From Cardiff they came - Gruff, Bunf, Cian, Dafydd and Guto – uniting as SFA from various techno and indie backgrounds to become one of the most casually inventive bands of their time. Their first known recorded artyfact, the track Dim Brys, Dim Chwys, appeared in ’94, and the 'Llanfairpwllgwyngyllllantysiliogogogoch (In Space)’ and ‘Moog Droog’ EP's both came rolling off the tongue in ’95. At this point they were still singing solely in Welsh, save for ‘Moog Droog’s God! Show Me Magic, a song that would turn up the following year on their debut album ‘Fuzzy Logic’. 1996 was a good year.

“Marie Curie was Polish born, but French bred…French bread!” There’s another one, roared with an elbow to the ribs midway through Hermann Loves Pauline (as Gruff said in one interview, “I'm all for puns, you know, and I like the space between languages and between meanings.” There’s that damn hiatus again) Then, predating their campaigning for a nuclear-free Wales by a decade, “Of course, she ended up dead from radiation/ Slow invisible suffocation” That’s what SFA were better at than the rest; raw emotion, humour, subtly masking the sucker punch… but what does a lyric matter without something to back it up. SFA had the most important thing of all, those motherfuckers of invention. They had the tunes. Take a glance through the chronology of the band’s singles from ’96 onwards; it’s a chronicle of creation and development, and of transcendence…transcendence of fucking Britpop.

That wasn’t their only encounter with a legendary musician. Paul McCartney from Wings chews celery and carrots on ‘Rings Around The World’s Receptacle for the Respectable – as he allegedly did for Brian Wilson on Vegetables from the unreleased 1967 album ‘Smile’ - returning the favour of the band remixing some previously unreleased Beatles music (later released on ‘The Liverpool Sound Collage’ record). Another quid pro quo moment occurred after a Cardiff studio encounter with John Cale, who played piano on the same album’s Presidential Suite in return for their backing him on one of his own tracks. This kind of bad behaviour is rampant among musicians. Seamus the dog howled (presumably returning the favour of David Gilmour’s hospitality in the absence of his master, Steve Marriot) on the eponymous track from Pink Floyd’s ‘Meddle’; thirty years later SFA had a Beatle chew on greenery.

Hiatus. This is the meaning of the word: since ‘Dark Days/Light Years’ things have been quiet from the SFA camp, but not from its inhabitants. Solo ventures preceded that album and have continued in its wake. Cian Ciarán has two albums under his belt, as well as a techno house music side project called Acid Casuals and a recent collaboration with psych-pop man Wilding. His brother Dafydd formed The Peth in 2008 with Rhys Ifans, releasing one album and recording another (yet to see the light of day), and currently plays with The Earth. Gulp is Guto Pryce’s band, while Bunf’s The Pale Blue Dots have just released their ‘Lots Of Dots’ record. Gruff, of course, has been busy of late, his latest flights of the fantastic leading him to follow a biographical muse. Aside from two concept albums – the first about John DeLorean, the second about Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli – with Boom Bip under the moniker Neon Neon, his latest solo endeavour combines an album, book, film and phone app detailing the journey of his ancestor John Evans to America in the latter stages of the 18th century to track down a Welsh-speaking Native American tribe. A hiatus is far from empty space.