But first they gave us Big Leaves, a Welsh band and friends of the Furries. Obviously totally in thrall to the headliners' sound, they conclusively demonstrated that guitars/bass/drums/perspiration can only take you so far down that elusive yellow brick road to nu-psychedelic enlightenment. Thanks, but then again, no thanks.

Rather more impressive, despite being rather less there (dim shadowy figures on stage in proximity to what could have been decks if you squinted a bit, but little sign of Adventures On The Wheels Of Steel-type vinyl-spinning dexterity) were 3D and Daddy G, the remaining tenants of the parish of Massive Attack. Yes, all they did was play records, but they did so with the sort of freestyling casual abandon that distances them from the celebrity phonograph equestrians churning out production-line mix CDs for the TV-advertised/Woolworths market. No borders, no boundaries. I recognised The Clash, PiL's "Death Disco" and "Fodderstompf" (the latter played at the wrong speed, for maximum disorientation - respect!), Desmond Dekker, The Damned and, most unfathomably, vast tracts of "Dark Side Of The Moon". Nobody danced, but that hardly seemed the point: when it comes to sculpting something new out of juxtaposing (heck, mashing up) the old the only acts I've seen/heard come anywhere close are the Brothers Chemical (on their "Brother's Gonna Work It Out" CD) and The Scratch Perverts (ripping the Unkle album to shreds during the NME's televised Premier Shows last year). And they haven't even got a logo.

After a few minutes of good-natured shambolic drawled babble from Mr Marks, somebody arrives on stage with an alpenhorn, and proceeds to blow it as if warning ships away from dangerous cliffs. It is clearly going to be that sort of night, the sort of night of which memories and recollections are necessarily haphazard and random. There are six speaker stacks suspended from the auditorium ceiling, and sparsely but effectively employed to gently relocate the audience smack dab in the middle of the Super Furries' vision of how life should be, or maybe is. Deep inside the mantras "Wherever I Lay My Phone (That's My Home)", "Some Things Come From Nothing", "The Door To This House Remains Open" and "Nightvision" you're no longer imprisoned in the CIA's barn-like acoustic, you're gently cocooned in a womb of swirling near-subsonic frequencies, going as low as the laws of physics dare allow. For their pearlescent reading of "Northern Lites" SFA employ a brass section. Not an ordinary brass section, naturally, but one decked out in panda and pope outfits. And why not? When it comes to playing "Fire In My Heart", possibly the most childishly simple yet sincere ballad of the year, lead Furry Gruff Rhys pauses proceedings between each verse, and yes, you could have heard a pin drop. Or more appropriately a balloon drop, as later in the evening hundreds of white balloons are unleashed from the rafters. They play "Mountain People", and it grows itself a thudding techno closing that possibly outsquidges the version that ends the "Radiator" album. And because underneath all the excess and experimentation they're showbiz to the core, they save the best for last.

"The Man Don't Give A Fuck" was notorious even before it was released. Notwithstanding the sort of title that doesn't exactly endear itself to daytime radio programmers, there was a lengthy will-he/won't-he tussle over whether or not Donald Fagen would grant permission for SFA to use the Steely Dan sample (from "Show Biz Kids") that forms the song's core. Happily he did, and "The Man Don't Give A Fuck" stands as one of the band's finest recorded five minutes. But live, of course, that's just the beginning of it. Having whipped up the entire CIA into a seething mass of bodies hoarsely yelling "You know they don't give a fuck about anybody else" the band leave the stage, with the exception of keyboardist Cian, who, hunched over racks of tortured electronics coaxes up a screaming Hardfloor-style acid marathon that seems to last forever, at least, before the euphoria is shattered by the theme from "Jesus Christ Superstar", of all things, and the appearance on the stage of four, waving, Teletubby-like figures whose masks gradually slip to reveal human faces. They leave, the house lights come on and a few thousand dazed but happy people stagger out into a Welsh winter night, pursued by the still-thudding clatter of drum machines.

So where does that leave us? The Manics have the inscrutable ideologies, Stereophonics shift units by the megabore-load, Gorky's are ever charming against considerable odds, but no band from the principality can confound your jaded expectations and mess with your mind like the Super Furry Animals on a good night, diving headlong into the kind of visual and sonic experience that lifts a gig skyscrapers above a marginally more participatory version of listening to the records. Don't try this at home, they should have warned us, because you can’t. Rumours suggest that 2000 will bring the world both SFA's Welsh-language album and their techno long-player - unbelievably, the Super Furries' tank appears to be rumbling towards even weirder terrain.