In those retrospective portrayals usually written by journalists who weren't there, the music and visual-arts scene of New York city in the mid-to-late-1970s is romanticised into cosy chapters. We have heard all about the tempestuous punk-rock minimalism of The Stooges, about the inspired feedback-manipulated rock-and-roll cool of Velvet Underground and about Andy Warhol's fantasy world of amphetamine-fuelled pop. But delve deeper and you discover maverick artists pre-empting the future.

Two of them were Alan Vega and Martin Rev. The former was a Brooklyn-born visual artist and sculptor connected to the Project of Living Artists scene, the latter a free-jazz aficionado and connoisseur of electronic sound devices from the Bronx. Together, with Vega on vocals and Rev on keyboards, they formed Suicide, an aural outlet for their heavily synthesised vision of the future.

Nobody adopted quite as extreme a sense of change as Suicide. They didn't so much push the boundaries as rip them apart with terrifying squalls of dissonant keyboard noise and spluttering vocal assaults.

Of all New York's heroes and villains, it was Suicide who took advantage of the city's chaotic celebration of decaying US urban life. Vega remembers it well.

"The 1970s will never exist again, especially in New York. I mean, the city was going downhill. All freaks came from everywhere in the world just to come to New York. You could be who you wanted to be. I guess it happened in the 1950s and 1960s, with abstract expressionism and jazz. And then in the 1970s, with the so-called punk thing and conceptual art.

"Everyone was poor, fucked-off and everything, but it was a great scene because everybody knew everybody else and everybody helped everybody else. We had two great clubs - Max's \Max's Kansas City\ and CBGB's - in those days.

"We actually created a whole new thing. It was a great time and a great place . . . Inspiration came from bands like the Velvet Underground and The Stooges, Silver Apples, Lamont Young, Terry Riley, a lot of jazz, John Coltrane, the free-form guys. Marty was coming out of a jazz background. He liked doo-wop shit and all that. You know, even before Suicide, I was fooling around with electronics. Oh, and what's his name, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. What a great record that was. Those were the kind of things that got me off."

With a story similar to those of numerous acts from the New York scene of the late 1970s, Suicide were a band whose influence seeped through generation after generation of music fashion. From exponents of space rock and industrial noise to new romantic pop stars and techno and electronica artists, Suicide's influence has proved hugely enduring.

Influential artists such as Spacemen 3, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Spiritualized, Orbital, Pulp, Nick Cave and Primal Scream have paid their respects to Suicide's bloody altar. And even such mainstay chart fodder as Soft Cell, Human League and Erasure have benefited from their groundwork.

"I always look at it as a watered-down version of what we tried to do. Like a Soft Cell kind of thing, it was very obvious. But it's cool. Nowadays, the audiences are younger than when we started. They weren't even born when Suicide started. And there are bands around doing that shit that weren't even born when Suicide started. We've influenced bands over 30 years. And you've got bands who don't even know they were influenced by Suicide, because they were influenced by other bands who were influenced by Suicide."

Suicide's live shows initially attracted the attentions of both the New York punk fraternity and the city's art intellectuals. They regularly degenerated into punch-ups between band and audience. It was extreme communication. "It was just what happened, whether we tried to or not," says Vega. "It was because what the nature of the beast was. I mean, it was the times, and it was the fact that we were a two-man band without a guitar or drums, you know? That was enough to get it going. We didn't have to really try. It would just happen automatically. Especially when we opened up for other bands like The Clash or Elvis Costello. You automatically get shit just for that, because people wanted to see the main band.

"We'd come out and just deliver our barrage, and suddenly things would get worse. And then it would accelerate. I'd be like, 'I can't hear you,' to the audience." He chuckles. "That really got them going. It was real easy to do in those days. Nowadays, you can't do anything. What can you do now? I mean, the kids are so used to everything."

For someone who has been so celebrated by the avant-garde, the joyful irony is that Vega exudes a far more impulsive understanding of music. "I used to jokingly say it was a country 'n' eastern thing. But it was the blues. It was just blues. I never really viewed it as avant-garde, but little do we know. I just thought everybody was behind the times.

"Marty and I recognised right away that the whole 1960s thing, the guitar/drum thing, was like a dead mat of dust. To us it was obvious, but I guess it wasn't obvious to anybody else. We were only living in the present and we loved the music, although there were times when I felt Marty and I were crazy. Our rehearsals were sometimes like, 'What are we doing? Are we losing our minds?' Nobody was doing anything else like it.

"But, ultimately, we loved it, so we figured: 'Well if we love it, why doesn't somebody else love it?' We're only ordinary human beings, so why wasn't anybody else digging this shit? But we felt that, sooner or later, they would. But we never said we were the avant-garde. I don't believe in the avant-garde. I just feel that we maybe understood the present better than anybody else."

With their recorded work, Suicide opened up new possibilities for music, turning their backs on the traditional guitar/drum rock format. Their first and second albums, from 1977 and 1980, stand out, but they continued to record and release live albums and pursue solo careers through the 1980s and 1990s.

They're still going strong - a new album is in the works and due for release next year - despite the fact that many of the more commercially successful acts they inspired are long gone.

"Marty used to say, it's the race between the tortoise and the hare, the old parable. We're definitely the turtle in this thing here. He's right. He actually said that 30 years ago."

Many view the forthcoming Suicide tour as a couple of old guys coming out of retirement for a rock-and-roll testimonial. But that's far from the case.

"We never said we were quitting," says Vega. "I'm always going to be doing music. I'm not going to sit down some day and decide to retire.

"What am I going to do, bounce my head off a wall or something? It's breathing to me: I don't have any choice in it."

Suicide play the Ambassador Theatre, Dublin, on Friday, September 21st and Limelight, Belfast, on Saturday, September 22nd; bookings at 1890-925100