Grandaddy have always been contrary buggers. They’ve long since eschewed the bright lights of nearby San Francisco for their more modest Modesto hometown setting. And of course a few years back they reinvented country music. With synthesizers. So maybe it’s not so unexpected that they start tonight’s sold-out gig with ‘You Are My Sunshine’, without a trace of irony. It’s simply their way of letting us all know that they’re beyond any concept of cool or uncool. They are simply Grandaddy and they are peerless.

The country tag is starting to look a little uncomfortable too at times. The atmosphere of the Old West is in their blood and seeps out of songs like ‘Hewlett’s Daughter’ and ‘Everything Beautiful Is Far Away’ like the water that snakes through the valleys of their native California, but with songs like the buzzing, synth-led ‘Our Dying Brains’ and the bubbling, Toytown-simple ‘AM180’ from their glorious ‘Under The Western Freeway’ debut, take all the traditional sounds out of their natural environment and into orbit where they mutate into full-blooded backwoods-to-the-future prairie space disco.

Unlike so many of their peers, and so many of those bands that they’ve helped to inspire in the great alt-country resurgence, Grandaddy have precious little time for introspection. Jason Lyttle’s voice may be fragile and reedy, like Neil Young at a whisper, but he’s got little time for navel gazing. Instead we get the likes of ‘Summer Here Kids’, which sets off at a gallop like the last Pony Express out of Hell, a blur of piano and guitar fuzz. Grandaddy can really thunder when the bit is between their collective teeth - layers of semi-psychedelic guitars and synths melding with the trippy, synchronised videos that play behind the band.

They do wander occasionally, it’s true. But even here they wander with an elegance that few other bands could ever muster, like in the glacial cloud gazing of ‘XD Data II’. There’s something just a little bit magical about everything Grandaddy do. They can even write a song about a dishwasher and make it sound like a snow-blind love ballad.

Beyond genres and scenes, beyond the Civil War beards and log cabin drawl, Grandaddy are purely and simply an almost flawless pop band. And tonight, children, your Grandaddy didn’t just help win the battle for pop’s soul. He won the whole goddamn war.

Dale Kattack