SHAUN Ryder answers the phone on the second ring, voice bellowing down the line. From the start he is a mixture of excitable energy and experienced raconteur, gliding through old stories and references.

Topics include the punch-up with bouncers at the Barrowland with the Happy Mondays, working with John Cale in the 1980s, and continuing to make a career in music.

His enthusiasm doesn’t waver when talking about the present either, whether his current release with Black Grape or contentment at his family man life, a world away from the hedonistic figure of years gone by.

“I’m all about going for walks with the kids in the country and going on bouncy castles now,” explains Ryder.

“I had a family in the 90s too but I was away building a career. Now I’m not on that treadmill and I do a lot more now than I did then. I was partying a lot then and it’s so easy now because I have all this time to do it in.

“The young ones know that Dad’s in a couple of bands, or even three bands because they’ve seen the Gorillaz stuff, but I’m still just Dad to them.”

The drugs and excess might have been replaced by bouncy castles, but his enthusiasm for music hasn’t changed. The purpose for our chat is that Black Grape have a new album out today, Pop Voodoo. It’s the first release by Ryder and partner in crime Paul "Kermit" Leveridge in 20 years, and they’ll bring the record to Glasgow at the end of this month when they headline the Govanhill Against Racism event in Queen’s Park on August 28.

Ryder has been a regular visitor to Scotland over the years, from festivals to gigs to question-and-answer sessions, and he’s loved most of them. His first visit to the Barrowland, however, came with the Mondays and was memorable for offstage reasons.

“The first time we were there we got battered off the bouncers. We were only kids and we’d stolen New Order’s beer out their dressing room, and a couple of bouncers saw us and didn’t know we were a band or anything.

“The next thing we knew we were getting clobbered by them. It was our baptism at Barrowlands.”

The Mondays are still a going concern and have a "greatest hits" jaunt scheduled for just before Christmas, stopping at Glasgow's O2 Academy on December 23. However it was inaction on their part that led to Black Grape getting back into the studio ahead of them.

“There’s six big personalities in the Mondays, so everyone has to get together at the right time,” explains Ryder.

“It should have been a Mondays album that we were doing, but me and Kermit were doing some writing again and the Mondays couldn’t get studio time together. We did that football song (We Are England, released for Euro 2016) and we thought we’d carry on.

“Alan McGee hooked us up with Youth to produce, and he asked us what we were after. We said the Bee Gees, the Beach Boys and a bit of Motown in there too, and I think we did that – you might not be able to hear the Beach Boys influences but they are in there!”

Cue Pop Voodoo, a typically sleazy, debauched record, complete with Ryder’s varied wordplay. Black Grape first emerged in the wake of the Mondays imploding, with It’s Great When You’re Straight topping the charts in August 1995, and Pop Voodoo is a worthy continuation of their 90s work, rattled off inside a month.

“Me and Kermit work like Alas Smith and Jones, where we sit head to head and Kermit has his traditional writing method, and I’ve got bits of paper and beer mats with lyrics on them, and we’ll try and find a hook, then bounce our ideas off each other.

“I don’t record anything on my phone or in a notebook, just these bits of paper and they’re all shoved into a teapot at home until I look at them again for writing. But I don’t discriminate, it’s just whatever I’ve got there I’ll use for whatever band I’m working on.”

At the moment that band is Black Grape, but Ryder is optimistic the Mondays will re-emerge with new material in the future. 2017 marks the 30th anniversary of their first album, Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out) that featured the curious choice of John Cale to produce it.

“That was Tony Wilson’s idea, because he was friends with John Cale,” recalls Ryder. “I think he paid him £6000 to produce it, and he was just sorting himself out after having a pretty heavy lifestyle for years. So he would sit there eating tangerines and doing crossword puzzles, then he’d press play and just record us as a live band.

“We thought maybe we’d take out Squirrel and G-Man in full next year if there’s no progress on a new album. But we tried to take some of those tunes into this year’s set, and they really are weird! It’s the sound of us learning.”

Weird, but also brilliant. The Happy Mondays were ahead of themselves, with a love of all sorts of genres and styles, coming in a pre-Spotify time where music clans were far more established.

“You were either a punk or a mod, or this or that, back then. What brought the lads in the Mondays together was that we weren’t ashamed of going ‘oh, I like Dean Martin or I like ABBA’ as well as Northern soul.

“Other kids would be ashamed of what we liked musically. But we wanted all our influences in there without sounding like them. So if anything ever sounded too much like New Order or Echo & the Bunnymen or Orange Juice we’d just scrap it right away.”

The Mondays were a ground-breaking band, with a clutch of records that still stand out today, and Ryder reckons they sound better than ever live. It is easier to look purely at their musical output these days though, whereas the 80s and 90s saw them tied so heavily to drugs, drink, drugs again, a trip to Brazil to see Ronnie Biggs and more drugs.

For Ryder, the focus on their offstage abilities was a deal worth doing to help get attention, even if there was a love of music underpinning all the excess.

“We had to use any tool we could to get noticed,” says Ryder.

“We were lucky, or unlucky, because we were making records far sooner than we should have done, cos we knew Phil Saxe. He was best friends with Mike Pickering and Rob Gretton and Tony Wilson, and then suddenly we’re on Factory Records.

“We weren’t ready musically, but when someone from the NME is coming down to do about four lines on the band, you get a joint out or do a line in front of him and suddenly you’re getting a great big photograph and a full page!

“Thing is, we got the headlines but we always loved our music too. I never wanted to end up having to go out and do a proper job. I really did treasure it when we got our break, because I knew how important it was to try and make a career out of this.”

Pop Voodoo is released today.