Brit-pop is dead - most of its stars are no longer musicians. In fact, most of those who are still producing music are no longer musicians in any meaningful sense, Oasis being a CBBC version of The Rolling Stones and Damon Alburn being a wide-ranging credibility vampire with Tony Allen and Dangermouse as his quarries. Neither as politically radical nor musically radical as punk, there's a tendancy to write it out of history, and to accept the clip-show version of its history as fact - Liam Gallagher at Knebworth, 'Roll With It' vs 'Country House', Geri Spice's Union Jack dress, and, to mark its death, Tony Blair schmoozing the ambassadors of Cool Britannia like only a groupie can.
Of course, this is bollocks - Brit-pop produced many great songs (I may have been of an impressionable age, but watching Top of the Pops from 1994-1997 was a profound, gleaming thrill - remember Top of the Pops when you were a kid?) and bore aloft various bands that still produce great music to this day. Some kind of cosmic balance ensured that for every Shed Seven there was a Radiohead, for every Menswear there was a Pulp and for every Dodgy there was a Super Furry Animals.
Unlike Pulp or Radiohead, the Super Furries were clearly of Brit-pop. Bankrolled by Creation Records' Oasis-gotten millions, with jangling guitars and sunglasses/haircut combinations trademarked by Ian Brown, they were ideally suited to creating uplifting summer hits. But, regardless of their physical and spiritual proximity to the tenets of Brit-pop, the music they made was simply too divergent and odd.
Radiator, their second album, while it contains anthemic and pensive songs, full of sweeping guitar chords, and singalong melodies, also contains absurd fitful sketches, slightly over 2 minutes in length, called things like 'The International Language of Screaming'. Actually, even if we disregard the wilfully awkward pieces of music - the little keyboard pieces, the song in Welsh - even the 'hits' are difficult. 'Demons', with its sense of purpose and sweeping chords, has one of the most abrasive guitar tones in the history of recorded music, and the lyric "and in the year three million/our skins will be vermillion". 'Mountain People' asks you to digest, along with its singalong melody, a perpetually stretching verse and, to finish, a wall of electronic noise. These were not songs made for 'I Love The 90s'.
This is bad enough faced with the button-down style of Oasis and their friends, and the even more straight-laced members of the sub-group 'Cool Cymru'. But, the Supreme Crime of the 1990s Furries was their adherence to a non-personal lyric style. So 'The Placid Casual', as well as having the gloriously memorable chorus-marker "Fuzz/Clogs up my video", has a second verse about an unsuccessful coup in Sierra Leone. 'Mountain People' could be a eulogy for any number of culturally distinct mountain folk - the Kurds, the Chechens or, at a push, the Welsh - and heavily implies conflict - "two short blasts followed by one longer blast". The two love songs of sorts come laden with irony and history. "Hermann Loves Pauline" tells the story of a love affair between two socially odd people, in the third person, throwing in absurd references to Che Guevara, Marie Curie and 24-hour combination petrol stations and supermarkets. "She's Got Spies" does what it says on the tin, imagining a relationship destroyed by the interpersonal secret services of mistrust, eventually collapsing under its own tension. This is Brit-pop bent by history, an imaginary Oasis where one of the Gallaghers has read a book.
As such it was ignored. But like the other square-peg Britpop bands - Pulp, Manic Street Preachers, Radiohead - history has been kind to the Furries, and they continue to record challenging, witty music, long after Tony Blair committed some war crimes and Geri Halliwell became a UN Goodwill Ambassador.
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