Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys is not your typical rock star.

As lead singer of the Welsh indie heroes, he has carved out a career built on the surreal, with songs and imagery paying tribute to footballing cult heroes — Robin Friday — and live gigs often punctuated with walls of noise and Rhys singing through a Power Rangers-eque helmet.

Last year, he released the film Seperado!, a psychedelic road trip to Patagonia to track down long-lost uncle Rene Griffiths, a caped musician whose family moved from Wales to South America after an accident involving a horse in the late 1800s.

With critical and commercial acclaim never too far away, most of today’s identikit pop-rock darlings could be forgiven for allowing themselves to be swept up in a flight of fancy.

Not proud Welshman Rhys, who goes as far as saying he cannot actually believe people are still buying his records said: “I just feel amazed that I am still allowed to do all this stuff.

“I think we are very self-critical, both as a band and as individuals, and I never have any expectations about people connecting with the stuff I do.

“You could release the same record in two different times and get different reactions so I guess some of it is because of the moment we are in.”

His latest record, Hotel Shampoo, was inspired by the raw material used to construct Gruff’s recent art installation of the same name — disposable, wasteful complimentary hotel products acquired while touring the world over 15 years.

He said: “A lot of the songs have been around for a while, but the Hotel Shampoo stuff helped me to complete them.

“The album is quite piano-driven, so I thought about it being a hotel bar-type record, which is why I called it Hotel Shampoo.”

A recent show at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester was like no other I have seen in recent years, with a number of guests invited on stage, including local folkie Jane Weaver, who performed one of her own songs, and producer and record label boss Andy Votel, who co-hosted a mock gameshow called Sitars in the Eyes, much to the delight of the mostly-seated sell-out crowd.

But he says the desire to entertain comes as much to satisfy his own boredom as that of his audiences.

He said: “I have found myself at gigs where I am so bored, so a lot of it is because of my own boredom threshold.

“When I go out solo I’m just a guy with a guitar playing melodic songs so I have to do something to keep me and the audience entertained.”

On his next tour, he is playing a range of more unusual venues, including a number of churches — he calls in at St Phillips in Salford on February 17 — although his approach this time is slightly different.

He said: “There is an instrumental surf band from North Wales called Y Niwl who are opening for me and they’re going to play on some of the songs from my solo back catalogue which I have never done before.

“It is going to be exciting.”

* Gruff Rhys plays St Phillips Church in Salford on Thursday, February 17.