Hotel toiletries inspired Super Furry Animals' frontman Gruff Rhys's latest album, the Welshman tells Andy Gill

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Gruff Rhys, frontman of psych-rock institution Super Furry Animals, has revealed an exotic early inspiration. An idiosyncratic musician caught his eye as he watched television as a child. Rene Griffiths arrived on horseback, sang in Welsh with an odd intonation, and played guitar Latin-style – for he hailed from the Welsh diaspora in Patagonia, Argentina. Rene was a Welsh gaucho – and, Rhys's gran explained, a distant relative.

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What's said in the dressing-room stays in there – so says a time-honoured football maxim. Matt Murray does not adhere to it, fortunately for the wider world, the Wolves keeper having used his time while recovering from a serious knee injury to chronicle Molineux's finest foot-in-mouth gaffes. When Wolves equalised at Barnsley, effectively clinching the Championship title, their jubilant fans were cleared from the pitch by mounted police. Left-back Stephen Ward was incensed. "Did you see those police horses?" Murray records him saying. "They're animals!" Ward was again the fall guy after Murray explained he had been to the city's Grand Theatre to do a picture with the seven dwarves to publicise a pantomime, asking: "What show's that then?" Another pearl, passed on by a physio, finds Andy Keogh being driven to London to see an ankle specialist. "Did your ears just pop?" asks the striker. "We must've been going over the Pennines." And he once played for Leeds. Jay Bothroyd, now with Cardiff, advised colleagues to invest in "bricks and water", and Richard Stearman told team-mates that his ankle scan showed he had "nicked an archery". Mick McCarthy's men are not alone in their unwitting wordplay. Your reporter has a colleague who did all his Christmas shopping "at Mataland". Another wondered whether Joe Hart was "illegible" to play against Manchester City. Wolves, meanwhile, face a tricky FA Cup tie today at Tranmere, who, as any of the players could tell you, play in Burke and Hare.

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Prolific psychedelic pranksters Super Furry Animals released their ninth studio album, Dark Days/Light Years, in April, with front man Gruff Rhys teasing diehard fans that their new offering was "too enormous to play indoors". So no gigs, then?

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As Wales's kings of psychedelic pop prepare to headline the Wychwood Festival, lead singer Gruff Rhys talks to Nick Hasted about 16 years spent confounding expectations.

'I did a toy figure based on Gruff as an older man with an allotment. I put him in a tank top'

The worst mistake any band can make, if they want to get noticed, is to release consistently excellent records. Without the clichéd "falls from grace" and the proverbial "stunning returns to form", you just become invisible. So it is with Super Furry Animals, whose endlessly inventive psych-pop ought to have sealed their place as a national treasure after 15 years. Dark Days/Light Years isn't, to my mind, the Furries' finest, but it's growing in stature with every listen. It starts with two pieces of voodoo glam in the style of Marc Bolan, Ringo Starr and John Kongos in "Crazy Naked Girls" (great title) and "Mt". From thereon, it leaps around as many styles as any other SFA album, from the Bollywood-flavoured "The Very Best of Neil Diamond" (another great title) to the childlike "Inaugural Trams". Perhaps the loveliest moment, "Helium Hearts", has barely started before it ends, which tells you plenty: so tune-rich are SFA they can afford to squander a beauty like that.

Throughout the 1980s, the Welsh had very little to celebrate and St David's Day was simply a matter of a bunch of daffodils on the coffee table. Rejoicing about our nationality was an infrequent occurrence, generally reserved for rugby victories. I was always bewildered by the way parents dressed their little boys for school concerts – rugby jerseys or miners' caps, as if the whole country revolved around rugby balls and our problematic coal industry. Nobody even thought of impersonating Tom Jones.