Civic reception for atomic boom boys

"Good day for it," he says, as we begin to talk. "It's exactly 25 years to the day since we first stood in a rehearsal room together. It's also Rat's birthday."

Get that. Ned's Atomic Dustbin: 25 years old. Where did the time go?

Ned's are one of the most successful bands ever to emerge from the West Midlands and have a huge fan base in Shropshire and the Black Country.

They were founded in their native Stourbridge.

Jonn recalls: "We got together in a rehearsal room, which was a converted cold meat store, in Stourbridge. Thankfully, there were no glassy-eyed pigs in there."

The band's first rehearsal led to their unusual line-up, which features two bass players and only one guitarist. Isn't it normally the other way round, I ask Jonn.

"We were lucky to come out of that room with only two bassists. There could easily have been five. Dan had come along to play the drums but wanted to play the bass.

"Rat was a bass player and had just picked up his brother's guitar. Matt had just bought a bass and Alex had been playing bass.

"The only instrument that I had thought about playing was bass."

Happily, the band decided on a more conventional line-up, though the use of two bass players worked well for them.

"It wasn't a deliberate gimmick. We just didn't think that way. That was what we had. The reason it worked so well was because it was like that from day one.

"Alex had taken up a particular style of bass playing and was already doing that, he was heavily influenced by Peter Hook, from New Order, so Matt filled in the spaces underneath, playing more like a conventional bassist."

It didn't take Ned's long to rise through the ranks. They met fellow Stourbridge rock star, Clint Mansell, from Pop Will Eat Itself, at a party. Jonn adds: "We were all a bit silly on booze. He cornered me for half an hour and said the band had got 'it'. Something clicked."

Soon, Ned's were playing shows with Pop Will Eat Itself and Stourbridge's third successful band, The Wonder Stuff.

"From then on, it was about winning over the audiences. For me, and us, as a bunch of sweaty oiky teenagers, it felt almost like a football match every night.

"It was about going out there and killing myself winning them over. I would go bananas.

"I wanted to attract attention and entertain people well enough. We'd come off the stage bruised and battered. We spent no time thinking, we just did it."

They did just that. Amazing t-shirt designs, relentless touring, Top of the Pops appearances, hits with Happy, Trust, Not Sleeping Around, All I Ask Of Myself and many more, not to mention shows at Glastonbury and Reading, made them one of the most important indie bands in the UK.

They'll recapture the old magic when they play a Nothing Is Cool gig at Wolverhampton's Civic Hall on December 1, with DJ Steve Lamacq and special guests Cud and Frank & Walters.

"It's great now, very pure, because we don't have a record company to please. When we started out, I used to talk about killing myself on stage – these days, at the age of 44, the do or die element is back: but that's because we might put out a hip….."