Unlike other memmbers of the New York Dolls, David Johansen is alive and kicking. He tells Tony Clayton-Lea how Morrissey brought them back to the stage and breathed life back into the old dogs before one of them departed for the great rock'n'roll gig in the sky

AS A musician, I have a strong belief that you should just play music - you shouldn't have to work music, so to speak. If I had to create something for a predetermined marketplace or something like that, I might as well work in a factory or some other job I don't like. When I'm with people who are like-minded, passionate about rock'n'roll, how it should be played and presented, then it's a good option for me. In the practical sense, you have to pick and choose how you spend your time, you know. We have an allotted, finite amount of time and that time is important."

Unlike other members of the beleaguered New York Dolls, David Johansen is alive and kicking and talking in a voice that resembles not so much a slo-mo baritone as something put out in a force 10 storm and left to rot. He says he's doing pretty good, which on the face of it is welcome news, considering that the original members of the band (formed in 1972, and of which Johansen is a founding member) are dropping off life's conveyor belt with worrying frequency. I'd say he's doing about 50 a day, such is the scary, rattling timbre of his voice - a rock'n'roll instrument you'd like to visit but not to live with.

People make a lot out of the tragic aspects of the band, he says, and inevitably the stories of hard drug abuse and accompanying miseries have built up myths of one kind or another. Johansen points out, however, that a lot of post-New York Dolls band history - in effect, The Heartbreakers years, starring ill-fated former NYD members Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan - is attributed to the Dolls period itself.

"When we were together then," Johansen recalls, "it was a lot different - we had public lives of being professional degenerates. As for what other people did after the Dolls disbanded [ in 1975] it's not for me to comment on."

Fast forward 30 years and a heap of a lipstick-scrawl legacy (short-lived, but with two excellent proto-punk rock studio albums to their name - 1973's eponymous debut and 1974's presciently titled Too Much Too Soon), and you've got news that you thought you'd never hear: the previously consigned-to-history New York Dolls (what's left of them plus drafted in, like-minded people) are reforming to play at the Morrissey-curated Meltdown Festival in 2004. Johansen takes up the story.

"Yeah, Morrissey called me to participate in his Meltdown confab. I considered it, but said: 'Steven, it probably wouldn't be a good idea'. He, being an über-fan, said he thought it would. So I considered it a bit more, because when you're in a band or are involved in some project or other you don't really stop to consider what other people think about it. I'm in it, doing it and it's a part of my life - if I were to spend time considering what other people thought it would probably be paralysing. And when Morrissey broached the topic again, he being a fan, I tried to see it through his eyes, and how regrouping might be perceived."

Cue a snowball rolling down a ski slope, gathering weight and momentum in the process. One show at Meltdown turned into two, which resulted in offers to play at any number of European festivals. "We went to London with a return ticket and a place to sleep, and all we had to concentrate on was playing music. There was no five-year plan or anything like that. The gigs were well received, and people who came to see us didn't start throwing stuff at us."

Happiness at finding an audience again was temporarily halted by the death of original member Arthur "Killer" Kane, who passed away shortly following the Meltdown gigs. In true entertainment form, the show continued. "It went on like that for the first year, not having any plan beyond the next week or month. It was very much a go-with-the-flow thing."

Yet the sweetener for Johansen and fellow original NYD member Sylvain Sylvain was that, for Kane at least, any sense of unfinished business was resolved.

"My personal take on this whole business is that I take things as they come, and when we stopped in 1975 I felt that was that. Getting back together, I didn't have any great desire to complete any unresolved issues. As it turned out, however, it was important for Arthur that the band reunited, because although I didn't know it prior to Meltdown, he had felt there was unfinished business, perhaps of a more personal nature. And as we were going through the process of putting those particular shows together, it was quite important to him."

Johansen speaks with the tone of the weary-eyed, seen-it-all, warts-and-all protagonist. A believer in the power of art to transform even the most arch cynic into a blubbering mess, he enthuses about the band's recently released album, the triumphant One Day it will Please Us to Remember Even This, while simultaneously refusing to look back fondly on the band's glory days. I mention the band's flagrantly controversial ugly-men-in-drag debut UK television appearance - a 1974 slot on The Old Grey Whistle Test that had Little Feat fan and OGWT presenter Bob Harris muttering with disdain into his beard - and how it caused something of zeitgeist change in pop culture.

"When you create something like that amid a sea of mediocrity it seems startling to people," he contends, veering towards modesty. "Those who are artistically cognisant, or were just getting ideas about the artistic side of life probably saw what was passing for rock'n'roll music at that time as something that filled them with ennui. When New York Dolls came along, they saw we had passion, ideas, attitude, good fun. And it went on to inspire people, certain types of people, in different ways - maybe creative, maybe visceral.

"Now, you have hundreds of cookie-cutter bands around because they're actually conforming to some need in the marketplace. Whereas with the Dolls you could liken what we did back then - indeed, now - to folk art, because it's made for the love of itself and not to fit in or please anyone specifically - except ourselves. There's more to it than the music, of course - it's a kind of philosophy that is, let's face it, not for everybody."

Such an outlook fits perfectly with Johansen's casual approach to life planning. Death notwithstanding, will the New York Dolls be with us this time next year? "It's hard to say; if the record company doesn't recoup the album costs then they'll probably say goodbye. But if it makes enough for them to feel that they haven't lost their shirt, maybe we'll do another one. It's all contingent on record sales, so why build a world around that? You might as well live in the world you live in and experience it as it occurs."

One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This is out through Roadrunner Records. New York Dolls play Dublin's Olympia theatre on October 20