An acrid, lippy little man. Mac the Mouth, chewed up and bitter. That's what I'm expecting. Echo and the Bunnymen, after all, could have, should have, been huge. Bigger than The Smiths, bigger than U2. They swaggered like nobody else swaggered. They had the tunes, the pouts, the haircuts. They exuded a dreamy, indefinable mystique. Frontman Ian McCulloch waxed eerie and enigmatic; an inscrutable de Niro to Bono's huffing and puffing Stallone.
We meet upstairs in a brash Dublin pub. McCulloch, jowly and slapdash in tatty grey tracksuit and blue-tinted mirror shades, orders Guinness. I cue , rightly hailed as the group's most accomplished since 1984's grandiose, string-soaked Ocean Rain, famously touted by McCulloch as "the greatest album of all time".
His effervescence rankles. I'm here to exhume the past, to mull over squandered opportunities. Ian! That might have been you up there in place of Bono, lullabying America, bestriding enormodomes, tut-tutting at us from the cover of Time magazine. You must harbour some remorse.
"For a while there it pissed me off," he says. "It just seems mad that U2 should get there. Y'know, in 1983 we were getting bigger and bigger in America and that was the obvious route... There's a famous story - we were playing in Chicago and U2 came back stage. Bono says to me 'you've got to come out here for three months at a time, three months at a time. Three months! I couldn't be in Birkenhead for three months."
The Bunnymen spurned success because they wanted to be "great artists", he claims. The States didn't happen because they chose for it not to happen.
"Everyone else was going there. I mean U2 were out there for three months at a time. And then we did Ocean Rain in Paris, which I thought was quite an overt statement. I think that at the time the press and the fans understood what we were doing - turning our backs on easily the biggest market in the world. We just thought, well we'll do what we want to do. And if you want to buy it..."
Few mourned the Bunnymen's 1987 break-up, fuelled by a split between McCulloch, the group's soul and spittle, and guitarist Will Sergeant, its creative lynchpin. The lustre had faded. Mad-for-it dance culture was ascendant: the Bunnymen's gloomy affectations and army surplus chic seemed quaintly anachronistic. They went quietly and, for a while at least, we didn't really notice.
McCulloch insists the break up made him a better songwriter ("I needed to be away from Will for a while"). His solo career stuttered however. By the mid-1990s, he was back with Sergeant and working on a new Bunnymen record. Evergreen, released in 1997, was stark and magnificent. Its 1999 follow up, What Are You Going to Do With Your Life? almost derailed the comeback. Overproduced, intermittently indigestible, it saw the duo applying string motifs with a stylistic hose pipe, scrabbling to recapture the filigree splendour of Ocean Rain. Critics scratched heads, the public yawned, the record company told them to get lost.
Dropped for the first time in their career, the duo retreated to the minimalist blueprint of their 1979 debut, Crocodiles, to forge Flowers, a strident riposte to the doubters.
"The critics are saying this is our best album since Ocean Rain, or even Crocodiles. But we didn't consciously go out to make something that was the opposite of the last record. We never sat down and said lets not have strings. Will just came up with the parts. If Will is on fire, that's enough. There wasn't a song where I sat down at night and said let's have some strings. I thought that was a very good sign."
He harrumphs when I mention Bill Drummond - the scouse svengali who, before leading feral techno terrorists, the KLF, to the top the charts and attempting to destabilise the music (and art) industry by torching £1 million in the Orkneys, once managed the Bunnymen. There's no bad blood between the two, but McCulloch is miffed over a recent Drummond autobiography that painted the group as fruity occultists.
"Bill yeah... as manager, he was fab. A pretty nutty dude though. He drew on us more than we drew on him. The way he writes about the past it's like everything really revolved around him. But he was only the manager, just another cog. He was a very good cog. He was cog that didn't fit. We were like a broken Rolex in those days, all these cogs, all smashed and glittering..."
A camera crew rolls in and begins setting up. Another interview looms. Mac sighs - he has done more than 200 since Flowers was completed.
Does he ever consider walking away from all this?
"Naw. I like being in the band. It gives me this sense of who I am. There'll come a day when I won't need it but we're really enjoying it. I still feel like we're breaking new ground and we're making new fans."
Flowers is released on Cooking Vinyl. Crystal Days, a four-CD career retrospective, will be released next month.