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You won an NME award for Best Live Act. Are awards important to the band?

Not particularly. In the scheme of things they're not important, but we were quite surprised and quite chuffed nevertheless.

What's more important to the band: to be adored or to sell loads of records?

I'm not sure. I suppose if you get adored you get hated. It's quite hypothetical. We don't try courting it, it's just something that happens. I wouldn't like to be in the Manics' shoes, with some of their fans. It's quite a strange situation to be in.

But there's a picture on your website of a fan who has one of Pete Fowler's logos tattooed on her leg.

Yeah. Pete's very good with us. I wouldn't blame anyone for having one of his drawings on their leg. We've got a good relationship with him. We're the same age and he's from Cardiff. He likes our music and his artwork's Japanese.

A lot of British bands seem to be popular in Japan...

They're not really. I'm being pedantic again, but a lot of British bands have Japanese fanbases, and because it's a big country there's a lot of fans. But compared to Japanese pop stars they're nothing. Japanese music, J-pop or whatever it is, is 20 times as popular as American or European music over there. They sort of devour our culture. There seems to be a space for everyone there, including us.

We've heard you've been recording with John Cale at Cardiff's Coal Exchange. How did that happen?

We just got asked. It's a soundtrack for a film called Beautiful Mistake, and we went in to do sessions over a week. There were lots of other musicians there too. He's produced a lot of stuff that we like, like Patti Smith. We were recording stuff that we'd already written, rather than just going in and experimenting.

Guerrilla was a lot more experimental than either of your first two albums. Was that because you produced it yourselves?

No. We tried to do a pop album, but it just ended up that way. We experimented with a lot of machinery, but still wanted it to be accessible. But Gorwel Owen, who we usually work with, couldn't make it to the session, and we decided to do it ourselves.

There's a hidden track on Guerrilla, The Citizens Band, which is one of the best tracks on the album. Why was it hidden?

We were going to put it on, but we didn't think it fitted in. Next to a lot of those songs, Citizens Band sounded out of place. So we stuck it on as a bonus. We thought it was good. If you have a PlayStation game, you can play it for a few months and discover a new level. We wanted to do something similar on our album.

Do you still refuse to play on St David's Day? You had it written into your Creation contract.

That came out of the political climate at the time, when the Tories were in power. They wanted to bring in Trafalgar Day in October, to celebrate beating the French in the war. There was a campaign to make St David's Day a national holiday in Wales. If every worker in Wales had it written into their contracts that they had St David's Day off, it would become an unofficial national holiday.

You come from a very political family, but with the exception of The Man Don't Give A F*ck, none of your songs are overtly political. Why's that?

I've never found a way, as yet, of expressing political statements in a song. The song's about the mistreatment that we've had at the hands of politicians for years.