There comes a time in every touring band's life when one question must loom large: how do we get this golf buggy up the stairs?

On second thought, perhaps not every band, or indeed most acts. It is, however, something that once gave Super Furry Animals difficulty when they visited Glasgow's Barrowland Ballroom.

"We would drive onstage in it every night, it was glow-in-the-dark," recalls Gruff Rhys, the Welsh group's frontman. "We'd managed to get it into every room on the tour, but obviously the Barrowland was a couple of floors up, and initially the staff were reluctant to let us attempt to get the buggy inside.

"When we told them we'd got it in every other venue they took as a matter of urgency to get it in, and made this insane makeshift pulley system on the side wall, and winched it up over the stairs. I don't know if anyone in the audience was aware of the sweat and blood that had gone into getting this weird golf cart into the venue..."

Talking to Rhys is somewhat like ascending several flights of stairs, but being unsure exactly where to stop. He apologises late on in our chat for going off on tangents, and he has a habit of taking time over his answers. Given we're talking over the phone, this creates the occasional moment where it seems he's wrapped up his thoughts, only to resume. But his answers are thoughtful, and the 44-year-old has much to say.

The past several years have seen variety in his projects, but after six years he's returned to Super Furry Animals, who are revisiting their 2000 album Mwng for a series of shows, including one at the O2 Academy on Tuesday night (venue staff will be relived to hear that the stage show this time only requires a few projectors).

The album was the first Welsh language record to crack the pop charts, and the band will be performing both it and a selection of other favourites at this run of gigs. After years away, the transition back to life with the Super Furries has proved straightforward and laid-back.

"It feels really normal to be back," reflects Rhys. "It's not been strange - the weather's been good, we've been going in to practise every day, although we've not necessarily been doing much. I saw an interview with Sylvester Stallone, and he said he goes into his office every day to write, but sometimes nothing happens. He just tries to write, only writes dot, dot, dot and then goes home. Our rehearsals are a bit like that. We'll get coffee, do one song and go home. Other times we'll do the whole set. It's all very relaxed.

"We're all neighbours, we're within about a square mile of each other in Cardiff. So we see each other quite a lot anyway, and with the songs it's been incredible, because we must have them all to memory, given that we haven't played them in six years. We must have played them so many times that the hands remember, even when the minds don't."

The Super Furries' own minds have always been active, more than many of their contemporaries in the Britpop scene they were initially tied to. For all that their stage shows involved Spinal Tap-esque lunacy, and their music could conjure up blissful pop and searing psychedelic rock, the group have some political steel running through them. It's not a coincidence that yesterday's re-release of Mwng came on International Worker's Day, and Rhys has made no secret of his fears at what Thursday's General Election might bring.

"The austerity that has been imposed on Wales has been crippling," he says. "It's been carried out by the Labour government in Cardiff and I've no idea why they've not been more vocal in being opposed to it. It'd be horrific for Wales if that continued. It's a lose-lose situation [whoever wins], but a Conservative and UKIP axis of evil running the country would be the nightmare scenario."

It's no surprise, then, that he sees some hope in the recent leaders' debates. While Scottish attention may have centred around Nicola Sturgeon's impressive showings, Plaid Cymru's Leanne Wood also struck a chord, and Rhys was impressed by both.

"What's happened in Scotland seems very exciting and empowering, politically. On a political level it would be incredibly refreshing to see them [the SNP] have influence. I've really enjoyed the leaders debates, and seeing Leanne Wood, Nicola Sturgeon and Natalie Bennett talking a lot of sense and trying to break the neo-liberal stranglehold that's there...

"There's this idea that austerity is the only way, and it's constantly been drummed into people by the main parties that there is no alternative, and unfortunately it's been regurgitated by the media to the point that people believe the most important thing in life is paying off a debt, not treating your fellow humans with civility. It's been really heartening to see an alternative being offered in the debates."

Could he see the flow in Scottish nationalism reaching Wales?

"We haven't had the surge in nationalism in Wales that there has been in Scotland, although there was a vote on more powers for the Welsh Assembly in 2011 and the Yes vote passed easily, far more so than the vote in 1997. It was overwhelmingly Yes, and I think that what's happened in Scotland will reverberate to Wales. It will just take a few years."

There is an infamous tale about someone informing the group after an early gig that they would do better if they sung in English, only to be told that the band were already singing in English. Mwng represented a shift, being their first album recorded in nothing but Welsh, yet the music on there proved strong enough not to deter their fans. It also almost brought things full circle, as members of the group had spent pre-Super Furries days playing in bands on bills organised by the Welsh Language Society, the direct action pressure group who have been active since the 1960s.

"Even though there's a Welsh parliament in place, there's still a need for hunger strikes by them [the WLS[, and the key in Wales has been radicalism. But what's been important was that they put on concerts by Welsh language bands. All these events they put on were successful in cultivating an audience for Welsh language music.

"The bands we were in before Super Furry Animals, we gained a lot from playing those sort of gigs. As a band we've always felt we enjoy the English language, we enjoy writing in it and it's a great language, as is the Welsh language. We just wanted to see how much chaos we could create and how many people we could reach with it."

There are similarities with the ongoing discussions over the future of Gaelic in Scotland, and of Gaelic as a cultural tool. Rhys argues that there should be nothing stopping Gaelic music from flourishing, even to those who don't speak it.

"Gaelic is as well made for music as any other language," he says. "There are plenty of small languages all over Europe that can create great pop music, like Sigur Ros who haven't had to sing in English at all, yet the music still gets across. There's no reason why Gaelic shouldn't be considered like that."

The decision to revisit Mwng is not, however, part of any grand plan, politically or musically. It's been out of print for some time since its initial release, and discussions on a re-issue had started "years ago". The fact that this year also marks the 20th anniversary of Super Furry Animals first coming together has provided a happy coincidence.

"People have been offering us weird stuff to mark it," says Rhys. "So we decided we'd just do it ourselves, and do it on own terms, playing some gigs and releasing the record with no pressure...

"With a lot of our albums, we were engaging with the technology of the time, and trying to make pop music in that way, trying to engage with the moment and the equipment that was being used then. Even though that's recent history, a lot of those technologies are obsolete already, but Mwng, as an album, is basically a live band in a studio. It's our easiest album to revisit."

Not being under pressure is a theme that Rhys returns to later on, when discussing the prospect of the group making a new record. At the moment, it seems a more relaxed approach is the way to go.

"We're all churning out things individually, so we're really just here to celebrate Mwng and that we're still alive. We're just going to enjoy it, and not pressurise ourselves by making another record. The albums we've put out were made with such intensity; we were living together 24 hours a day and making music. We wouldn't ever want to make a half-assed record."

Super Furry Animals play the O2 Academy on Tuesday. Mwng is out now, including deluxe editions on vinyl, CD and download, on the Domino label