D’yer mind? I’ll be out in five minutes. I’m just drying me hair.” This being Ian “Mac” McCulloch, the frontman of Echo & the Bunnymen, the word hair is pronounced “urr”, Cilla-style.

We’re in Mac time now. A slight delay has stretched out to an hour, over which time our arranged interview location has been changed. The Bunnymen’s 49-year-old singer, feeling “fragile” apparently, would rather not make the two-minute walk to the group’s Parr Street Studios in Anfield, so he has installed himself in a flat belonging to one of the studio employees. Oasis are in town tonight, playing the same venue where, next month, Echo & the Bunnymen will play Ocean Rain — the album that comes free with today’s Times. And McCulloch, whose records Noel Gallagher bought as a teenager, isn’t planning to walk through the doors of the Liverpool Echo Arena looking like anything less than local rock royalty.

It’s all very different from Will Sergeant’s arrival, four hours earlier. The other original Bunnyman, now 50, shuffles in and removes a CD of Sixties psych obscurities from a plastic bag. “I just bought this,” he says, excited about the prospect of playing it. He bought his first album, at 12, from the late Brian Epstein’s NEMS store in Liverpool — “a Velvet Underground compilation, because I liked the cover. A dream start really.”

In 2008, three decades after they emerged alongside the Teardrop Explodes and Wah! in a Mersey pop renaissance, the Bunnymen are still a going concern. The pair, both local boys, first met outside the ladies’ toilet of the legendary punk club Eric’s in 1978. The band was born after Sergeant spotted a lone McCulloch at a birthday party. When asked what he was waiting for the singer is reported to have replied, “The gift of vision”, a sardonic reference to his chronic shortsightedness.

Today it’s hard to gauge exactly what McCulloch and Sergeant ever had in common. Sergeant lives a life of relative seclusion “out near Ormskirk”, disturbing only the cows outside with his fondness for albums by Neu! and Kraftwerk. His shambling schoolboy gait does nothing to suggest that, before Johnny Marr and John Squire, Sergeant was the guitarist that post-punk indie boys wanted to be. By contrast, starry arrogance is now so hardwired into McCulloch’s persona that even he seems amused by the cocksure remarks leaving his mouth: “When Glasvegas supported us, Will goes: ‘Did you get the album?’ I said: ‘I didn’t need to — I invented them.’ ”

But whatever may separate them, McCulloch and Sergeant take pride in what they achieved together, in particular Ocean Rain, the album (their fourth) that’s regarded as their masterpiece. This month it receives an expanded reissue.

It was one of those rare instances where a band’s lofty delusions of grandeur deliver a record well in excess of its constituent parts. Beyond the hit records – Killing Moon, Silver, Seven Seas – Ocean Rain mapped out a musical landscape of crystalline otherworldliness. Unlikely tour bus staples – tapes of bala-laika music and classical pieces by the Red Army Orchestra – informed the baroque Arctic pop of The Yo-Yo Man, the galloping orchestral melancholia of Nocturnal Me and, of course, Thorn of Crowns –a song whose hook went “C-c-c-cucum-ber, c-c-c-c-cabbage” – proof that McCulloch could induce goosebumps even by singing the most preposterous things.

“I have to admit,” McCulloch says, “that I hadn’t played the album for 20 years. When I did, the idea of singing those words presented a few problems.” He says that before performing the album at the Albert Hall last month he considered changing some of the lyrics, but Sergeant dissuaded him. “The problem,” he continues, “is that some of it was meant to be funny. But you can’t always tell.”

It’s hard to look back at Echo & the Bunnymen’s transformation from practitioners of wintry psych-pop gems to bona fide pop stars without feeling a twinge of sadness about what happened next. Ocean Rain was good enough not to make a mockery of advertising that trumpeted it as “The Greatest Album Ever Made”. This was surely the point at which world domination beckoned.

At the time, McCulloch’s bête noire was Bono. Nary an interview went by without the Bunnymen singer deflating the U2 frontman’s onstage exploits. With hindsight, McCulloch says he was never “a contender in the way Bono was”. He realised as much when U2 supported Echo & the Bunnymen in 1983.

“I was watching them in the sound-check and he thanked the f***ing crowd. And there was no crowd there! It was a f***ing soundcheck! I thought: ‘This fellow’s got it sewn up.’ ” Between Ocean Rain and the Bunnymen’s eponymous fifth album in 1987 they still graced music paper covers but, in a post-Live Aid world, all expectations of what a guitar band could achieve had changed. “I remember our A&R man at Warners, Rob Dickens, coming into the studio and playing us a song from the Peter Gabriel album,” Sergeant says. “Big Time it was, with all these horrible synthesized brass parts, and he said: ‘This is what you need to sound like.’ ”

Built into the story of almost any successful band is an inevitable reality: it’s hard to grow up without growing apart. Even before their drummer Pete De Freitas died in a motorcycle accident in 1989, the Bunnymen were in disarray. After his father died suddenly in 1988, McCulloch embarked on a solo career and Sergeant signed the singer Noel Burke for an album that, inevitably, stiffed. “Was there an element of ‘I’ll show him?’ Yes,” Sergeant says. “But if Mac’s solo career had taken off, he would have jumped ship for good. So it all evened out, really.”

The formal rapproachement happened in 1994, when Sergeant and McCulloch regrouped as Electrafixion before reverting to the Bunnymen two years later. In terms of years, the Bunnymen’s second life has eclipsed their first more than twice over. Chris Martin has cited McCulloch as a key influence on his vocal style. Add that to the obvious debt owed by Arcade Fire and British Sea Power, and the band’s stock is on the rise. With that in mind, I ask the two if it feels better now than before.

“Definitely,” McCulloch says, “because we’ve got more great songs and enough time has elapsed for the measure of our greatness to be comprehended.”

And Sergeant? How does he feel about the new Bunnymen album, due in the spring? “Well, you know . . . it’s mostly Mac’s songs. I just plough through it. It’s really difficult to get any ideas through. Mac just takes over, really.”

Three hours later and two minutes away from the studio, a wired McCulloch is being every inch the rock Tigger to Sergeant’s floppy-maned Eeyore. McCulloch is planning a solo album. “I’ve written a song called Get the Chicken In,” he says. “I had a roast chicken. It was one of those where you cook the bag itself, and I was singing: ‘Get the chicken in, get the chicken out.’ Then there’s another song, Little Dwarf, which is a ballad.”

Having hit his stride, there’s every chance he might keep them coming, but the clock on the wall reminds us that, over by the docks, Oasis are due onstage in half an hour. McCulloch ambles over to the mirror. “I’d see you to the front door,” he says, “but I can’t go out with me ’urr looking like this.”

Ocean Rain is reissued on Oct 13 by Rhino Records. The band play Liverpool Echo Arena (0844 8000400) on Nov 27 2008

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