It started, as do so many of the best things, in the pub.

‘It was probably three years ago,’ says Dafydd Ieuan with a thoughtful squint. ‘There was some chat over beers – “let’s do something…”’

The Super Furry Animals drummer was well aware of his compadres’ extra-curricular activities: singer Gruff Rhys’ second solo album was looming, keyboard player Cian Ciaran had his Acid Casuals. ‘I thought, “fuck it, I fancy a bit of that as well.” I’d been in the Furries for so long – and the Furries are still going, by the way – I just fancied going in the studio and producing and engineering and learning all the skills. The craft. ‘Cause I’d been in studios all these years, working with great people, picking up all this stuff…’

The Furries are a band comprising five songwriters. Sometimes it’s hard, understandably, to get all your ideas out there, on record. And Daf had a load of ideas. Psychedelic pop songs, ‘beer-chucker’ anthems, cosmic-melodic wig-outs worthy of a made-up band we’ll call Punk Floyd. All of these were fizzing around Daf’s head like Bulmer’s bubbles in a summer’s day beer garden. He needed some focus. Some ‘brackets’. A theme, mebbe (not a concept; that’d be wank). And Daf needed a singer.

‘And gradually, Rhys got involved.’

Step forward Rhys Ifans: son of Pembrokeshire, actor and, way back when, very briefly, first singer with the band that would become Super Furry Animals.

Rhys: ‘I never did a gig with the Furries.’

Daf: ‘We did some recording though, some demos at my house. But we passed out, didn’t we, and we had to stop recording.’

Rhys: ‘OK, but I’d love to put that record straight: I was never employed by the Super Furry Animals.’

Daf: ‘To say he was the first singer is not a lie, it’s just an over-egging, a slight exaggeration.’
Rhys: ‘But the interesting spine is that me and Daf worked together 15 years ago. So it kinda made sense – we wanted to do it again.  Not because I’m a skilled musician. Because he likes my company.’

In early 2006, after six months’ chat and many, many rounds, Daf approached the former flatmate he’d known for almost 20 years. Daf had a song, a piece of stoned soul called Honey, Take A Bow – next time he was back home from London, did Rhys fancy singing a vocal? Britain’s most properly rock’n’roll actor was bang up for it. And so the pair, along with a bunch of likeminded Cardiff musicians, went into a studio in the city’s docks. They would be in and out of there, on and off, for many months to come.

‘And bit by bit,’ says Daf, ‘it became obvious that if we carried on, we might have an album. It’s been so fractuous [sic], it was only in the last year that I actually realised…’

‘”Oh shit, it’s good?”’ suggests Rhys.

‘…that we could actually pull it off,’ says Daff.

They decided to call themselves The Peth: Welsh for The Thing. They were inspired by John Carpenter’s horror film of the same name, particularly the bit where the ice-station crew member’s dismembered head sprouts legs, prompting the line: ‘You gotta be fucking kidding…’

‘And that sorta reminds me of us,’ grins Daf, ‘this amalgamation of things that shouldn’t be walking.’

‘The name’s got multi-layered meanings,’ says Rhys. ‘It’s a monster, his band.’

And with the gods, Gaymer’s and Owain Glyndwr [CIRCUMFLEX NEEDED ON THE ‘W’] smiling on them, they have pulled it off. The Golden Mile is the sparkling, funny, dark, ironic, celebratory, commiseratory, out-there, in-here result. The album title derives from the stretch of Cardiff road between the dockside studio and their mates’ houses in the Grangetown area of Cardiff.

‘It’s all about experiences and people and places around where we were recording,’ explains Daf. ‘Everything we need to sustain ourselves is in that stretch. Food, beer, plectrums, strings, whatever. It’s all available in that bit of road, so we started calling it The Golden Mile.’

‘Appart from chicks,’ clarifies Rhys. ‘You’ve got to go across the border for that.’
Hence 69 Fanny Street, a blissful but shadowy psychedelic song. If Shoot On Sight is the sound of a sci-fi glam rock band, or in Rhys’s head, Punk Floyd, then we might call 69 Fanny Street the work of The Dung Beatles. ‘Fanny Street is an actual street in Cardiff,’ says Daf, ‘but in the song that’s a fictional house where we’d have parties. It’s based on personal experience, being in places in Cardiff where you’re off your head - and you wish you weren’t. And in the morning you’re fucked, you’re frightened that you’ve done something terrible…’

‘That was one of the first carrots you dangled for me, that song,’ Rhys nods. ‘Beautiful.’
Check out Stonefinger for more comedown blues – and a remarkable one-take vocal from Rhys, who sounds appropriately broken. ‘I was, I was heartbroken.’

But on The Golden Mile, the ups more than compensate for the downs. Turbotank is a bleepy, anthemic chugger with dirty riffs and wailing harmonica, the latter courtesy of ‘Welsh icon’ Geraint Jarman. Sunset Veranda begins with Baba O’Riley-style synths before breaking out its irresistible bluesy swagger, much of which comes from the big lungs of Dionne Bennett.

Rhys has a vivid and expressive voice. But singing, obviously, ain’t his day job. How did he feel duetting with such a powerful vocalist?

‘When Dionne’s singing you’ve got to work your arse off,’ he acknowledges. ‘She’s extraordinary. But I’m quite comfortable with being on stage making a dick of myself. I make a living out of that.’

As well as vocals, Rhys has supplied some of the lyrics. What can he tell us about Half A Brain: “don’t fucking bother me, I’ve had enough and I’m going home…”

‘That’s just about being pissed,’ he says, wary of over-analysing stuff – music, words, ideas – that often bubbled up, instinctively and gloriously, in the studio. ‘But I guess if I was on a couch [I would say] it would be inspired by Shane MacGowan.’

Then there’s the first single from The Golden Mile, Let’s Go Fucking Mental: a tune that does what it says on the fucking tin. We might also call it The Theme From Peth… Brilliantly, the video is being made by Jake and Dinos Chapman, their first such project. The artists are old friends of Rhys; they’ve told him they think the song requires a video in which things are shoved up his arse. Rhys, ever the good actor, says he’s looking forward to that.

‘It’s our beer-chucker,’ beams Daf of this heads-down, bottoms-up moshpit-classic in waiting, the washes of feedback, riffs, shouting and tortured keyboards combining to create a ear-watering, eye-bleeding monster.

With a borderline scary gleam in his eye, Rhys says, ‘I can’t wait to do Let’s Go Fucking Mental live.’

Ah, The Peth live experience. Daf, Rhys and a band of eight Cardiff artist-muso-nutters will be careering round smalltown Wales in July before hitting London and the summer’s choicest festivals. The opening tour is being called Cymru Am Peth [CORRECT SPELLING?], which is a play on the patriotic slogan ‘Cymru Am Byth’ – ‘Wales Forever’. Now it’s ‘Wales For Peth.’

It was never the intention to make The Peth a ‘live thing’, reports Daf. It was more a case of ‘bang out some tunes, stick ‘em on the internet, job done’.

Daf: ‘But we just enjoyed it so much, hanging out, we just wanted to carry on.’

Rhys: ‘The important thing to remember is that none of this was planned. It’s still pleasantly baffling that I’m sitting here talking about doing gigs.’

One final thing. Actually, two. No, The Peth is not a side-project. And fuck no, nor is it an actor’s vehicle.

Rhys: ‘It’s totally not an actor’s vehicle. It’s a collective. This is not a Crocodile Shoes situation.’

Daf: ‘It’s been an exercise in engineering and coordinating. You know, our natural instinct when we’re together is to go to the pub and get wrecked. So there was almost like a discipline. I really wanted to do a record. But I really wanted to have a laugh as well. It was just finding that balance, without fucking it up.’

All hail The Peth: this summer they’re all going on an alcoholiday, then swaggering up The Golden Mile. Shall we join them?