An interview with Gruff about Mwng when the album came out in 2000
He makes good points in this interview! And it's true, he was so unsure of what he'd be attaching to the idea of these songs that they literally didn't tour Mwng in Wales at all— this album went to the rest of the UK, I think this album also went to America; it didn't tour Wales until the reunion in 2015 for this album's 15th anniversary that they played it live in Wales for the first time ever. That's what they'd said in 2015 anyway.
It's also interesting that he says it's a fine line to walk: you don't want to make a fully fluff record, you also apparently don't want to make it solely political: 'Something that gets people waving flags instead of thinking'.
What's funny is that Mwng isn't really a political record at all, at least not in an outward sense. Gruff's said it's quite a personal record. It was stuff going on in his life, and it was stuff he was seeing around him, and he wrote about it—all he does say is that because it was so personal, it felt more natural to write it in his first language.
There are songs that can be seen as political, or as social commentary (hello?? Track 1, the opener on the album is a song 'Drygioni'. Drygioni means 'devolution' in Welsh, like the devolution (decentralisation) of government powers to let nations of the UK have more self-governance power!), but they're in some ways personal songs too. They are a person reacting to the world around him, rather than impersonal manifestos— as Gruff says, something to think about rather than to just promote thoughtless flag-waving.
Good band, Super Furry Animals.
