The Radiators fell from the top of the punk tree and hit a few branches on the way down when their second album failed to spark the fervour of their safety-pinned followers. Now, Ghostown is regarded as one of the greatest Irish albums of all time. Bloodied, greying, but unbowed, they're back with their third album, which they hope will hook in a few more fans, singer Philip Chevron tells Brian Boyd

CTOBER 31st, 1978, The Electric Ballroom, London: the support act, a new band from Belfast, Stiff Little Fingers, are having a stormer - their scratchy punk sound finding much favour with the safety-pin and bondage-trouser audience. The headline act, The Radiators (who have just dropped the "From Space" suffix from their name) take to the stage to preview songs from their second album which will be released shortly. The Radiators have considerable punk credibility due to their previous TV Tube Heart album, but these new songs owe more to Sean O'Casey and James Joyce than the UK Subs. They are singing songs about their moribund home city and its fractious religious/political past. The audience, still revved up by SLF's set, react with disinterest bordering on hostility. "This isn't punk" is one of the kinder remarks.

Singer and guitarist Philip Chevron remembers the gig as a pivotal moment not just for the band but for the whole punk movement: "Previous to that gig we had done about 80 shows in six months, but then removed ourselves from touring for about six months to record the album that would be Ghostown," he says. "From our TV Tube Heart album we still had the audience to headline the Electric Ballroom, but during the six months we spent in the studio everything had changed. The initial wave of people on the punk scene were accepting of experimentation, but now punk had just become associated with bands such as Sham 69. The audience that night were all wearing the visual symbols of punk, that undercurrent that was there of rebellion or revolt or whatever just wasn't in evidence anymore. It was clear from the first few numbers that we just weren't ramalama enough, these were people who related to the songs on TV Tube Heart but just didn't get Ghostown. We sort of stopped gigging after that show."

Now rightly regarded as one of the greatest Irish albums of all time, the album ruined the band. It had been recorded with legendary Bowie/Bolan producer Tony Visconti and was an audacious musical statement that, as Chevron wryly observes, "fell between the cracks". The singles Million Dollar Hero and Kitty Ricketts were near hits, but record company politics put paid to any momentum the album was threatening to gather.

"We were on the Chiswick label, which was run by two Irish guys," says Chevron. "When we were trying to get the album out, they were in the middle of signing a licensing deal with EMI and certain acts became priorities and others didn't. You needed radio success to be a priority band and we weren't getting that. A lot of the reaction at the time was the album was 'too Irish', which wouldn't be a problem now partly because of what The Pogues have managed to do. I know Shane McGowan got the album and I can hear a direct link between the Sick Bed Of Cuchulainn and our Song Of The Faithful Departed. In fact, Shane told me much later that he thought The Radiators were going to become The Pogues with their next album. But there wasn't a next album."

One of the other problems with Ghostown was Nick Kent, or rather a lack of Nick Kent. "I really hoped he would review the album for the NME," says Chevron. "I knew he definitely got what we were trying to do with the album and if he really liked something, the review would be be important. But the NME gave it to someone else to review and that reviewer dragged up all this old enmity that existed between The Radiators and the NME. Overall the reviews were good, but they were misguided. One review said the album was 'a teenage pop classic', which is being damned by misguided praise. Over the years, it has been reissued a few times and the reviews are always 'this is a classic, it always was', but it wasn't regarded that way when it was first released."

After a farewell Irish tour, The Radiators broke up with the proviso that they would possibly reconvene at some later date. Chevron went on to join The Pogues and, while the band did reconvene briefly for a benefit gig in Dublin in 1987, it wasn't until they played a Joe Strummer benefit show in 2003 that there was serious talk of reforming and recording a new album.

"One of the main things there was Cait O'Riordan [ who was the early bass player in The Pogues] joined the band," says Chevron. "I hadn't seen her in about 18 years and she brought something new to the line-up, a sort of punk energy. We played a few shows just to see how we felt about the band getting together again. We had a new drummer, Johnny Bonnie, and between him and Cait there was a new motor to the band. Steve Averill [ aka Rapid], an original member, was also back and we started working on new material.

"We didn't want to have the Ghostown albatross around our neck, we wanted to record songs that would shake off what that album was about. It was all very unforced and the new songs seemed to stand up in their own right."

O'Riordan has now moved on to other projects and the current Radiators line-up is Chevron, co-songwriter Pete Holidai, Steve Averill, Johnny Bonnie and Jesse Booth. "We got talking about music and we found that there was common ground in our appreciation of American 1960s garage rock bands," he says. "Back when we started, we had the New York Dolls, Velvets and Bowie influences, but there was a big garage rock thing there too. I always thought that that was what separated us from the British punk bands in the early days. We came from a tradition which had a love/hate relationship with folk music - a bit like the Americans with country music. There were always other coordinates with The Radiators - the folk music, the danceband scene and that big connection with garage rock. All that Lenny Kaye Nuggets stuff, that would have spoken to us more than the obvious punk reference points. We have the same roots - that same direct approach, that same organ sound which is why the new album is a garage rock album. It's raw and direct, with no orchestras and no string sessions. It's not a quote unquote sophisticated album."

The album, Trouble Pilgrim, again a Chevron/Holidai collaboration, is a revelation. It sounds, as Chevron admits, like the Radiators album that should have come between TV Tube Heart and Ghostown. Only one song on the album, the stand-out track Huguenot, has any thematic connection with Ghostown. "It's a song about how different Dublin is now from back then and I didn't want it to be about how awful the Celtic Tiger is and all of that, so instead it's about the Irish dilemma with immigration and the paradox of how the country relied on emigration for so long. I myself am from Huguenot stock - the Huguenots were the original immigrant group and they were welcomed and embraced when they arrived. They were mainly tradespeople - they helped to build Dublin. The song deals with that knee-jerk racism you get today, all those racist manners and remarks. But then, the Irish abroad always had a history of racism. What is going on now I thought I had seen the last of in London during the 1970s and 1980s. And seeing the Irish go through this is acutely painful."

Elsewhere there is the beautifully hook-laden Heaven and the show band-inflected Tell Me Why. "We never thought about releasing a single, but I suppose if we did it would be Heaven," he says. "This was never going to be an album that we were going to hawk around the labels, it would have been very hard to get interest in a new album by an ancient punk band. We made it ourselves and recorded it at Grouse Lodge Studios in Westmeath.

"So far, it's only been released in Ireland but we hope to 'roll it out', as they say, in other countries. We're trying to get a bit of interest going in Japan, Europe and the US, but there won't be a big marketing campaign behind it. It'll be the sort of album people pick up on themselves. I think it turned out better than even we expected. I'm not sure about its immediate impact, but then again we never made an immediate impact before."

He doesn't feel that the album will only appeal to Radiators fans, something borne out by the band's live experiences over the past few years.

"We played the Oxegen festival and the crowd seemed to go for it," he says. "That generation difference in music doesn't exist anymore. You'll find people who are as much into the new Amy Winehouse album as they are some great 60s band. And the other reason we didn't make it for the people who bought TV Tube Heart or Ghostown is that there were never enough of them in the first place. . ."

Trouble Pilgrim is distributed by RMG Chart Entertainment. The Radiators play Whelans, Dublin on November 18th