97: SUPER FURRY ANIMALS
Hermann Loves Pauline/
Calimero/Trôns Mr Urdd
(Creation, 1997)

BY 1997, my legs were buckling with Britpop fatigue. Blur had wisely and fruitfully moved into left field and Supergrass didn’t really belong under that umbrella in the first place, but otherwise I just remember it as a time when one dreary Camden-friendly band after another would line up to enervating effect on the gratingly self-congratulatory TFI Friday.

I took no notice of Super Furry Animals at first: I just figured that they would be more of the same, and somehow the fact that they were Welsh didn’t register with me at all. Then Herman Loves Pauline came on the radio one morning, and it was one of those rare occasions whereby I was so stunned by what I was hearing that I had to pull the car over.

At that point, I didn’t know it was the Super Furries: all I knew was that I was listening to a new single which seemed to have an entirely different class of blood coursing through its veins. There were Beach Boys high harmonies in abundance, but they were skewed and illogical. The production was lucid and powerful, yet dizzyingly kaleidoscopic and properly psychedelic.

Best of all, the lyrics were a clear head, shoulders, torso, legs and soles of the feet above and beyond the reach and scale of your garden variety pop single, leading as they did from the birth of Albert Einstein into a free-associating reverie on the bleakness of the human condition:

They call him MC squared
because he raps like no other;
an asthma sufferer
like Ernesto Guevara...

Marie Curie was Polish born but French bred (French bread!)
Of course she ended up dead from radiation,
Slow invisible suffocation...
Down the 24-hour garage or any service station
I lead my life in a quest for information
Sensurrounded by pies and books,
middle-aged drivers and deranged cooks...

Over the years, the Super Furries have become a less abrasive and oddly-shaped proposition yet still remain some distance from the mainstream, pursuing their inimitable ‘Fuzzy Logic’ to consistently rewarding ends. God bless them one and all.