But beyond that, and here allow me to submit their debut album Fuzzy Logic as incontestable evidence, they could very well be body-invading aliens who’ve undertaken to subvert music listeners and take over the world with an unlikely, but worryingly catchy blend of Syd Barrett, T-Rex and Mott the Hoople… silly, psychedelic, ‘70s music given just enough Britpop pogo-ability to make people buy it in this day and age.

God! Show Me Magic, a minor hit in the UK, opens the album and sounds like the geezers from Motorhead having it out with the whippersnappers from Supergrass, while Something For the Weekend could be Blur, just funnier and less self-consciously clever.

Frisbee and Bad Behaviour are punky two-and-a-half-minute power-pop wonders with shout-along choruses and, elsewhere, we find that no musical topic is too mundane or absurd for the Super Furry Animals’ almost Pere Ubu-esque sense of the whimsical - from their local weather girl, to drug trafficker Howard Marks, to band guitarist Bunf’s hamster (Fuzzy Birds revolves around the former attempting to use the rodent’s wheel as a dynamo to produce electricity for his house… an idea no doubt pilfered from one of the band’s heroes, Sir Isaac Newton).

Throw in the pastoral folk balladry of Gathering Moss and the drunken reverie of If You Don’t Want Me to Destroy You, and you have an album too damn inspired to dismiss despite its mildly unsettling many-heads-are-better-than-one schizophrenic eclecticism.

If there’s one thing that will keep Super Furry Animals on the outside of the mainstream, it will be their inability to take themselves seriously (read "boring") enough to become big chart stars. Or if they really are aliens attempting world domination, they will most likely have to try again.

Gerald Tan 1997