Paul Westerberg: Completely irreplaceable

The Replacements were famous for their awfulness on stage, often forgetting the lyrics and attacking their fans. Yet, 10 years on, their singer-songwriter Paul Westerberg still draws a fervent crowd. Fiona Sturges finds out why

It's a rainy day in Philadelphia. Several hundred sodden individuals, most of them paunchy men in their late thirties, are crammed into a record shop in the centre of town. The show hasn't started yet, but the windows are already steamed up – the anticipation is palpable. Paul Westerberg, the man they've come to see, is sitting in the manager's office, having a final few puffs on his cigar. It's hardly the most glamorous setting for a former rebel icon, but this is just how the former singer and songwriter of the Eighties hellraisers the Replacements wants it. Small crowds, minimum fuss.

The hour-long acoustic show is typically shambolic, with Westerberg struggling to remember the words to his songs and playing the goofball in between tracks. But there are also moments of pure magic, when he focuses on the job in hand and sings with such feeling, it's as if the words have only just occurred to him. While it's tempting to attribute Westerberg's erratic performances to the years of hard drinking, the reality is that it's always been like that.

"I've never been one to remember my own songs," he tells me later in his measured, Jack Nicholson drawl. "I learned to over-compensate for not remembering the words by playing it in a different style or making up a line on the spot. It's dramatic because you don't know if I'm going to fall on my face or not."

After the show come the autographs, and we're not talking just three or four. The queue snakes in and out of the CD racks, down the stairs and out of the door. Over the course of two and a half hours, Westerberg talks to around 400 panting fans, each of them clutching old Replacements records to be signed. Some are rendered speechless in his presence while others talk incessantly, asking questions such as "Do you remember the time when you dropped your plectrum in the Bowery Ballroom in spring 1982?" without a trace of irony. Westerberg's patience is remarkable.

It's around 11pm when the last punter walks out of the shop cradling his signed record and the staff finally lock the doors. As Westerberg gets up creakily from his chair and lights another cigar, I ask him exactly what drives him to do this.

"The thought that each one could be the last," he whispers hoarsely.

An hour later, a dazed Westerberg is sitting in an armchair in his hotel room, cigar in hand, mulling over the last few hours.

"There's always a guy who thinks he's my brother because we had a beer 10 years ago," he says. "I'm sitting there saying goodbye to this one guy, and trying to look at the next. I look up at them all for a split second, and they lay all this heavy stuff on me – 'you've got me through this' and 'you changed my life'. I've almost turned my mind off from hearing that. You know, one man said to me, 'Would you wait in this line for anyone? I said, 'Absolutely not. Not for anyone.'"

Yet such is the adulation that Westerberg inspires that they keep on coming. Two-thirds of the way through his tour he estimates that he's already shaken hands with at least 4,000 fans, and there's plenty more to come. "Most of them want to hear about the Replacements rather than what I'm doing now," he says quietly. "During the shows they're shouting out for all these songs that I can't even begin to remember. I have to ask them what the words are."

The Replacements began life in Minneapolis in 1980, springing out of the same post-punk scene that spawned Hüsker Dü. That this rowdy bunch of delinquents became one of the most celebrated hardcore rock bands in the country, inspiring a whole generation of bands including Nirvana, Soul Asylum and the Goo Goo Dolls, can be attributed to Westerberg's peerless songwriting skills. Yet major success always managed to elude them. What went wrong?

"Well, we did suck most of the time," drawls Westerberg. "But we were also capable of being the best in the world, and that was the strange dichotomy. That we could go for it on stage without any kind of safety net, fall flat on our faces and still be brilliant."

It's true that when it came to live performance, the Replacements were famed for their awfulness. They were forever getting caught up in scuffles with disgruntled fans outside their own gigs. This was a band who lived the rock'n'roll lifestyle to the letter. But as their hard drinking turned into alcoholism and their drug-taking became routine, their musical output became increasingly erratic and the band slowly disintegrated. In 1991 they finally split; four years later the guitarist Bob Stinson died from a drug overdose.

At 42, Westerberg now lives a quiet life and hasn't had a drink in over a decade. Some things don't change, however. Just two weeks ago, at a San Francisco show , he got into a fracas with a man in the audience. "The guy was heckling me so I just jumped off the stage and waded in," he says with a quiet chuckle. "I grabbed him by his collar but, instead of punching him, I made out as if I was going to kiss him. I think that kinda threw him off balance."

Six years ago Westerberg vowed he would never play another show, "because it was too easy and it wasn't fun any more." He decided on this latest string of shows, he says, to put an end to rumours that he was drinking again, that he was sick and that he couldn't leave the house.

"It's true that I will stay indoors for a few days at a time," he reflects. "I also take a lot of medication. But don't get the idea that this is me facing my fear. I've put my head in the lion's mouth a hundred times before. I've never enjoyed the anxiety of being up there but I guess I needed to see human beings again."

It's at this point in the conversation that I realise that Westerberg has had nothing positive to say about his career. The tortured artist role may be a cliché, but in his case it's apt. Does he get any pleasure at all from what he does?

"I don't know," he ponders. "I suppose it's like being a junkie. Just before you actually do it the pleasure's there and once it goes in your arm it doesn't mean a thing. The moment a song's born in my head I'm happy to be alive, I have a reason to be here. The thought of re-doing it, marketing it, going out and playing it for people seems a little foreign to me."

Westerberg is about to release his fourth solo album, Stereo. His first two solo efforts were mauled by critics, and despite the fact that his last, Suicaine Gratifaction, was critically acclaimed, it did little commercially. "You get used to it after a while," he sighs. "Worse than hearing 'I didn't like your last record' is hearing 'When are you going to make a record?' – when you just released one. That really hurts."

Stereo is as raw and brilliant a piece of work as he's ever made. In parts, it even sounds as if he's enjoying himself ("Oh come on, let's not go that far," he cackles). On the sleeve notes he writes: "What you have here are songs written and recorded at home over a two-year period. Cut mostly live in the middle of the night, no effort was made to fix what some may deem as mistakes: tape running out, fluffed lyrics, flat notes, extraneous noises etc. Many were written as the tape rolled."

On the first part of Stereo, a double album, Westerberg is in intimate singer-songwriter mode. The second, Mono, brims with the kind of low-grade, scuzzy rock'n'roll not heard since, well, the Replacements.

Now, 11 years after they called it quits, there are rumours of a reunion. Can this be true?

"Probably not, I really don't know," says Westerberg. "I don't even know if I'd want to. I always said I would do it as soon as no one else wanted us to. The smartest move we ever made was to pull the plug. I think that maybe it's best to just let the legend grow."

'Stereo' is out on 3 June on B-Unique/ Vagrant records