1 Super Furry Animals Radiator CREATION, 1997

“Their masterpiece… Pop, prog, techno, folk, Krautrock, and usually during one song. I’m not one for ‘funny’ lyrics but the line ‘Marie Curie was Polish born but French bred. Ha! French Bread!’ always raises a smile.” Gary Page, Facebook

Recorded at Gorwel Owen’s tiny home studio in Anglesey, Radiator is significant on several levels. The first SFA album to feature the monsterist art of Pete Fowler, it’s also the first with full creative input from keyboardist Cian Ciaran. His Fender Rhodes is all over a set broadly dividing into a manic first half (including Hermann Loves Pauline’s lockstep pop frenzy) and a melancholic second, concluding with the remarkable Mountain People, a country rock lament for indigenous Welsh culture, with lyrics inspired by Harold Pinter’s play Mountain Language, that eventually degrades into atonal techno. In 2017, on its 20th anniversary reissue, Guto Pryce declared Radiator, “a graphic, animated, fantastical record. We were creating our world instead of the world being thrust upon us.” In the entire Furry-verse, there is no finer place to visit.