HOWZAT

And he’s right. The crowd, their minds sandblasted, perhaps, by the more normal SXSW diet of unhinged and unwashed guitar music, look positively beatific. Right at the front was a beaming Timothy D. Tilton and his wife, Malega. Both aged 53 and silver- haired, they put the young hipsters to shame. “Is there nothing Gruff can’t do? We are huge fans,” Tilton enthused. A bulk mail clerk for the US Postal Service, Tilton had pulled a sickie to attend the festival, “I do every year. We kind of have a quiet understanding.” Most Austinites are music mad, but Tilton seems to be more than most. “I’m not the norm . . . I’ve never been the norm. My wife calls me a pusher. I’m always dragging people to see new things.”

Although Neon Neon is rooted in Eighties pop culture it works because what the pair describe as their “aerodynamic pop” is reinvention rather than pastiche, a slick cousin bands such as Gorrillaz and Hot Chip. “We’re not romanticising the Eighties,” Rhys says. “For one thing there was lots of crap, like Margaret Thatcher, cruise missiles, Lycra.”

“Musically, the album is an amalgamation of bits of music from the last 30 years,” Hollan adds. “There is Jan Hammer, but also Kraftwerk and psychedelic disco. As a record it could only have been recorded in this century. It’s not a throwback.”

The pair began working on the project after touring together. “I was really excited,” Rhys says, “because Bryan’s pitch was that it would have to be something extremely different. We’d have to leave our comfort zones. No pastoral whimsy for me.”

It has taken them two years on and off. Gruff, though his manner is louche and he chews over his words as if they are particularly sticky toffee, is prolific. Last year he notched up a Super Furry Animals album and an acclaimed solo record. He also travelled to Brazil to collaborate with Os Mutantes and made a film in Patagonia about Welsh immigrants.

It was only last year that the pair finally got to record. “It was a lot of fun. The late Seventies and Eighties were fun eras musically,” Hollon explains. “With synths and all the new gadgets they tried to recreate accoustic instruments. They failed miserably at that but instead succeeded in creating something completely new.”

At this point Rhys picks up his keyboard and demonstrates “high bongo” and “low bongo”. Suddenly we all notice that the actor Steve Buscemi is eating next to us, as he looks over and squints out a smile.

For a pop album about the man who wrote the playboy template, Stainless Style is surprisingly sincere. “I know nothing about cars and have no interest,” Rhys explains, “but while we were recording we came across a booklet on conceptual cars of the Eighties and I got obsessed with John DeLorean.”

The car-maker was born in Detroit to Romanian parents. The youngest ever General Motors executive, he turned the staid car industry on its head with his fast-lane life-style. Dramatically, in 1975 he left to manufacture what he ambiguously called an “ethical sports car”, in ravaged Belfast.

The DeLorean DMC-12, with its gull wings, was later immortalised in Back to the Future as the dream machine of every teenage boy’s fantasy, but the reality at the time was very different. Inexperienced workers, engineering faults and lack of demand doomed the project from the start, despite over $91 million of public money being invested, only 8,550 cars were built. The 1980s Gatsby spectacularly fell from grace when in 1982, in an apparent attempt to save his ailing company, he was caught with $10 million of cocaine in an FBI sting. Even though a paper trail revealed that he had been squirelling away money into Swiss bank accounts, DeLorean escaped jail after pleading entrapment. Always the showman, he announced from the courtroom steps that he’d converted to Christanity. He was later baptised in his luxury swimming pool.

DeLorean appears to be a timely icon to revisit. In that morning’s Austin American-Statesman, a columnist has written about the US’s current “morbidly obese” petrol prices, as they were in the Eighties. Read The Wall Street Journal and there is a full-page advert for the Celtic Tiger: “Northern Ireland’s Economy Gets Ready to Roar” cries the appeal to investors.

“Well maybe there’ll be a huckster web guy,” Rhys says. “But, really, I don’t think there could be another figure like him. What we wanted to do was portray a man who was obsessed with celebrity culture, with wealth. Who embodied that era. Politically. This is a completely reckless record. His ideals in no way fit in with mine. This is a man who redesigned his own face in line with his cars. He had plastic surgery that looked like he stuffed a big metal sausage down his face.”

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