Dafydd Ieuan, drums, vocals

Gruff was the first person I ever met who could just churn out songs – good, catchy ones. I joined his band Ffa Coffi Pawb, but by 1992 they’d split and Gruff and I were living in Cardiff, as were Bunf, Guto and my brother Cian, the other future Furries. We started out doing techno sets, and I had a little home studio where we demoed ideas for songs. Our first singer, the actor Rhys Ifans, slept on a mattress in the corner.

I had this Steely Dan album, Countdown to Ecstasy. There were bits I really liked. One lyric from the song Show Biz Kids – “You know, they don’t give fuck about anybody else” – just tickled me, because I was very immature. I still am. The song is about rich kids in LA partying and doing coke or whatever, but I thought if we took that line in isolation it could be used as a protest anthem. At the time, I was thinking of the John Major government, but over the years it’s proved applicable to every shower that’s come along.

We took the idea to our producer Gorwel Owen. In his studio, he looped the sample and synced a synth to it. Guto did a dub bassline and we just jammed over that. It didn’t evolve into a song until Gruff had an idea for the intro and verse later. It could have gone in a totally different direction – we were friends with Howard Marks, who didn’t like the quiet bits and thought it should just be the loop from start to finish. It’s a good hook, but I think the way it ended up being arranged makes it a lot more interesting.

Gruff Rhys, lead vocals, guitar

The demo of the song stayed in the back of our minds for three years – something really cool that we didn’t know what to do with. We finished it when we needed extra songs for singles from our first album. It was all set to come out as the B-side to If You Don’t Want Me to Destroy You. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan had cleared our use of the sample. But at a very late stage, a fax came from Fagen’s lawyer [reversing their decision]. So we had to quickly write and record a new B-side, Guacamole, to replace it.

At the time, we were on Creation Records. When label boss Alan McGee heard The Man Don’t Give a Fuck he said: “This is a hit single!” Some staff were saying: “It’s got 50 fucks on it!” But he didn’t care. Fagen’s lawyer was contacted again, and this time we got the green light – but Fagen and Becker wanted 95% of the royalties. We thought: “It’s never going to get played on the radio, so that’s 95% of nothing.” So we let them have the lot. We hadn’t accounted for the lack of censorship on Australian radio shows, though. The song got playlisted on Triple J radio station.

McGee wanted to release the song as quickly as possible, which ended up being early December, so the song became a Christmas single by default. The fact it has sleigh bells on it is a coincidence, though – Surf’s Up by the Beach Boys was one of the albums we bonded over as a band, and songs like Feel Flows had that kind of sleigh-bell rhythm.

It’s a very flexible song, because it’s vague. The man is the establishment, I suppose, the military industrial complex. The line “Keep the masses from majority” was about how people like Thatcher were able to dismantle society despite more people voting against them than for them, but a few years later we were screening footage of Bush and Blair when we played the song live, and added a loop of Bill Hicks in the intro: “All governments are liars and murderers.”

We did a gig in Baltimore and got a drive-by egging afterwards. I think there were some right-wing kids in the audience who didn’t like what they were seeing. They actually ran out of eggs and had to go and buy some more. On their second go, the show’s promoter managed to catch one and throw it back through their car window.

The song changed our gigs, because we had to close shows with it. We’ve tried putting it at the start and in the middle, but it just doesn’t work. It’s got longer and longer over the years. In 2004, we released a live version with a techno section from Cian that stretched it to 23 minutes. At Glastonbury one year, we were partway through it when a man tried to drive a van through the crowd but had to stop. People were jumping on top and dancing and he was up there pushing them off. Eventually, he realised he couldn’t get down, so he just started dancing himself. He had some amazing moves.