There are bands who age like claret, and there are bands who age like the yoghurt forgotten at the back of the fridge in a student flat. Super Furry Animals, gloriously, have become something stranger altogether: a psychedelic communion wine brewed in a lab by druids with access to vintage synthesisers and a sack of recreational pharmaceuticals. At the first of two sold-out nights at Barrowland Ballroom, they didn’t so much play a concert as conduct a mass hallucination with better harmonies.

For the uninitiated, the Furries emerged from Cardiff in the mid-90s, part of that magnificent Welsh cultural uprising that briefly made Britain feel less like a country and more like a benevolent nervous breakdown. Frontman Gruff Rhys remains the group’s resident cosmic geography teacher, all wonky charm and melodies that sound like they were beamed in from a pirate radio station orbiting Neptune. Huw Bunford plays guitar with the kind of graceful precision normally associated with surgeons and particularly elegant burglars. Bassist Guto Pryce anchors everything with a low-end rumble like a contented thunderstorm. Cian Ciaran remains the mad scientist in the corner, slathering songs in electronics, synths and oddball textures like a chef over-seasoning a meal and somehow improving it. Behind it all, Dafydd Ieuan drums with the calm assurance of a man steering a pirate ship through a meteor shower.

Now, confession time: I’ve always leaned more toward Neon Neon, Gruff Rhys’s neon-lit side quest into retro-futurist electro-pop. Neon Neon always felt like the music you’d hear inside an abandoned arcade machine that had developed feelings. But live, Super Furry Animals make a devastating argument for the original mothership. The musicianship is almost offensively good. They play together with the telepathic ease of old bank robbers who’ve escaped every heist. No grandstanding, no macho peacocking, just five men locked into grooves so tight you could bounce a pound coin off them.

Opening with “Wherever I Lay My Phone (That’s My Home)” and “(Drawing) Rings Around the World,” they immediately turned the Barrowlands into the world’s friendliest spaceship launch. The sound was enormous but oddly cuddly, like being mugged by the Teletubbies. “Do or Die” had real brute force, but it was “Golden Retriever” that detonated the place properly — all sunshine hooks and glam-pop swagger, still sounding like T. Rex after a weekend eating serotonin tablets in Snowdonia.

“Juxtapozed With U” arrived midway through the set like a disco ball descending from heaven. Couples hugged, middle-aged men grinned at each other with the watery-eyed sincerity of lads reunited at a funeral, and somewhere near the front a woman danced with the reckless abandon of someone who definitely owns at least three tote bags. The song remains absurdly beautiful: part Giorgio Moroder, part grief counselling session.

The deeper they went into the set, the weirder and better it became. “Mountain People” lumbered magnificently, “Slow Life” drifted by in a narcotic haze, and “Night Vision” sounded like Pink Floyd being remixed by a very stoned Open University lecturer. Then came the final three songs, and suddenly the Furries stopped being an indie band and became a fully operational prog-rock hydra. “The Man Don’t Give a Fuck” was volcanic, all repetition and fury and glorious stubbornness, a song that still feels like swearing at authority through a megaphone made of glitter. The extended jams leaned hard into their proggier instincts — sprawling, hypnotic, ridiculous in exactly the right way. It was less “encore” and more “ritual summoning.”

And then, because subtlety has never really interested them, they returned dressed as gigantic shaggy beasts for the final number. Not chic animal masks. Not ironic costumes. Full-on hairy cryptid energy. They looked like a gang of escaped yetis who’d discovered analogue synths in the woods. The crowd reacted accordingly: total delirium.

The genius of Super Furry Animals has always been that beneath the silliness, the dinosaur helmets, the costumes, the techno freakouts and multilingual psychedelic nonsense, there are songs of startling warmth and intelligence. At Barrowlands, they proved that again. Older now, certainly. But so are cathedrals…

Article: Angela Canavan