We’re now going to play a song that was written for us by Robbie Williams when he was fatter than me," smiles Greg Dulli from the stage in London’s Subterania, as the opening chords of ’If I Were Going’ swell around him. It’s incongruous, to be sure, but The Afghan Whigs are an incongruous band. There can be no other way of describing a band who released an album of Motown covers on Sub Pop during its ’home-of-grunge’ heyday; a band who met in a Cincinatti jail and yet write songs with a cartharticism unparallelled by their peers. There’s certainly no other way of describing singer Greg Dulli, a man who is every inch the excessive showbiz superstar, cracking jokes, swigging whisky and getting off with female members of the audience but whose guilt and self-loathing has been thickly smeared across four albums.

The Whigs’ fifth album, ’1965’, sees the band making a few changes - a new label, a new drummer, and a seemingly cleansed Dulli writing lyrics that no longer seek to exorcise his sexual demons.

"I think," says bassist John Curley, "that as a band, we wanted to do something that we hadn’t done before, and Greg, as a songwriter...well, I’ve heard him say that he wanted to avoid becoming a parody of himself". Incongruous again, as Dulli’s stage persona is nothing if not a parody, throwing dancefloor shapes as the band do a pisstake encore of ’No Diggity’. But all this is between songs - as each song starts, suddenly Dulli is the caged animal of ’What Jail Is Like’, or the teenage arsonist of ’Going To Town’. And in the new songs, he’s the sleazy bloke by the bar staring at your girlfriend. For if the enduring emotion of ’Gentlemen’ was guilt, and that of ’Black Love’ was anger and a thirst for revenge, then ’1965’ is characterised by what John describes as "...a kind of lust for life". First single ’Something Hot’ kicks off with the lyrics "Got your phone number", in stark contrast to the "Got you where I want you, motherfucker" of ’Honky’s Ladder’.

The album was recorded in New Orleans, "because we all live in different places now. None of the others wanted to come back to Cincinatti, where I still live, and we sure as hell weren’t going to Minneapolis, where Rick [McCollum, lead guitar] lives because winter was coming on, so we all decided to go to Greg’s in New Orleans where it was warm and we could play with the best horn players in the country. We played in some bars, got in a few fights, Rick got thrown in jail and Greg quit the band. It was pretty normal really".

Indeed, this tension does seem to be what the Whigs thrive on - last album ’Black Love’ was written after the acrimonious departure of long-standing drummer and friend Steve Earle, whose replacement "was a great drummer, but as we toured the album it turned out that he wasn’t that great a person, and you don’t want to be spending that amount of time with a person like that," hence long-time friend Michael Horrigan now filling the drum stool. Greg’s quitting the band was actually a 3 day disappearance, with Dulli going AWOL and returning with the album’s final track, the instrumental ’The Vampire Lanois’. Curley explains that, "it was the only thing he wanted to do when he got back. We had to set it all up and record it straight away".

Considering how important this turmoil and stress is to The Afghan Whigs’ music, it’s a little worrying that Dulli appears to be mellowing out, calming down even.

"I wouldn’t say calming down," disagrees John. "I just think he picks his fights better now". As long as it means the records continue to be this good, here’s hoping he keeps picking those fights.

Afghan Whigs were talking to Tim Sismey, in October 1998.