A few weeks ahead of the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest, I heard that Finland were to be represented by a “horror rock band” singing a song called Hard Rock Hallelujah. When I saw the video to the song, I decided that I needed to meet this group ahead of Eurovision. In order to do this, however, I had to persuade The Times to stump up the cash to let me fly to Athens in the week before the Contest, where all the artists would be rehearsing and embarking on the promotional campaign trail. After a certain amount of hectoring, The Times capitulated – which I’m still surprised about, given that we had no way of knowing at that point that Lordi would go on to win Eurovision.

As self-styled “Viking Welcomes” go, the one put together by the combined Scandinavian delegations is pretty tame. Well-scrubbed young TV presenters munch on tiny Nordic nibbles with Eurovision Song Contest entrants who look every bit as 80s as they do. The proliferation of mullets and turquoise chinos suggests that little has changed in this world since 1984, when Sweden’s Herreys took the honours with Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley.

So when Ox – skull-faced “hellbull” who plays bass with Finnish heavy rockers Lordi – ambles over towards the smorgasbord, your eyes naturally follow his journey. After a couple of seconds assessing the fishy profiteroles, he seems to conclude that it would be too fiddly to pick up said snack with his zombie fingers and successfully guide it past his snaggly undead teeth. Instead he wanders over to a bowl of olives. The character described on Lordi’s official website as “the giant powerhouse on hoofs” realizes he can manage olives far better. He simply tilts his head back and, as his bony corpse jaws open, drops them in one by one.

Across the other side of the rooftop terrace at Athens’ Hotel Divani, Mr Lordi, frontman with the most talked about Eurovision entrants in recent memory is telling a Dutch journalist that, contrary to reports in the Greek press, he isn’t a Satanist. “Of course, there were some misconceptions about the band because of the music, but if they take their time, they will see that we don’t eat babies for breakfast. If we really lived up to our music, there wouldn’t be a single person alive here.” Two aggrieved pink demon eyes peer out from his glowering prosthetic face, towards the other side of the pool where Swedish pop starlet Carola Häggkvist is singing her 1983 runner-up song Främling. “Everybody would be killed. There would be a massacre. Think about it.”

In the surreal world of Eurovision, where an air of Benetton-bright positivism seems mandatory, it’s not difficult to see why Lordi’s entry Hard Rock Hallelujah has caused consternation in some quarters. Written especially for the contest, the song warns of something called “the day of rockoning” and declares that “the saints are crippled/On this sinners night.” But with a chorus that rocks like an ocean liner in a hurricane, it’s also emerged as one of the surprise favourites to win the contest. Ask Mr Lordi – or Tomi Putaansuu, as his septugenarian parents call him – if he thinks his group will win on Saturday, and he conspicuously refrains from pledging to harness the almighty power of Beelzebub in order to vanquish his puny rivals. “The UK entry doesn’t personally do it for me, although I think Anna Vissy’s song for Greece is good,” he says thoughtfully, “It is a strong power ballad type of melody.” As for Lordi, being here is already a victory. Whatever happens on the night, this will change things for us.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Finnish music writer Anna Mutanen, who says, “Lordi weren’t one of the biggest bands in Finland when this happened. Not like, say, The Rasmus or Hymn. I would say they were somewhere in the middle.” As the band’s tour bus heads for the Finnish Embassy, Mr Lordi articulates his exasperation at a Finnish media that has struggled to understand what the band are about. “All the critics are usually putting us down because of the lyrics,” he explains, describing the mixed reaction which greeted current album The Arockalypse, “They’re like, ‘That is so puerile.’ Or, ‘It doesn’t make sense.’”

That seems a little unfair, I suggest. Take for instance, the couplet, “Who’s your daddy, bitch, who’s your daddy/Who puts you in your place?” [Who’s Your Daddy] What’s not to understand? “Exactly! This is entertainment! Or Chainsaw Buffet – that’s me imagining if Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre had a girlfriend and his family invited him out to dinner.”

Unsurprisingly, horror films and a love of rock monoliths like Kiss and Alice Cooper loom large in Mr Lordi’s universe. Growing up as an only child in Lappish Finland, his fascination with the grotesque extends as far back as he can remember. “I used to watch films like The Evil Dead and think, ‘I want to do that, I want to be that.’” Aged seven, he began experimenting with his mother’s make-up bag. “I would draw monsters on paper, so after a while it seemed like the next logical step was to draw them on my face.” At the Finnish Embassy, Seija – a journalist based in Northern Finland who knew Mr Lordi when he was plain old Tomi Putaansuu, remembers a “nice, shy boy who was making films even as a teenager.” “That’s right,” he says, when we get back onto the bus, “My parents bought a video camera when I was about ten, and I knew exactly that I wanted to make horror films with it.”

Indeed, Mr Lordi is quite the connoisseur of gore. Before finding a way to combining his governing passions, horror and hard rock, he graduated from film school and earned a living drawing storyboards. I tell him that as a twelve year-old, I saw An American Werewolf In London – which in turn prompted a mild obsession with Jenny Agutter. He says that he had a similar experience, but developed an arguably more noble kind of obsession with Rick Baker – “the guy who did the special effects. I learned a lot after buying one of his books.” When I tell him I live in the London suburb where Shaun Of The Dead was shot, Mr Lordi is touchingly impressed: “Really? Tell me, The Winchester – the bar in the film – was that a real pub?”

It’s amazing, but after a while, you really do forget that you’re talking to the “unholy overlord of tremors” – a “cyberundertaker”. “Look at these,” says the 32 year-old singer, pointing a black three-inch long fingernail at his knees. On each knee, there’s a skull which opens and closes its mouth when Mr Lordi walks. Just above them is a switch which makes their eyes glow red. “That was my design,” he beams.

Gazing around the rest of Lordi – in their frankly restrictive attire – it’s hard not to wonder how the band tend to their more pressing physical requirements. “It’s a little tricky,” concedes Mr Lordi. “If I would have to take a dump, I would need to take off everything.” He pulls up a flap that hangs over the lycra undergarment covering his legs. “For a leek though, it’s a matter of taking off the gloves. Someone helps me remove them and then, it’s just a matter of taking Little Lordi out.”

Whatever Lordi’s detractors have to throw at them (raw meat is their stated preference), it’s impossible to doubt such cosmetic dedication to the cause. It takes three hours in front of mirror alone before Mr Lordi is brought to life. How tedious must that be? “Well, I am quite a lazy person,” comes the self-deprecating explanation, “I’ve been doing this since 1997, so it pisses me off when I start. But after about eight or nine minutes, I forget and I remember once again that this is fun. It’s what I like to do.”

The tour bus arrives outside The Underworld – the Athens club where Lordi are due to play a live pre-Eurovision set tonight. It’s a low-key gig. Perhaps fearful of courting further controversy, Mr Lordi will opt for water instead of fake blood for his squirty chainsaw. As the group alight the bus, a large crowd of Greeks converge around the band and proceed to stare at them. Doing his bit to subvert democracy in the city where it was born, the band’s German label manager leaps into action and hands out “I Vote Lordi” badges.

It might just be hard reality of wearing furry monster boots in the baking Greek sunshine, but Mr Lordi looks slightly uncomfortable. “In Finland, it’s very different, he explains, “If the Finns see anyone doing anything unusual, they pretend they haven’t seen it.” He tells the story of a Lordi photo shoot for a Finnish newspaper, in which he was required to stand in the middle of Helsinki during rush hour. “Hundreds of people everywhere, and not a single person stopped to look. We are not assertive people. We will do anything to avoid causing a scene or being the centre of attention.” Cometh the hour, cometh the band, cometh the Day Of Rockoning, that will surely change.

Outside the swish Connaught Hotel, London is bathed in sunshine, but very little of it finds its way into the conference room where Michael Stipe is thoroughly examining the small box of mints that sits beside every place setting. The main reason for his visit, he points out, is the Frieze Art Fair in Regents Park, which starts today. But, of course, R.E.M.’s profile – by virtue of their imminent dissolution – has rarely been higher. Sat in a neat little pile on the table are promo copies of the group’s farewell release. Dressed in dark blue denim, Stipe runs his fingers across the sleeve of Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011 and ponders that the texture doesn’t quite meet his specifications. As she leaves the room, his publicist points out that he’s not holding the finished article. “Are the three new songs on here?” he asks her. She explains to him that, forestall any pre-release leaks, those have been sent out digitally.

We could have met in a café or a pub, perhaps even ventured out to Regents Park. But as it happens, a conference room is an entirely apt setting for an encounter that, at least to begin with, feels more like business than pleasure. You can’t blame Stipe for being suspicious of his interrogators. Five years ago, an encounter with The Times virtually stalled when the singer, now 51, took exception to what he saw as the British press’s serial attempts to out him from a closet he had no interest in occupying. Elsewhere, he has been known to issue a curt “Fuck off” when greeted with a question he doesn’t like. At times, it’s been hard not to sympathise. How would you like it if you turned up to be interviewed on The Culture Show, as Stipe did in 2004, and told by Paul Morley that you had become an “oldies band”? In fact, the last time we met, two years previously, Stipe seemed reconciled to what he thought posterity would have to say about him. “That’s what will be in my obituary,” he said. “That I was a singer for a band called R.E.M. in the late 20th Century… Of course, it’s not all I want, but it’s there.”

Later on, speaking from home he keeps in Seattle (he also shares a house with his girlfriend in Portland) guitarist Peter Buck will tell me that it would have been around this period – prior to the recording of this year’s Collapse Into Now album – that the group first discussed the idea of going their separate ways. In September, a few hours before they went public with the news, it occurred to bassist Mike Mills that he should perhaps tip the wink to drummer Bill Berry, who left the band in 1997. “I left a message on his voicemail,” says Mills. “I assume he got it, but I never heard back.” Back in the conference room, Stipe’s piercing blue eyes deaden when he’s asked who first broached the idea of a split. “That’s not important, I don’t think.”

In the general scheme of things, of course, he’s right. It’s not important. But still, I don’t see why it’s a thorny issue.

“It’s nobody’s business,” he says flatly.

This doesn’t feel like a particularly transgressive question, I say.

A hint of weariness enters Stipe’s tone. “We don’t have to bat a difficult interview back and forth all day, do we?”

So we move on. Thirty years is a long time to be making records for a band who, in Buck’s words, imagined that, with hard work and the right breaks, “could be as well-known as Big Star.” Released in 1995, Monster was far from their best album, but the goodwill accumulated from 18 million combined sales of Out Of Time and Automatic For The People – both albums that they didn’t tour – propelled the group to American stadia. “That was the first tour where we weren’t just playing to our peer group,” recalls the guitarist, “Once we had a hit single, things changed a little bit. We were, like, ‘Wow, there’s so many young people out there. Like, teenage girls. One show, while Michael was talking [to the audience], Mike goes up to me and says, ‘Look how many people there are. I think at least one person in this place has murdered somebody.’ And…well, yeah… if you’ve got 56,000 people in a place, I guess there is murderer out there. I would like to think that we don’t draw an extra number of them, but you never know.”

Success on that scale impacted upon the different members of R.E.M. in different ways. Buck thinks that “it helped drive Bill away from it all.” I suggest that being in R.E.M. after Losing My Religion sent them supernova must have at times felt like being in an iron lung. The thing that collectively keeps you alive is also the thing beyond which you can never quite venture. “OK. That’s a fair enough analogy,” says Stipe, before abruptly appearing to be put out by the question. “Well, I could apply that to public transportation if you want to take it further. It gets you where you want to go [even though] it might not be the happiest ride. Or sweaters. They keep you from catching colds. Come on, really, that’s a little harsh.” Finally, witheringly: “I wouldn’t compare my 31 year career with my best friends to dialysis.”

Buck’s response is strikingly different. “It is true. I’m a particularly driven, ambitious person, he says, “Not for financial success. But every record we’ve ever made, the day we finish it, I start panicking about having a new stock of songs that are great for our next record.” Stipe recalls how, as just one of many post-punk bands emerging from the campuses of Athens, Georgia, Buck’s manic motivational energy set R.E.M. apart. “It was Pete who used his encyclopaedic knowledge of rock history to pre-empt all the stupid ways that groups fall apart. There were very simple rules,” recalls Stipe, “You share all your publishing and you don’t fight about petty things and it’s democratic. Everybody gets a veto vote, not just the singer.”

Had Buck imagined that R.E.M. might still exist in the next century, he might have come up with a rule about not halting the sessions for a new album in order to put out a greatest hits record. This was the fate that befell 2004’s disastrous Around The Sun – and, in a sense, the misstep that triggered a sequence of events that brings us to this point. “The three of us have… not different goals [but] different ways of approaching what we want to do,” explains the 54 year-old guitarist, “And mine is radically different from the other guys. I’ve found as I get older that I like to work quickly and spontaneously. I don’t like doing the same thing over and over again.”

Buck has, by his own admission, been “trying to keep it fresh” ever since the group’s network TV debut (on Letterman) when the group elected to play an unnamed three day-old song which would turn out to be the imperishably wonderful S. Central Rain. He got his own way for 2008’s rawer Accelerate and the tour that followed. Longtime fans who decided to stay away this time missed what, for Buck, was the most “raucous, out-of-control” R.E.M. tour for over 25 years.

“For me,” he continues, “not knowing exactly what’s gonna happen is important. We played a total of 93 different songs on those shows, songs that we didn’t even know how to play. The feeling was, ‘Can we ever better this?’ And I thought, ‘Maybe not. Maybe this is the last tour. Um… right into making Collapse Into Now, we had a little talk about what we wanted to accomplish and decided that we wanted to make one final last great record.”

Perhaps because we thought that, if R.E.M. split, they would have done it a long time ago, we missed the signs when Michael Stipe allowed them to filter into his lyrics. It wouldn’t be unnatural to think that the dewy autumnal reverie of We All Go Back To Where We Belong, featured on the new compilation, might address the split. In fact, Stipe addressed it far more unambiguously on Collapse Into Now’s second track All The Best. “Let’s sing and rhyme/Let’s give it one more time,” goes the chorus: “It’s just like me to overstay my welcome.”

Did R.E.M. overstay their welcome? Certainly, by opening their account with a run of near-perfect albums (Murmur, Reckoning, Fables Of The Reconstruction), they set a standard that wasn’t always possible to maintain. Allow the needle to drop on almost any song R.E.M. recorded up until 1986 – from the Paisley-patterned folk-rock of Seven Chinese Brothers to the lysergic southern gothic portent of Feeling Gravity’s Pull – and the alchemy is little short of overwhelming. But perhaps mainaining that sort of quality control wasn’t the real problem, so much as the proclamation that seemed to come as standard with each album since 1998’s Up – that this was the real return to form (true in the case of Up, but less so thereafter). It’s hard to get the measure of a new record when your overriding emotion is suspicion. Maybe, now that the pressure to stay in the game is off, the music can stand or fall on its own merits.

Certainly, in the light of the split, there’s something unexpectedly moving about watching footage of the group playing the Collapse Into Now songs in the large room of Berlin’s Hansa Studios, where the album was recorded. Discoverer and Stipe’s tender post-Hurricane Katrina paean Oh My Heart sound fantastic. “There’s a good chance that we’ll never play together again,” says the guitarist. “And that’ll make me feel sad except for the fact that I played [those songs] a lot for a long time. I can’t imagine anything in this moment that would cause us to use the name R.E.M. and play songs again.” Speaking from his Athens home, bassist Mike Mills remembers that final performance, “It was a very fraught day and very emotional. But we weren’t going around saying, ‘This us the last one! Wow! This is weird!’ I think everyone was aware of it in their own way though.”

Perhaps it’s surprising that they stayed together as long as they did. Half an hour ago, Stipe referred to the rest of the band as his “best friends.” Now he seems to be urging me not to draw any conclusions about their friendship on the basis of them having been together for so long. “Proximity does not indicate intimacy,” he says, “Shared history does not indicate a feeling of love or family or anything. I have a shared history with some of my neighbours whose last names I don’t know and I couldn’t tell you whether they go for roast beef or tofu.”

Be that as it may, like all great bands when they start out, R.E.M. looked like a gang – albeit one that bore no sartorial relation to the presiding fashions of the day. Throughout the early years, the chronically shy, curly-haired Stipe and Buck, the garrulous sonic architect of the group, would share a room on tour. Pretty Persuasion came about when Stipe woke up one night and blurted to Buck that he had a dream about a nonexistent Rolling Stones single called Pretty Persuasion. Buck duly obliged with a tune that formed the basis of the song. In 2011, Buck is fundamentally unchanged, still buying more records than he can get around to playing, still jamming with friends in his spare time. And Stipe? It’s hard to believe that nearly 30 years later, the same frontman – now a keen photographer – would be uploading pictures of himself naked in his New York apartment onto his Tumblr page. For all of that, he maintains that the “eccentric in the band is not me – that should be obvious at this point.

If Stipe isn’t R.E.M.’s resident “eccentric”, the intended recipient of that accolade is unclear. Mills has long since snuck into the role of the band’s affable pragmatist. Neither is eccentricity the first word that springs to mind over the course of an hour-long conversation with Buck. You don’t get the impression that dealing with record companies is something he’ll miss. “There are some things that never change,” he explains, “Like with demos – a demo is supposed to show you what the arrangement of the song is and how it’s gonna go. And you play it to someone from the record company and they go, ‘The drums could sound bigger.’ Well, it’s a demo! My feeling has always been that nobody knows anything. If they did, all these bands they sign would have hits. Warner Brothers did not want Losing My Religion as a single. They were saying, ‘No way! There’s a mandolin on it!’ And we were like, ‘It probably won’t be a hit, but it would be a really good way to introduce people to the record. And, of course, it was our biggest hit.”

Back in London, Michael Stipe emerges into the sunshine and elects to walk to Regents Park. Perhaps he’s right. The world doesn’t feel very much like an iron lung at the minute. He expresses concern about my not wearing a cycle helmet and makes me promise to buy one. “You have children,” he says, fixing me with that unnerving stare. He also asks me not to mention this exchange, but given how much more relaxed and chatty seems outside the conference room, it would be doing him a disservice not to. Buck too, seems anything but awed by the great post-R.E.M. beyond. He has recently returned from an extended stay in a small Mexican fishing village. “I kind of have a little bag,” he explains, “I have a shirt and a pair of pants and a couple of books and I go somewhere. Other than that, my goal is to make music be my hobby.”

As goodbyes go, it’s hard to remember a more muted one than this. No final tour. No grand crescendo. But this is clearly just the way at least one member of R.E.M. wants it. Dressed in his pyjamas on this Thursday afternoon, Buck sets out his position, “We could be out there right now making a billion. But we’d be doing it for the money, and we’ve never done anything for the money… I hated rich people when I was young, and I still kind of do. Being one myself, it’s a little contradictory, but hey, I can live with that.”

As befits a man who arrived in the UK just two hours ago, Terry Reid’s dress mode is Californian; the tan, expat orange. Crumpled white shorts, red t-shirt and – because it was the first thing he found in his suitcase – a blazer orphaned from the rest of its suit. Now 56, he’s not the sharply-attired mod of his very first publicity pictures, but the blue-eyed glare is unmistakeable. An hour into our rendez-vous, he’ll finally alight upon the one irreducible lesson that life has taught him. “The trouble with record companies is that there’s always trouble with record companies.” So amused is he by this summation that the ensuing laugh momentarily drowns out the sound of a plane taking off nearby.

Star quality never blossomed into stardom for Reid. However, for a brief period, his prospects burned brighter than almost any of his peers. “There are only three things happening in London: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Terry Reid.” said Aretha Franklin in 1969 – while his high-voltage blueswail made him the first person Jimmy Page approached when looking to recruit a singer for his new band. Touring commitments with the Stones, Cream and Jimi Hendrix prevented him from joining what became Led Zeppelin. But then, why would he have wanted to? With hitmaker du jour Mickie Most having procured him a deal, only good things were possible – or so it seemed at the time. But returning from Mick and Bianca Jagger’s wedding in San Tropez, Reid discovered that Most had mastered his second album, Bang Bang You’re Terry Reid, in his absence. “I told him where to stick his five album deal,” recalls the singer, “which effectively put my career in limbo.”

Despite electing not to work with him any more, Most refused to release Reid from his contract. For the next three years, Reid’s live reputation sustained him. By the time he appeared at the first ever Glastonbury festival in 1971, Reid was in the process of relocating to America. His surroundings may have changed; not so his luck. Despite having covered his song Without Expression for their zeitgeist-defining Déjà Vu, Crosby Stills Nash & Young left it off at the last minute. He was due to perform alongside them at Woodstock, but strike action from US helicopter pilots left him in the Pan Am building watching it on television with a forlorn Joni Mitchell. “It was poor Jone I felt sorry for,” contends Reid, his East Anglian burr softened by the years abroad. “Watching [Crosby, Stills Nash & Young] doing her song and she’s humming along watching it on TV.”

An afternoon in the company of Reid only serves to underscore the sense that you might be talking to the boomer-rock Zelig. That some of his more spectacular anecdotes might come with an element of lily-gilding, is perhaps understandable. Bereft of gold discs to account for his place in the annals of rock, Reid has just a small but loyal following to argue his case.

It’s a case strengthened by the 2004 reissue of what, in recent years, has come to be regarded as Reid’s masterpiece. As with Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and Talk Talk’s Spirit Of Eden, River is one of those albums that seems to exist apart from its creator’s canon – indeed, apart of almost all popular music. Listen to the three songs that comprise side one and you can hear a gradual cutting loose from Reid’s past – the Soho basements and provincial ballrooms – into the wide vistas of possibility. By the time the title track appears to float in on a Brazilian breeze, the leonine bluesman has swapped his earthly container for a place beyond mere happiness.

The critical re-evaluation accorded to River in recent years seems to have genuinely touched Reid. But he takes the compliments modestly, deflecting them in the direction of Atlantic co-founder Ahmet Ertegun, who bought Reid out of his contract with Most and suggested he work with legendary soul producer Tom Dowd. “We were blown away, although at the end of the sessions, when we played it to Ahmet, he said, ‘I love it, but it’s… it’s a jazz album. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to sell it to the record company.”

Still only 24 when River sank, Reid made two more albums in the late 70s before no more deals were forthcoming. For Reid, the 80s was a decade eked out with session work for California pals such as Don Henley and Jackson Browne. Then, in 1991, Warner Brothers chairman Rob Dickens tracked Reid down and decided he would be the one to finally launch the singer chartwards. His big idea – that Reid’s voice be let loose on The Waterboys’ 1985 single The Whole Of The Moon – had promise. But, as the single left the pressing plant, The Waterboys’ original was enjoying a bizarre new lease of life as a rave anthem. By the time Reid’s version appeared, its original creators were enjoying a top five hit with it.

What might seem like an extraordinary run of bad luck to some is, to Reid, nothing more than a salutary life-lesson. His point – that “there’s a world of difference between making records and making music” – is worth lingering on. The argument that he could have been a Rod Stewart or a Joe Cocker had things gone his way is a persuasive – until you remember just how many awful records his gravel-voiced contemporaries have made, simply in order to make more awful records. “It comes down to how you want to live,” says Reid. “I got to see my children grow up. And I’ve never stopped playing.”

Indeed not. Before moving out of town in 2004, to a golf course on the outskirts of the Californian desert, his Monday night residency at Los Angeles’ restaurant The Joint attracted a revolving cast of illustrious side musicians: The Eagles’ Joe Walsh, old pal Graham Nash, and Keith Richards. Give or take a few celebrities, it’s essentially this show – a convivial mix of old favourites, new tunes and well-chosen covers – that he brings to Britain this week. How does it feel to be back? “Compared to L.A., nothing much changes over here. I’m staying at my mother’s house tonight. Round about this time of the year, you’ll see her by the side of the road selling plums and damsons from her orchard. People come from all over the country to buy her fruit. They’ve been coming for the last twenty years.”

Like mother, like son. Reid has survived by doing what he has always been doing. With Heathrow behind us, we negotiate a roundabout on which a model of Concorde remains perched, its famous nose pointing upwards. “If you could have told me, in 1969, I’d be going longer than that thing,” smiles Reid, “I would have been happy with that.”

A biblical downpour is making its way through Highgate Village, but Ray Davies’s beetroot barnet is safe beneath the awning of his local Cafe Rouge. Your correspondent hasn’t been quite so lucky. Despite agreeing to his date with Q over 48 hours ago, the venerable Kink has been reluctant to confirm his preferred time and place. Finally, 25 minutes before the interview is due to begin, Davies’ “project manager” summons your correspondent to the bistro in question. As the heavens open, Q dons waterproofs and cycles with manic gusto in order to get there on time. In the event though, Davies is 15 minutes late. In dress-down Sunday mode, North London’s 68 year-old pop laureate is not a dedicated follower of fashion. Attired in casual threads and springy white trainers favoured by retired cab drivers when popping out to buy The Sun, he folds down his brolly and orders a white Americano. We have barely taken our seats before Davies feels he needs to get something clear. He’d rather not be here.

“It’s frustrating,” he begins, wearily, “I’ve got three new projects I’m trying to develop and doing this – no disrespect – takes up so much time.” By “this”, Davies is referring to the business of promoting an imminent box set comprised of Kinks BBC sessions. Though he doesn’t mention it again, this is the apparent raison d’etre of our encounter. But if walking 400 yards from his house to a cafe to talk about himself over lunch is such a drag, why does Davies go through with it? “Unfortunately, because I wrote the songs, it involves my input. People wouldn’t appreciate it if I delegated it to someone else.”

Still, now we’re here, let’s make the best of it, eh? What would Ray like to eat? “Oh, I wouldn’t want to eat anything here,” he says. Q urges Davies to reconsider. After all, this slot is predicated on the experience of having lunch with a celebrated pop singer. This, it turns out, was the wrong thing to say. “I never thought of myself as a pop singer,” says the man who sang You Really Got Me, Waterloo Sunset, Lola and several other peerlessly splendid pop songs.

A waiter arrives. Ray will eat after all. He asks for poached eggs, but a strained atmosphere deteriorates further when we’re told that it’s now lunchtime, which means that the water used to make the poached eggs has been “thrown away.” I order the Fromage Souffle, which affords Davies the time to choose a mushroom omelette with a cup of hot water. Things go from bad to worse, however, when our waiter returns with a tiny jug of hot water. This is terrible. Davies looks at it despondently. In the end, he picks it up and takes a sip out of its little spout.

This, of course, has long been his patch. Down the hill is the Archway Tavern, immortalised on the sleeve of 1971’s Muswell Hillbillies. Muswell Hill itself, just a mile away, is where he grew up. The Odeon, where his sisters worked, is still standing. So is the Broadway Cafe which was where, as schoolchildren, Ray and Dave Davies would eat lunch in the years when their mum ran it. Between bites of omelette, Davies also points out that we’re a stone’s throw from his sister’s house where – as a teenager – he wrote You Really Got Me and Tired Of Waiting. “There’s probably a tape somewhere,” he ponders, “featuring those demos.”

Does he often get recognised? “Yes. Usually on the days when I don’t want anyone to see me.”

And what do people say? “They say, ‘Who are you?’ They know me, but they don’t know my name. I tell them I’m Damon Albarn and put on a cockney accent.”

I point out to Davies that Albarn lost the cockney accent several years ago. “He’s probably got a Jude Law accent now,” he jests drily.

The food arrives. Within earshot of the waiter, Davies looks at it, then looks at me and says, “Be careful what you order. You might get it.”

He picks at his omelette. How is it? “Nice corporate cooking.”

Like a tormented beat-boom Eeyore, Davies’s glass seems perpetually half-empty. He likes the cakes in the tea shop across the road, but “it’s so difficult to get a table I’m comfortable with there.” Later this afternoon, Andy Murray will take on Roger Federer in the Wimbledon men’s final but, alas, he won’t be watching it. “I’ve got this lovely TV, but I can’t get it to work. It needs re-tuning.”

There’s also the matter of an upcoming CD, Waterloo Sunset – The Very Best Of Ray Davies & The Kinks. His project manager explains that this will be different to other compilations because it will include material from Davies’s solo albums and even one song from the brother with whom he barely speaks these days. All this, however, is scant consolation for Davies. “I can never agree with what should be on… It’s always the hits.”

Well, you have to sympathise. Perhaps more than any of his peers, chunks of The Kinks’ history remain overlooked. The group’s 1978 album Misfits is a case in point. Although successful in America, impeccably observed vignettes such as A Rock And Roll Fantasy and the record’s title track are overdue wider reappraisal (though one would be hard pushed to extend such reappraisal the album’s disastrous race-relations paean Black Messiah. “Good record, good memories” he nods, and for a moment his features soften. “I don’t care what Damon does… I care about real people. Misfits is about a friend of mine who passed away recently. I’m just trying to celebrate people like that.”

Onto Davies’ Glastonbury appearance two years ago, in particular another moment which celebrated one of Davies’s contemporaries: a version of See My Friends dedicated to Kinks’ bassist Pete Quaife, who died the previous week. That was poignant, I suggest. Davies now looks as bored as it’s possible to look without actually being asleep. “Well, I never phone in a performance,” he says finally, before adding, “Who was it that closed Glastonbury last year? Attractive-looking girl. She had all these pyrotechnics. Was it Rihanna?”

It was Beyonce. “Ah, Beyonce. That made me laugh. How can you read an audience when you’ve got to think of the next light blowing off?”

The waiter returns with the bill. Before we say our goodbyes, any chance of a quick picture of the artist on his home turf? He grabs my phone and shoots about three seconds of video footage, mostly of his hand next to his leftover chips. That’s your lot. Beyond the awning, Highgate is now enjoying the sort of afternoon sunshine which inspired another one of The Kinks best-loved songs. Ray Davies looks relieved to be back out there, but you suspect the weather has little to do with that.

It is, of course, tempting to dwell on the surly supersized adolescent who deliberately mumbles inaudible answers and then affects to have forgotten them when asked to repeat himself. Lest we do Julian Casablancas a disservice, we should start by remembering the good times. The way his face momentarily softens when you tell him that you think The Strokes have just recorded an album full of potential singles – enough, indeed, to reply, “I like your talk.” The way he ambles into the room and enquires “Is that a strumpet?” Such comic timing, delivered with requisite New York understatement is not hard to warm to. Needless to say, no strumpets have been delivered to The Strokes’ room at the Metropolitan (maybe four years ago, it would have been a different story). The Strokes’ drummer Fab Moretti picks up the tray – containing biscuits, by the way – and extends his arm in Casablanca’s direction. “I think you mean crumpets,” he tells his frontman. “But these are neither.”

“It gets a little confusing,” explains guitarist Albert Hammond Jr, whose friendship with Casablancas goes back to Le Rosey – the prestigious Swiss school where the two were sent in 1992. “Your biscuits are our cookies. Our muffins are your cakes. And our biscuits are… well…” “Sort of a savoury bread,” interjects the drummer, born to Brazilian and Italian parents, “Kind of a flaky, southern kind of food. The sort of thing an old lady in St Augustine would serve you. Right now though, the Metropolitan’s biscuits are helping my hangover.”

Casablancas absents himself from the room – his interview isn’t due to begin for another half an hour – it’s left to Moretti and Hammond to conduct a postmortem of The Strokes’ first UK show in two years – a reminder, if one were needed, that on the eve of their third album, the New York quintet can still elicit feverish devotion in their fans. I tell Moretti about the queues – 800 fans four days previously, snaking around the block at ULU for the chance to get in; then, a couple of hundred more on the night before the show, camped in the hope that extra tickets might be released on the day of the concert. Though still only 25, Moretti has that easy, solicitous air that will probably make a great father of him one day. He says he feels a responsibility to them. He worries that no Strokes show might be worth that sort of hardship. “But at the same time, I’m respectful of their choice. Because there are bands I would have done that for. Which ones? Guns ’N Roses, Nirvana, The Beatles. I would do it for The Beatles right now.”

And those fans lucky enough to get in would have had ample chance to digest The Strokes’ third album – First Impressions On Earth – because for the first half hour or so, that’s all they played. Such confidence in the ability of new material to hold the attention seems to tally with the diffident self-belief that radiated around the band even in 2001, when their repertoire barely extended beyond the ten songs on their debut album Is This It? If that record – and its successor Room On Fire – portrayed a band holed up in a damp New York basement in retreat from pop’s encroaching tendrils, First Impressions… is a development. The sense of airless claustrophobia is still there. But pop – albeit pop of a warped, febrile variety – has, one way or another, found them. Which means that once new single Juicebox has fallen from the charts, big tunes like Electricityscape, On The Other Side and Razorblade – the one with an amusingly similar chorus to Manilow/Westlife monster Mandy – should make light work of following it.

As Moretti and Hammond bowl down towards the bar to join Nikolai Fraiture (bass) and Nick Valensi (lead guitar), this seems a natural juncture for a returning Casablancas to make sense of the previous evening’s hysteria. He didn’t see the queue either, although he says that any fans who found him and told him they had been up all night had their names taken down. “They definitely got in the show,” he says, “But then I saw another girl later that day who said she was also in line. But she didn’t ask me, so I didn’t say, ‘Do you want to [go]?’’ He pauses. “If she reads this, I guess she’ll be kicking herself.”

Nonetheless, despite the “unreasonably high expectations” he has of himself, Casablancas enjoyed himself. It seems necessary to ask because, where The Strokes’ 27 year-old frontman is concerned, it’s not always so easy to tell: the impassive stature, the ever-present cop-shades which sit on the bridge of his nose in a barely-lit venue – all the better to focus on individual audience members without the burden of communicating? It’s a gentle line of enquiry – small talk, really – but the drop in the air pressure is enough to make the dogs across the road in Hyde Park start barking, “Um, no. No. No, no. Definitely no thought behind it.”

It wasn’t my intention to spend any great length of time talking to Julian Casablancas about his sunglasses. Still, as if to retreat from any unintended psychoanalytic slight, I suggest that it was purely a cosmetic choice. Which, in turn, prompts the retort, “Why are you wearing your sweater? I dunno… it’s as cosmetic as your sweater is.”

Though I point out that my motives vis a vis the sweater are mainly thermal, I also don’t want to be having a weird argument about sweaters and sunglasses. And, if the ensuing, piercing silence is anything to go by, neither does he. So we try again. First Impressions Of Earth is The Strokes’ first since Casablancas married his girlfriend Juliet in January. First Impressions Of Earth was so named because, when Casablancas surveyed the track listing, he wondered what an alien unfamiliar with our world would make of it. An alien would, I venture, hear songs like You Only Live Once or the vertiginious urgency of Heart In A Cage and deduce that our ambivalence towards love isn’t enough to stop us falling in it. It’s nice to hear The Strokes’ singer swapping skinny-tied insouciance for something more vulnerable. “Ummmm… sure,” ponders the singer, smiling to himself. “I dunno… whatever you think, man.”

Rewind fifteen minutes and Casablancas’ drummer is sitting in the chair now occupied by the singer. “There are so many love songs on this album,” coos an empathetic Moretti – whose own partner Drew Barrymore found herself “papped” as she helped Casablancas’ partner shop for a wedding dress. “It’s great for him, especially given that the person he married was a very close friend of ours for a really long time, so the love was always there between them. It was just kind of… a secret love. We had known her for six years, which is kind of a long time for us young kids.”

Back in the present, Casablancas is still deriving some peculiar amusement from the word “vulnerable”: “Umm, sure. Urm, I dunno. Whatever you think, man, I dunno.” Another pause. “To me, [songs] are loosely based on specific things, but meant to be delivered in a way that, urm… won’t only… um… have an emotional response…” Then comes the inaudible murmur, from which there is no apparent return. I ask him to repeat what he just said.

“It’s not just… it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s… uh… yeah, whatever I said. I can’t remember.” Perhaps realizing that this catatonic state won’t sustain him for the remainder of our allotted time, Casablancas tries to rally. He contends, “meanings of songs have only been destroyed” when he discovers what they’re about. Sometimes, I tell him, the reverse is true. An interview with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke yielded the minor revelation that Everything In Its Right Place from Kid A was inspired by his love of order and tidiness. The song’s dreamlike, spooky sense of euphoria goes well with the compulsive-obsessive overtones of the lyric.

The Strokes’ frontman remains unconvinced. He mutters something else barely audible about the Radiohead song only having one line. That it doesn’t, seems barely a point worth arguing at this stage. His publicist walks in and tells us we have five minutes. I tell him I don’t need them. For the first time since I told Casablancas I liked his record, he registers something other than profound indifference. A smidgen of surprise, perhaps, that maybe that should have been as unpleasant for me as it was for him. “Thanks,” he says. It was nothing, I assure him.