Eighteen months on and I'm back at the Columbia Hotel although in a different room (101 actually – I sniffed edgily for rats), facing a Jim Kerr looking fitter and sharper despite a continental shirt combination that makes his slender frame appear almost chubby. His natural brown hair has once again been allowed to grow through and it forms two semi-fringes, one uncomfortably perched over each temple.

After nearly a year of vinyl quietness, Simple Minds have issued the 'Waterfront' single, seen it vault chartwards a have an LP set for release next February.

"When I spoke to you before it was right on the eve of 'New Gold Dream', we'd just done the single and it was great when it came out, we were really pleased then. For the first time we sat back and didn't panic, being sure that it was in control, like a complete, focused thing.

"We went off for six months, toured, came back and wrote these new songs feeling very chuffed and smug. But a week later we found out all we were doing was writing 'New Gold Dream' part two, which was really awful. It was big problem at the beginning of the year. I was drying up, at least everything I wrote seemed to be either the same as 'New Gold Dream' or a parody on it. So we kept touring and touring, and that's why this is the first record this year and why there's been no album, because this mental block came on.

"Then in September all these manic songs started coming out that could never have been on 'New Gold Dream'. There's one called 'Kick Inside' which could be a Sex Pistols backing track. And I don't know how we went from 'New Gold Dream' to that, but we have, and we're really up with it. We played this unannounced gig in Glasgow at the weekend and it just sounded so rough and raw, but still with an underlying classiness to it."

The sound of 'Waterfront' is very bright, very outgoing. In retrospect 'New Gold Dream' seemed comparatively inaccessible, the mix somehow fogging the energy.

"I think we maybe got a bit obsessed last year. In the summer when we came back and found we could be in the charts, suddenly all these singles were coming out from ABC, New Order, the Bunnymen and the Associates and I think we probably started to think a bit too much.

"Peter Walsh, who did the LP, never made the band go the way we didn't want to, but he picked up one side of us a opposed to a kind of overallness. When you hear 'New Gold Dream' live the tracks just go WOOOSH ... as for the album ... I dunno ... there's been a lot of good things said about it and I like that, but other people just say it's ethereal mush and that doesn't upset me either."

The single's upfrontness has been interpreted by some hiding a lack of substance. A lot of the reviews cite Steve Lillywhite as making empty garbage sound grand and meaningful.

"All that's just crap. We could have written those reviews a month before it came out, in fact we did! We're dead in control now, and I think that shines through. Review-wise for us there's certain people who dismissed us this time I year and who now go out of their way to say we're crap and will use four or five paragraphs to say that, as they did in the NME.

"I think a lot of the things I said in interviews last year have annoyed people – just the tone of it. I think there's certain glow in my interviews, they're usually picturesque and pretty entertaining which is more than can be said for the Paul Wellers of this world.

"We are without doubt one of the best bands in Britain right now, if not the world, and I just can't understand anything else. We've always been the first to turn round and say 'we blew it' or 'that was a crap gig' if it was a crap gig. There's just a quality within us to ... I dunno ... stretch ourselves. We can be either completely right or dead wrong but rarely inbetween."

There's this hysteria, if you like, that surrounds Simple Minds in interviews. If writers are into the band they tend to get totally carried away, caught up in the romance of thing and the quasi-mystical haze that follows could be construed as a cover for nothing of substance underneath. (That's why I'm sitting here trying to be sensible this time!).

"No, I can't stand it when people in interviews say 'I'm just an ordinary guy' I think you have to be a bit of a fruitcake to sit down and do interviews and really, really analyse the thing that you didn't analyse in the first place when you made it.

"There is a sort of absurdity in a natural sense and, depending on the day, it can get more so by the minute. I'm even prepared to let it go either way, it's space, there's this space there ... I don't think I make up lies in interviews. If it verges on hysteria in the way it's written then I reckon I was probably hysterical at the time, but I know I don't make things up.

"It depends on how you look at it really. I like reading interviews with a lot of bands – I can't stand Elvis Costello's music but I think he does brilliant interviews. It's just another side."

A lot might see 'Waterfront' as not matching up to the glowing talk:

"People say there's this big wall with nothing in it. I'd like to find out just who is making records with something in it and what is it that they say that convinces them that there's something there. People are always attracted to different sorts of illusions anyway.

"'Waterfront' is one of the most realistic songs we've ever written – that's the irony of the whole thing. For years people said to us 'why do you never write a song about Glasgow or something that's realistic to Britain' instead of all our cosmopolitan stuff. The easy answer was that we were not there at the time, whereas we were in these other places.

"But then going back to Glasgow, I realised that I was never ever really removed from there. You have to go away to realise the goodness of a place. When I got back my mental block had gone and I started to write. I went for a walk one night and ended up literally on the banks of the Clyde. I went right to where the town ends to what were once the shipyards. It was eerie, I could just hear my own footsteps, and I was surrounded by factories which are just shells now.

"I just started to think about what it was like in its day. Some of my people, my grandfather and stuff, had worked there. There was a predominant bleakness but the great thing was actually being able to see the water. It was still moving and it seemed to hold some sort of symbol. Everyone now comes up with figures of unemployed and industries that are all dead and the human race becoming redundant. I don't believe any of that.

"It's not being romantic but I saw the water as a symbol because that was what the city was built on in the first place and it'll still be there when the city goes. I still believe things will turn round and life will go back there and that strength will still come from there. It just made me write a dew simple words, just a verse, an anecdote even, which happened to fit a backing track that came up.

"There was no European in it, no president getting shot, no fugitives, but it was important for me and for anyone listening to the song. I'm confident they can feel uplifted, because that's how I felt at the time."

It's got that ring of Simple Minds optimism about it. It stands out as positive and hopeful at a time when people, in the UK and Europe anyway, are assimilating the threat of total annihilation into their lives.

"I really challenge that. I know you can turn on the TV and see these things (American cruise missiles) have actually arrived here but how big is the threat? The pubs are still full Saturday nights."

That's probably why ...

"One of the criticisms of 'New Gold Dream' was made by this German journalist who said 'how can you be so escapist' while he was sitting in the hotel drinking cocktails.

"If I thought it was all going to end I'd just sit on my bed all day or be doing smack or something. I wouldn't be writing songs and talking about going to Australia to play next month. I just don't think it's going to happen."

The music industry in a strange way reflects that terminal feeling, a turnover that gets faster and faster until eventually ... Simple Minds in contrast have always seemed very long-term.

"I think the whole pop and rock thing is so confused, everybody's got their heads up their arses really (ah! the shithaus school). It was great to bear the record on the radio before Marilyn and after Ozzy Osbourne and still making its presence felt much more than any of the others.

"I remember when Derek Forbes came in with the bass line and it was just like a 12-bar, it could've been Status Quo! I think it's a damn cheek to release a record like that with all the flak you can get, but it's a case of knowing inside that you want to do it."

You're looking healthier these days.

"I think just now is the lull before the storm again. We do go mad and when a record comes out, running round touring and talking. At the end of last year I looked at myself and thought I looked like I should be in a band."

Pretty sick looking most of the time ...

'Yeah, I mean I was ill but I just hated that black hair and all. There's much more pride for us now to be had in what is natural. It doesn't matter whether it comes to using a 12-bar that you would normally only play at a soundcheck, or letting your hair grow normally as opposed to making it Superman blue.

"If you go way and come back you notice things. Not just social things but music too, there's nobody coming up to you nowadays and saying have you heard this band or this record or seen such and such. You just turn the radio on and get kind of tranquillised ... I dunno if that's a ploy or what.

"Before, I'd always denied the danger of being on tour for a year. I always said it would never catch up with us because we had too much energy. But last year when we got back in one week we got just about everything that means thumbs up from the music industry, be it gold discs or front pages or topping a tot of the pools. I'm not saying we're ungrateful bastards but we never felt up or down. I think it was due to total fatigue and being generally knackered. And that's bit frightening."

What effect has Steve Lillywhite had on the band?

"He was perfect for the time. He brought out all the energy we normally reserve for interviews or playing live. You can actually hear Charlie's guitar on this record and on a few tracks you can hear the words, I don't know whether that's down to me or the mix. He's got a reputation now having done U2 and Big Country, all due respect to them but I don't think we used him because he'd done them.

"To tell the truth we wanted to use Alex Sadkin. We liked the stuff he'd done with Marley and Grace Jones and you could see his face light up when he heard us play. He agreed to do it but then he went off and did Duran Duran, Classix Nouveaux and the Thompson Twins and we thought what's going on here?. It just fell apart.

"This is actually the third record we've been in touch with Steve to do, before he'd always been too busy or whatever. The sound he gave us was what we have live. We knew if anybody was able to do that it would be him."

Who's buying 'Waterfront'? Surely not the 12 and 13 year olds who might have bought 'Promised You A Miracle'.

"I think the sensitive fans of the band might be put off by it. Every record you know you'll lose some fans but hopefully gain some too. You just can't give yourself a chance to think about that when you make it or you just get into a state. Anyway, it would be condescending to think that you had a clue who was going to like it.

"I think the way a single should work this year is as an anti-single. Something that goes in amongst all the mush and like SMASHES its way through, which is what this record is doing – something makes it go straight in at 25 and isn't a hype."