V-Twin: Our friends eclectic

'The Blues Is a Minefield', V-Twin's excellent debut album, has just about everything in the mix: jazz funerals, faux soul, even rock'n'roll. As do the stories their front man, Jason McPhail, tells Steve Jelbert

"I've got a great story, right," says Jason McPhail, the 29-year-old front man of the wonderful, chaotic and underrated V-Twin, from Glasgow. Jason uses that phrase a lot, for, while many musicians spend years aping the manners and music of their predecessors, he's actually gone out and befriended his inspirations. This time he's recounting how his pal Dan Penn, the writer of classics such as "Dark End Of The Street" and "Do Right Woman", found himself in a photo taken at Elvis Presley's great 1969 Memphis sessions.

"Elvis is holding a bass, and Dan's at the side, wearing sunglasses and smoking. I said to Dan, 'That's you with the King, man. Did you speak to him?' He goes, 'Who?' I said, 'The King.' He says, 'Do you want to know what I said to the King?' Duh! 'Yeah.' 'Nothing. I didn't say anything to the King. I figured I'd just stand at the side in shades and try to out-Elvis him.'

"I let some time pass, to try to take in the image [which can be seen in Peter Guralnick's musical history Sweet Soul Music]. Then I asked, 'Did you hear him sing?' 'Who?' 'The King.' " Before this fine pub anecdote goes too far, it's worth pointing out that Elvis was recording a little tune called "Suspicious Minds" at the time.

McPhail met Penn when, as a teenager inspired by Guralnick's description of him as "the secret hero of this book", he decided with a friend to promote a show in their home town. "It was the sheer naivety that made it work. I phoned him and said I was 19 and had never promoted a show," he recalls, still surprised at his own audacity.

Through Penn, he even got to know Alex Chilton, once of the Box Tops and Big Star. Cue incredible account, heard at first hand, of how a young Chilton, who topped the US charts with the enduring "The Letter", found himself staying with the Beach Boys Dennis and Carl Wilson. Dennis's house-guest – one Charles Manson – was not best pleased when the 16-year-old pop sensation forgot the milk when buying groceries. "Alex thought, 'Sod this. I'm going back to Memphis,' " says McPhail.

Despite the wealth of tales they can tell about the great and dissolute, V-Twin are no nostalgia outfit. Their excellent debut album, The Blues Is a Minefield, is anything but retro. Often built from curiously constructed samples and featuring any number of unusual sounds ("I love timbales," says McPhail – "if you're from Glasgow, where it rains all the time, what you want is a bit of Trinidad in your living-room"), it's endlessly eclectic. Switching from down-the-line rock'n'roll, such as the hilarious dissection of band politics in "Call a Meeting", to the jazz funeral march of "The Emperor Is Dead" (dedicated to the Louisiana legend Ernie K-Doe, yet another chum), to the hysterical stomping faux soul of the much-reissued single "Delinquency", it's a real treat. McPhail's raw howl will never win the approval of Pete Waterman, but so what?

It certainly wasn't written on acoustic guitars. "I find now that the best way is to start with something abstract until you end up with something finished, or else you just end up with 10 versions of the same song," says McPhail. Not that he's above musical thievery. The horn parts on their new single, "Swissair", are purloined from the Psychedelic Furs' "Pretty in Pink". ("You're the first person to notice that," he concedes.)

McPhail has always been on the cutting edge of technology. "I was forced to do two things when I was six. One was to learn German; the other was to play the home organ. My father was convinced that was the way music was going to go," he says. " 'Everything's going to be in one box. Bass, drums, melody, chords,' he said. It was just torture." He demonstrates his hard-learnt technique, including operating the bass pedals and the lost art of triggering drum patterns with your knees. Luckily, he inherited an understanding of jazz and, of course, keyboard skills.

V-Twin took their time making the first album. The band, whose core members are McPhail, the drummer Michael McGaughrin and the guitarists Bobby Kildea (also bassist for the less abrasive Belle and Sebastian), Dino – or, sometimes, Donald – Bardot and Michael Kasparis, have been a fixture for half a decade now on Glasgow's scene. Sometimes it appears that their adventures come before the music.

A trip to New Orleans inspired much of the debut album. They were invited by a wealthy friend possibly unaware that a gaggle of Glaswegians set on pleasure might not make ideal companions for a man in rehab. This story has the lot: an armed stalker, more guns, a gorgeous kleptomaniac junkie, hard drugs, convulsions and many, many bottles of extremely fine wine.

"A lot of our album had to do with that whole thing. 'Call a Meeting' was about trying to sack Michael, the drummer. At that point he had to go. He nearly got me shot," McPhail reminisces. "We're good friends again now." That's nice.

Recently, the band have picked up a prominent supporter. To the disbelief of many, the Rolling Stones' legendary Sixties manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, turned up to see them at a recent show in London.

"It's bizarre, isn't it?" laughs McPhail. "I picked his name out of an e-mail subheader, and when we eventually had finished copies of the LP, I couldn't sleep one night. So I shot him off a letter. He got back to me and said, 'Send me one if you want, but I'm in Bogota.' [Oldham has long been domiciled in South America with his wife.]

"It went, and he came back enthusing about it when, to be honest, no one else was. He gave us a breakdown, track by track, which was really cool," says McPhail. But not as cool as his appearance at a recent show in Camden, north London. "Fifteen minutes before we went on, Oldham walked through the door. Honestly, it had crossed my mind that he might come over. We were tuning the guitars, and I told the band, 'Andrew Oldham's here', and everyone went, 'What?' Then we played the worst gig we've ever played. He'd come all the way from South America to witness this complete, shameful shambles." He laughs again.

Oldham was forgiving enough to spend a week working with the band. Now he's talking about signing them. It's all more material for McPhail. God knows, if his band fails, he can always write a book.

'The Blues Is a Minefield' is out now on Domino. The single 'Swissair' is released on 16 December