I bought Tolerance, my first Blue Aeroplanes album and the band’s second, in 1985, when I was 16, with Saturday job money. Instantly, I was obsessed, and roamed the racks of the pre-Amazon dark age for early 12 inches. The hydra-headed Bristol collective were a kind of rolling art project, that combined performance art, poetry and rock’n’roll, and the teenage me probably liked to think he was a kind of rolling art project, that combined performance art, poetry and rock’n’roll, too. Instead of just a dick.

The group never seemed to play anywhere I lived, so I took coach journeys to London shows at the ICA and Wood Green’s Club Dog freak night, sleeping in tube station photobooths, to see their beatnik frontman Gerard Langley declaim a doggerel that continues to repay close study, over twin lead guitars and live vinyl sampling, while a Polish dancer freestyled between the players, rushing at each other in perpetual Brownian motion, dodging kits and cables; action-painting aesthetics applied to a downtown New York folk rock/punk rock fusion, like Philip Larkin fronting Television. Random elements collided in unpredictable patterns. Every show was pre-calibrated to be unrepeatable.

When the band signed a major-label deal in the early 90s, and recorded in big LA studios without sacrificing the eccentricities that defined them, it was a victory for our side, but record company wrangling scuppered a near US hit, leaving them silent for half a decade, until a recalibration of economics and ambition saw a return to active service in the new century.

Perhaps temporary derailment saved the Aeroplanes. The world they find themselves in today, on the release of their 14th album, Welcome, Stranger!, suits them. Now, all music exists simultaneously on YouTube and Spotify, stripped of context, and the Aeroplanes’ crossing of timestreams and cross-pollinating of highbrow and lowbrow idioms has the hallucinogenic air of late-night surfing.

Now, there are Aeroplanes who weren’t born when the band released Bop Art in 1984, alongside a frontman who treasured his Fairport Convention albums long after punk rock hit. Fortunately, their latest album is one of their finest, and the song Dead Tree! Dead Tree! is a career highlight. Time has shown the Blue Aeroplanes, and the teenage me, the wiser. Few early investments have matured so satisfyingly.

Welcome, Stranger! is out now. The Blue Aeroplanes play O2 Academy Liverpool, Wednesday 11 Jan; touring to Sunday 29 Jan