It is 1992, and Rob Birch is on a stage. He and the other Stereo MC's spent much of 1992 and 1993 on stages around the world; supporting U2 and Happy Mondays, playing their own shows, pushing an album called Connected that sold and sold and sold. You remember Connected. The song was everywhere, booming from clubs, on the radio and trying to sell you a newfangled mobile phone.
The tour ends and the years go by. Nine of them. Pop music trends come - hello drum and bass, Spice Girls, speed garage, nu-metal, David Gray, trance, All Saints, Oasis - and go. You hear Connected now and again and wonder what happened to the band with the singer who looked like Catweazle. And you wish your mobile phone would stop ringing.
It is 2001 and Rob Birch is back on a stage. It's like he never left it. HQ in Dublin has probably never experienced anything like it: a band coming on strong with so much energy, so much panache and so many good tunes. They are playing songs from a new album called Deep Down & Dirty and the vibes are something else, especially on tracks such as Breeze, Sofisticated, We Belong In This World Together and the title track. Birch covers every inch of the stage, an obsessive figure in baggy military surplus and silver rings.
It's a few weeks later and he's on the other end of the phone, ready to explain a nine-year hiatus and celebrate a return to form. Birch speaks in a slow, unexcited monotone, rarely raising his voice and seldom resorting to an inarticulate "you know?" or "you know what I mean?".
"To me, we were only away in the sense that we weren't gigging and we didn't have any records out," Birch says of their break. While he has a point - they set up the Response record label and Spirit Songs publishing imprint - most people were waiting for another Connected. And so, it seems, were the band.
"I do think we spent too much time in the studio, and it did become like trying to break through a brick wall. Sometimes you just bang your head on it when you should be looking for the door. We weren't getting a spark going. There were ideas, and some of them were good, but they never bore fruit. We had to start afresh with a new attitude. We had to figure out where we were going."
That took time and space.
"The business can get you into a pattern which is far removed from the pace you started out with in your bedroom or front room when you were first making music," he says. "You have to get back to the stage where you are excited about making music. We needed to have a space where we could get some vibes together, make some beans on toast, have a cup of tea and get back to the fun. We built a studio in Brixton [in south London] and we got to work there. And we found the vital essence."
Having located that ingredient and 10 or 11 songs to go with it, the band return to a musical world changed beyond recognition from that they left. Ask Birch if he regards the album as a club record and he pauses.
"You can dance to it, but I'm not so sure if the kind of music we make is what people call club music any more. I don't think there is anyone else out there doing what we are doing. We do heavy grooves, our music is rough and dirty and we've had the same vocalist for 12 years.
"We're a freak amongst all the music that's out there because we don't compromise our sound to suit the time. Because a lot of the music is so homogenised, we stick out like a sore thumb. Actually, I hope sincerely that we do.
"Our records have our own character, and while a lot of people mightn't like that, we'll be able to look back at them at the end of the day and say: 'we put out some good records, and we did some good gigs, and we did all the things we wanted to do.'"
Some may feel the lengthy period between albums was due to pressure brought about by the success of Connected, but Birch doesn't see it that way. "That album opened so many doors, so I look back at it with great fondness and love. I think we overdid it in some ways, say with the touring, but I don't regret it, because it allowed us make another record which I think is the best we've ever made. Connected led to here, and we wouldn't be here otherwise."
Another factor is an understanding record label. Island is still waiting for Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine to produce the goods it paid for in the mid-1990s, but at least the label has a new Stereo MC's record. "Island have always been pretty good to us," says Birch. "We've been signed to them for 14 years. They signed us for £1,500, which meant they didn't have to drop us if we didn't have a hit record. They liked what we were doing and let us build it slowly. Yes, they wanted to sell records, but they were also into developing an act. When Chris Blackwell left, Island hit a bit of a low point, and they didn't know where they were going. Since Lucien Grainge took the helm, things have got focused. It has got a lot more corporate, but that's the world we live in."
The new corporate culture also means that using your art to soundtrack adverts is no longer unusual. Stereo MC's may well have kick-started the trend when they allowed Connected to be used in the mid-1990s.
"Carphone Warehouse had been pestering us for a year to do it, but we weren't sure," says Birch. "In the end, we thought the money would come in handy. It wasn't a trendy advert, it was low key and anaemic. It was just for a telephone, it wasn't trying to say anything. I don't regret it, because it enabled us to buy a building to put a studio together, and without that we wouldn't have made another record.
"I loved the track and it hasn't spoiled it for me or for the people who sing along with it at gigs now. But I wouldn't do it again unless there was a good reason - a very good reason. You've got to be a realist. It would be nice to live in an ideal world, but we don't." So they return to the real world.
"It's like we never stopped," Birch says about their recent comeback Irish shows. "Doing live stuff is like swimming: once you start, you either swim or sink. It's an extreme feeling, knowing you have to go out and perform in front of an audience. It brings things out of you that you can't really formulate, you just have to experience them. It's what I'm looking forward to."
Deep Down & Dirty is released on May 25th. The Stereo MC's perform at the Witnness festival on August 4th and 5th