Important things first: the stage set for Super Furry Animals' biggest ever London show is superb. Giant blindfolded horses stand guard on either side. Tree stumps fill the ground between band members. Two cross-eyed volcanoes loom in the distance, belching smoke at key moments. It looks a bit like a '70s prog-rock extravaganza, but one designed by Albert Uderzo. As the fantastically daft 'Receptacle For The Respectable' snakes toward its headbanging finale you could, at a push, call SFA's music cartoon-prog, too.
Ambitious, ornate, at once deeply serious and cherishably silly, Super Furry Animals remain one of our very finest bands. Not one of our most fashionable nowadays, of course: how gilded and maximalist this music sounds two days before 'Room On Fire' is released. But then SFA have probably always been better suited to a role as bemused outsiders rather than heroes of the zeitgeist.
And, it's worth noting, they currently sound better than ever. To begin, you could be forgiven for thinking you'd stumbled into a show by Orbital, as filigree techno pounds from the stage. Eventually, Gruff Rhys appears with a harmonica and diverts the music into the lush, fluent 'Slow Life', before the beats take precedence again. Here - and during an extraordinary 15-minute passage of 'The Man Don't Give A Fuck' - the weird thought occurs that while the music business frets about the 'death' of dance music, it's a purportedly indie rock band who currently have the best grasp of rave dynamics.
At times tonight, in fact, Super Furry Animals give an entirely convincing impression of a band who can turn their hand to anything. Bands who try to channel their tasteful and eclectic record collections usually end up something of a mess. But SFA are a glorious exception. Much of this music shouldn't work, from the pungent techno/West Coast hybrids, through the baroque fantasies of 'Sex, War & Robots' and 'The Piccolo Snare', up to 'Run! Christian, Run!', which is an enduringly marvelous marriage between country rock and dub reggae.
It does, though. What's more, SFA are a great pop band, as the triumvirate of 'Rings Around The World', 'Golden Retriever' and 'Do Or Die' - surf-glam-spacepunk, approximately - prove. More specifically, they're a pop band with a moral force and a compunction to experiment which moves them into a different sphere, where the Flaming Lips are perhaps their only real contemporaries.
By the end, the crowd are filling in the harmonies to 'Hermann Loves Pauline', and baying at images of Bush and Blair ("All governments. Liars. Murderers," notes a sample) projected on the screen. Super Furry Animals, meanwhile, have changed into their yeti costumes and attempted to finish 'The Man Don't Give A Fuck' in the vein of a prehistoric Stooges.
That they succeed, more or less, doesn't come as much of a surprise. When they have the attitude that no excess is too absurd, that nothing is quite impossible, they too could probably get away with murder.
