The Man Don't Give a Fuck

The song is built on a looped line from Steely Dan's Show Biz Kids, "you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else", repeated more than 50 times. Dafydd Ieuan said he thought that taking the line alone would make it a protest anthem, and at the time he had John Major's government in mind. Gorwel Owen looped the sample and synced a synth to it, Guto Pryce added a dub bassline, and the band jammed over it. It did not become a song until Rhys had an idea for the intro and verse. Rhys said the demo stayed in the back of their minds for three years. It was meant to be the B-side of If You Don't Want Me to Destroy You, and Walter Becker and Donald Fagen had cleared the sample. Then a fax came from Fagen's lawyer reversing that, and the band hastily recorded a new B-side, Guacamole.

Once the sample was cleared again, Fagen and Becker wanted 95 percent of the royalties. The band figured it would never be played on radio and agreed. Alan McGee said it was a hit single and did not care about the swearing. It came out as a single on 2 December 1996 and reached number 22. The sleeve shows a photograph of the footballer Robin Friday. Rhys called the song flexible and vague: the man is the establishment, he said, the military industrial complex. Triple J in Australia playlisted it.

It became the closer at every show, because the band found it did not work at the start or in the middle, and it grew longer over the years. A live version recorded at the Hammersmith Apollo was released as a single on 27 September 2004 and runs 23 minutes 30 seconds, with a techno section from Cian Ciaran. At the Cardiff reunion show in 2015 it closed the set, with the band back in yeti outfits and holding up cue cards reading prolonged applause, louder and ape shit. NME placed it at number 66 in its 2011 list of the 150 best tracks of the past 15 years.