of Wales (mostly playing in village halls and they still managed
to get into a fight – with a chip-shop owner).
There’s now talk of a second album. How far would Ifans take his role in the
Peth? “That depends on how far it wants to go,” he replies. “I am an actor
and that’s my first commitment, and the two experiences really don’t
compare. I certainly couldn’t go on a theatre stage in the state of mind
I’ve generally been in with the Peth . . .”
Ieuan arrives, and tells of how the catalyst for making the record was the
construction of a box-like studio by his friend Kris Jenkins. “I’ve spent a
lot of time in that studio, but every time I got the rest of the band in
there, we managed to get about an hour’s work done before it degenerated
into extreme drunkenness,” he says. “It was all very sporadic, but somehow
it came together.”
The Peth is also a product of the small community of Welsh-speaking musicians,
mostly based in Cardiff, who all seem to know each other and are centred on
the activities of the psychedelic rockers Super Furry Animals, which for a
split second Rhys fronted. “Rhys and I met at Welsh-language punk gigs about
20 years ago, shared a flat together and discovered early on that we enjoyed
the same activities,” Ieuan explains. What activities, I ask, picturing the
pair enjoying a game of Scrabble together, or perhaps a game of pontoon if
they’re feeling frisky?
“Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll,” they say in unison.
They’re not lying. “I was asked to support the Peth on tour,” says the young
Welsh-language singer Cate Le Bon, who also performs with Neon Neon, the
side project of Super Furry Animals singer Gruff Rhys. “I had to turn it
down. I was honoured that they asked me but I knew that I’d be dead after a
couple of days. They can drink more and stay up later than anyone I know.”
A few days later Ifans is wandering around the site of the Green Man festival,
very drunk indeed, if cheerful and charismatic. It’s Friday, and the Peth
are due to perform on Sunday evening. He stays up all night and into
Saturday morning, ignoring requests by fellow campers to keep the noise down
until he is berated by an eight-year-old girl for being so inconsiderate to
people who are trying to sleep. A couple of hours later he’s wandering
around under a huge piece of tarpaulin with two friends, hiding from the
rain in what he calls “a Welsh house”. It’s as if he’s Method-acting the
Peth’s song Last Man Standing for the entire weekend.
By the time of the concert on Sunday Ifans doesn’t appear to have had any
sleep for the past 48 hours. He takes to the stage wearing the same clothes
he was in on Friday night, covered in mud, swilling from a keg of cider.
Despite all this he puts in an epic performance, camping it up as a
Jaggeresque rock’n’roll star as he swings a microphone and dances with the
band’s female singer Dionne.
There’s a last-gang-in-town aspect to the Peth onstage, much like Happy
Mondays or Primal Scream at their most wasted, and it’s a lot of fun. The
Golden Mile is named after a stretch in Cardiff where, according to
Ifans, “you can get everything you need”. It is clearly his spiritual home.
The single Let’s Go F***ing Mental by the Peth will be
available as a free download from www.thepeth.com
from Monday. The album The Golden Mile is released on September 1.
Both on Strangetown Records.
Wow ! A positive story about Welsh culture in the English media ! Ardderchog !
Blewyn, Muscat, Oman