“I’M INTO the big issues, me. ‘Fire Inside My Soul’, ‘You Must Be Prepared To Dream’, ‘Potency’, ‘Truth And Beauty’, y’know? The important stuff.”

Ian McNabb’s wobbly wooden chair creaks ominously as he leans back, grins and stretches his arms out wide, by way of displaying visually just how very large the themes he tackles really are. Not a moment too soon, he pulls back in to his table in the Central Hotel, sips his pint and continues the demonstration.

“Some people just shouldn’t be allowed into a studio,” he spits good-naturedly. “Like, the Pet Shop Boys, Pulp, The Beautiful South, The Smiths (gasp!) – all those songs about normal everyday life, songs about nothing! With me, I’m either like this . . .” – he leaps ceilingward to signal extraordinary exultation – “. . . or I’m way down here . . .” – he swoops back floorward, to signal significantly less exultation. “Reaaalllly good times or really bad times, that’s what I want to hear about, not this mundane shit.”

So, he’s a man of extremes, then, is our Ian. And while he fails to convince me – Pulp’s ‘Razzmattazz’ is simply a work of genius and the Divine Comedy’s Promenade, which deals with nothing more apocalyptic than a day at the beach, is one of very few records to have noticeably and instantaneously changed my life – I can see, and sympathise with his point. In pop, you need to think big. And Ian McNabb certainly has, particularly on this year’s follow up to 1992’s Truth And Beauty, the Mercury-nominated Head Like A Rock . . .

It’s a bit of an epic, you see, Head Like A Rock, with ten songs averaging six minutes each, all (as their author has noted) attacking the big issues. The standout is the opener, an expansive Neil Young-esque trawl through Ian’s life and career, the aforementioned ‘Fire Inside My Soul’ (the best bit is the description of his first tour across America with his Liverpudlian old band the Icicle Works – “Started out in Sausalito/They said ‘You talk just like the Beatles!’/Listenin’ to the Flying Burritos/Got a great big hit/And a Fire Inside My Soul.”) It is a fine song in its own right, but Ian won’t kill me if I suggest that what makes it that little bit special is the beautiful noise of none other than Crazy Horse, whom he convinced to play on three other songs on the record also. So, how does someone whose records don’t get released in the USA swing that, then?

“I had the bollocks,” he booms. “No-one else asked them and I thought ‘I’ll give it a go’, and they weren’t working with Neil so it worked out well.

“Actually,” a thought strikes him, “I got a bit of a tingle the other day because Neil played a Bridge benefit in San Francisco and it was the first time they’d played together since the sessions for Head Like A Rock. Anyway, getting together with Crazy Horse, it was our little trick, a way of getting some attention. Q gave us three pages because of the Crazy Horse thing. The inkies are bastards, though, didn’t give us a thing.”

Well of course they didn’t, I tell him. They have to, by law, devote seventy pages per issue to Oasis, didn’t you know? This sets him off. “Fuckin’ Oasis! Twats! The Surrogate Stones Roses! Jesus!” Then, vitriol spewed, he proceeds to dish some dirt. Goody.

“Noel Gallagher (Oasis’ guitarist and songwriter) came to a gig I was doing with Crazy Horse, he came backstage and he was pissing in his pants! He was terrified! So he was supposed to come up for one song and five minutes before he comes on, he’s going ‘No. I’m not goin’ on. I’m not.’ So I said “Come on! It’s only A minor and G! Come on!’ And he says ‘Are you sure? It doesn’t go to D or anything?’ (laughs) So he came out and he stood at the side of the stage, shaking! And of course in every interview since then he’s been on about it. ‘I WAS ON STAGE WITH CRAZY HORSE!!!’ Nothing about me, of course. The twat.”

But it’s not as it seems. Ian McNabb is not envious of whippersnappers such as Oasis and their overhyped (and, admittedly, very rich and pleasantly stoned) ilk. This much is obvious if you lend even half an ear to Head Like A Rock, the most relentlessly cheerful record ever made by someone who wasn’t eight miles high at the time, with lines like “And I still get excited by the silliest things/I can’t help myself smiling when the birdies sing.” (from ‘Still Got The Fever’). And anyway, if he wants to compare himself to anyone, it should be to peers of his like U2 and old buddies REM (at least they were buddies, and Ian stayed with them in Athens a number of times, “until Michael got weird.” Icicle Works shudda bin contenders; they weren’t. But this is not a bitter man.

“No, I don’t think like that. I don’t think you can. I don’t think you can live like that. Anyway,” he grins, “I can’t imagine what it must be like to be successful. It must be fantastic!! ’Cos I’m not successful, and I’ve got a great life! I make records and sing and meet my heroes. And I haven’t made it!”

In fact, truth be told, he’s a little worried about the havoc that success might wreak on his most prized possession, his Muse. As he says, “I’ve been doing this since I was fifteen and now I’m, what, thirty-four in November, and ever since then I’ve always thought in terms of . . . The Struggle! Mein Kampf! (laughs) And I don’t know what I’d do if I got big and didn’t have to struggle anymore. I’d be off in my villa playing golf on my yacht and having a great time and then some guy’s come up and go ‘Alright Ian, gonna write us a new album, then?’ And what’d I write about?”

Essentially, his is the archetypal rock ’n’ roll fear of turning into your heroes (after they got crap). “Springsteen hasn’t released a good record since 1973 – OK 1975, and ‘Philadelphia’ was alright. Van Morrison is in it for the money now! Hymns To The Silence had some great songs on it, it would’ve made a fantastic single album but he put out a double because they sell for £22 instead of £14. REM haven’t been any good since Reckoning. Monster is shite. Well,” he falters momentarily, “I haven’t actually heard Monster yet but I’m told it’s shite. Have you heard it? Is it?”

It’s shite-ish, I suppose. But hang on, Mr-I-Played-With-Crazy-Horse-Amn’t-I-Cool-McNabb, what about Neil? He still rocks, as it were. After twenty-five years of superstardom? Not bad, eh?

“Yeah. It’s amazing to me that he’s still hungry. I mean he’s not, he can’t be! But he sounds like he is. Still, even with Neil, his last classic song was ‘Rockin’ In The Free World’, and that was, like, 1989 or something. And Sleeps With Angels isn’t brilliant. My record’s way, way better than it.”

Not a popular opinion, but one that the Mercury judges possibly share, as they deemed him worthy of fourth place in this year’s competition, behind only the might of Blur, Pulp and, well, M-People. Which is probably a nice feeling, though blowing the £25,000 first prize on a holiday in the Caribbean would, I’d imagine, have been nicer. So does it mean anything?

“Not really. I’m not going to knock it. Everyone knocks the Mercury Awards but I normally sell ten thousand copies of each record and with the Mercury thing, this one has sold seventeen so I’m not going to be nasty about it. It doesn’t mean much. I have a plaque on my telly now that says I made a good record but I don’t always believe it. Sometimes I think I’m rubbish,” he says, in an abrupt about-turn from two paragraphs ago. “It’s part of the insecurity of being an artist, of making something from nothing. You’re never convinced that you’re any good.

“Still,” he continues, returning to form, “I’m fuckin’ miles better than everybody else . . .”

That’s what we like to hear, Ian. Long may you run.