This is the happiest night of my life. Maybe that says something about my life and its perpetual, terminal adolescence. But there we are. I’m sitting in a dank basement rehearsal studio in one of those godforsaken, flyblown outposts of west London, perched on a chair with a can of Stella and a cigarette while, 2ft away from me, a band are playing through scratchy Peavey practice amps – and I’m in awe, a kid again. And so this article wholly eschews any notion of objectivity because, where this band are concerned, I have none. The band are the Only Ones – and there’s a twist in the tale.

Listen; we all cleave desperately and maybe pathetically to the music we liked when we were 16 or 17 years old, and I would guess this is true about my affection, undimmed these past 27 years, for the wildly diffuse quartet of individuals standing before me right now, running through a song that takes me back to a time when my hair stood up on end like the bristles on a lavatory brush, hardened into keratin wire by my girlfriend’s hairspray, pure filth and the dictates of fashion. Thing is, though, the ghost of the Only Ones also skitters through almost everything I have liked ever since, from the left-field beauty of Sparklehorse to the cool druggy rumble of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and almost every young, troublesome Brit guitar band on the make, from the Libertines to the Others.

The Only Ones are now considered almost unfeasibly seminal; the Only Ones, everybody is agreed, were way ahead of their time and unequalled in their influence. Could have told you that would be the case back in 1978. But you wouldn’t listen, would you? That’s one of the pleasures of adoring this band, the self-affirming knowledge that one was right all along, and almost everyone else was wrong.

A song, executed with pristine grace and sung with remarkable conviction by the physically pretty, frail Peter Perrett, comes to an end. “What do you want now?” asks the guitarist, John Perry. This is wonderful, my own personal live jukebox, I think, swilling my beer. We’re four songs in. I wonder, if I should dare ask for ... well, um, I would hate to be obvious, but, you know, it isa great song, I mumble ...

“Go on, surprise us, why don’t you?” says Perry, sighing. And Perrett smiles, says “Why not?”, and begins the ominous, chugging four-chord progression that will soon herald all sorts of prepunk, punk and postpunk aural mayhem and sublime melody and romance, wrapped up in three minutes or so. It’s replete with a most unpunk, literate and eviscerating guitar solo, and it’s the song that figures in every connoisseur’s list of the best rock singles ever, and was recently described by one online encyclopedia as the best rock single ever recorded.

Another Girl, Another Planet never graced the higher reaches of the charts; nothing the Only Ones recorded remotely managed to do that. It has been covered 100 times, and been appropriated by Vodafone for an advert. But at the time, nothing. The problem is, the Only Ones were either wilfully before, ahead or in dissonant collision with their times, or more likely all three. They made two wonderful albums – the second one of the best I have ever heard – then, disconsolately, a thin and pressured third album as their label, CBS, demanded nice pop hits and gave them a producer with a tin ear who later (as Perry put it, down the pub later) “worked with people like Bros ... and Duran Duran”.

The record label couldn’t let them just grow; it wanted them to be something they were not. And even that would have been sort of okay, but the thing CBS wanted them to be wasn’t very marketable either. In the early 1980s, in a blizzard of class-A drugs, they disbanded, and have not been heard of since – apart from in encomiums and awestruck tributes from current bands and journalists, loaded with the sense of their unfulfilled potential and, maybe, with nostalgia.

Listening to them in this Acton hole, they sound quite now. For all of us, back in 1977, who yearned for something cleverer from punk (“Why shouldn’t you want that?” Perry asks), this strange, edgy merging of punk and Dylan, and perhaps also the Velvet Underground and Neil Young, did the job. We had what we wanted – but it took the rest of the world 29 years to agree. Which is why they have done that unforgivable thing – reformed – for some gigs next month. Get your tickets quick.

That twist in the tale: when the band finish their set, I tell them that we’ve met before, and leave £50 on the table as a clue as to how and why. I was in a band too, back in 1978 – a bunch of kids aged 16 and 17 who maybe aspired to be the Only Ones (I wore a full-length fur coat, just like Perrett did), but rather lacked the musical accomplishment. We supported them in a gig at the Coatham Bowl, in Redcar – and, unlike the other punk bands we supported back then, they were nice to us. Perry did my girlfriend’s English homework backstage, spotting that the text she had to identify was from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. We’d have expected that from the Only Ones – the guitarist to be well read. But later we had a guitar nicked from backstage by some opportunist, and the Only Ones gave us £50 towards the cost of a new one, because they felt sorry for us. It was a sweet gesture from a cool, muso, skint band. They said pay it back one day when you can – and so that’s what I did, more than a quarter of a century later, in Acton, regrettably minus the interest.

There is a sudden gasp of incredulity from the band around me. They remembered the gig well; they even remembered my band. “You were just these young, really eager, nice punk kids,” says Perrett, which is probably about the measure of it. “What a wonderful story,” says Alan Mair, the bass-player. Mair is the clever, undruggy one, the one who hated the close proximity of heroin back in 1978, just as the rest of the band eschew it now (sort of).

That night in 1978 was the second happiest evening of my life: supporting my favourite band in a local venue, getting to share the beer and cigarettes of individuals I considered slightly more evolved than the merely human. The notion that maybe I could be as good as that one day only enhanced my pleasure. If it wasn’t quite as good as it was this time around, it’s because, back then, I hadn’t resigned myself to watching from the sidelines as other people did stuff, which is the job of the journalist; I assumed, naturally, that I’d be doing stuff too, rather than watching. Now that I’ve become accustomed to my role, the pleasure is all the greater.

Later, we go down the pub, then Perrett, a Forest Hill boy, kindly drives me back to familiar south London. Why reform, I ask them. You have pretty much the perfect legacy of a rock band – hugely critically acclaimed and adored, a whole cavalcade of younger bands paying homage. No money, obviously, but then you’re not going to get much of that this time around, are you? All you can do now is slightly tarnish the whole thing.

“Yes, that’s right, to a degree,” says Perry – a humorous, clever man who has filled the intervening years by writing well-regarded books and doing session stuff here and there. “We did think about that.” “But I feel like the Only Ones is unfinished business,” says Mair. He’s right about that, I reckon. What will be the limit of it all, I ask. For the moment, they’re contenting themselves with playing a bunch of gigs featuring old material, but a session for the BBC last week showcased a new song. And what of the drugs, I ask – especially – Perrett, whose astonishing proclivities have left him somewhat weaker than your average fiftysomething. Perrett had today’s shiny new drug monkey, Pete Doherty, living at his house for a few months, but he was not hugely impressed.

If you had your time over, would you live a good Christian life, Peter? “Yes, until the age of 50,” he says. “Imagine how good it would be if you were healthy while you were young, then had class-A drugs to look forward to when you reached 50.”

So, there you are. The Only Ones are playing somewhere near your house in the next few weeks, following a triumphant redebut at the All Tomorrow’s Parties bash in Minehead. And Perrett’s sons, Jamie and Peter, guard the flame, sort of, in their band Love Minus Zero: Dylan plus punk plus ska. Must be in the genes.

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