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BORN – Cardiff, 1967

CHILDHOOD SUPERPOWER – ‘My Puma football boots’

CHILDHOOD SUPERWEAKNESS – Sweetcorn

CHILDHOOD DISASTER – Burning down parents’ living room

CHILDHOOD VICTORY – Winning a womble in a raffle (‘I believe it was Great Uncle Bulgaria’)

BAD BEHAVIOUR – Perennial daydreaming

TEEN REBEL ICON – Gianluca Vialli, Juventus and Italian striker (‘He had a sneaky cigarette while he was a sub during the World Cup … the commentator Barry Davies didn’t know what to say’)

TEEN GROOMING TIP – Leather jacket

GEEKY PASSION – Sharks

FIRST ATTEMPTED SONG – ‘Swn’ (‘It means noise … I had no idea what I was doing’)

BEACH BOYS VALHALLA – ‘Good Vibrations’

LIFE WISDOM – ‘Never judge a book by its cover’

Bunf was the guitarist in a band called U Thant. All the posters said that U Thant were a punk band, but somewhere along the road they’d taken a left turn into space-rock territory, and now Bunf was armed to the teeth with psychedelic guitar pedals.

Totally uninterested in learning the blues, playing hyperspeed solos or even being technically any good, Bunf was instead on a mission to find his own sound. Three heroes, at the time, were pointing the way.

‘Tone-wise it was Mick Ronson,’ he says of the legendary glam-rock guitarist. ‘In terms of stage presence it was Chuck Berry, and [I wanted] the pacing of George Harrison’s solos. To be honest, I never did crack Chuck Berry.’

When he wasn’t being a psychedelic rock star, Bunf worked in education – and following two years at a primary school, he’d graduated to being head of art at a secondary near Pontypridd. To the kids, Bunf was a source of dazed amusement, arriving late in the mornings to find that they’d already registered themselves and started without him.

‘I managed to get the two most responsible girls to help out,’ he says now. ‘If I was five minutes late they would take over the register. It’s not what you’re supposed to do as a teacher, but in a way I think they enjoyed it, because it empowered them to take responsibility … in my own sick way I taught them a lesson!’

The other teachers at school, however, viewed Bunf with suspicion – and the feeling was mutual. Organised religion and discipline were the twin forks of the school’s philosophy, with the deputy heads in particular displaying an evangelical streak. It wasn’t the religion that bothered Bunf, however; more the school’s insistence that religion alone could save kids from a life of poverty. ‘We were in a really hard, deprived area which had this enormous lack of hope,’ says Bunf, ‘and it was inadequate to suggest that it’d be OK if you followed that path. The kids were beyond that.’

When possible Gruff and Daf would catch the teacher in action with U Thant, and it wasn’t long before they got to know another member of the group who seemed a like-minded kind of person: Guto Pryce, their dark-haired, square-jawed bass player.