Shame to say, or maybe it isn’t (depends how you feel about Super Furry Animals), but ‘Something 4 the Weekend’ will be the only representative from the Welsh band’s debut album Fuzzy Logic. I heard that album for the first time in 2014, but didn’t really hear it, if you know what I mean. I got my first job out of uni a few years later, but found that there was a lot of downtime the majority of the time. So I went ahead and choose to listen to SFA’s discography from beginning to end. ‘Something 4 the Weekend’ was the only song on Fuzzy Logic that I really liked. The LP’s a strong start to a catalogue. But their albums got stronger as they went along. ‘Least to these ears.
Sounds to me like this is a song about taking too many drugs. Actually, maybe not about taking too many, but just about them in general. Singer and guitarist Gruff Rhys also mentioned it was about sex too. What time is the best for those two vices? The weekend, obviously, hence the title. I’m sure there’s a quote that verifies that hypothesis somewhere. The song’s first verse details the narrator’s increasing usage of drugs (“stuck it on the back of my tongue and then swallowed it”), the second covers the sex part (“stuck it right up and that was the end of it”), and the chorus is where the narrator tells us that he’s always thinking about the two things with the aid of an easy, memorable melody. Also, you may notice that Gruff Rhys has this thing where where he pronounces words like “getting” as “gerring”. That’s not something he can help. He’s just very Welsh.
I then went on to find that this song wasn’t originally recorded this way. On initial copies of Fuzzy Logic, the song was titled ‘Something for the Weekend’. It’s essentially the same track, but faster in delivery, somewhat rawer in production and had a different intro. I’m going to hazard a guess that it was a record company decision that led to the re-recording of the tune, to make it something easier to play on the radio or whatever. You know how those businesses go. But on this occasion, I’d probably agree that it was the right choice. The song got released as ‘Something 4 the Weekend’ name, charted within the top 20 of the UK singles chart, and the ‘new’ single version eventually went on to replace the original when later copies of the album were sold. That original’s out there, though. Right below this paragraph, actually. You might like that version more. There’s no going wrong.
Why wasn’t Juxtaposed With U a huge hit? That one’s pure ear candy.
Good question! Guess people were never ready for it.