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On the eve of the release of the New York Dolls’ fourth studio album, ’Cause I Sez So, the band’s vocalist, David Johansen, sounds pleasantly mystified. Much as he’s enjoying it, this Dolls reunion, which began five years ago and has since spawned two albums of new material and any number of shows — with a second European tour imminent — was not what he originally planned. “If I had known I would still be doing it now, I probably wouldn’t have agreed to do it in the first place,” the 59-year-old chuckles.

He explains that when Morrissey phoned to ask him to re-form his seminal glam-punk outfit for the 2004 Meltdown festival, he agreed precisely because the gig came with no strings attached and wouldn’t interfere with his busy solo career. “I figured Meltdown would be a one-off. It would be blithe and easy, unlike all the other offers I’d had, which always sounded like a lot of work. I thought we’d have a few laughs, stay in a nice hotel, fly back home and forget about it.”

In the event, Johansen was thrilled by the Dolls’ first performance in 27 years. Even though the band were missing the guitarist Johnny Thunders and the drummer Jerry Nolan, both of whom died in the early 1990s, they lit up Festival Hall. “England always got the Dolls, and that show was bordering on euphoria. I’ve done a lot of stuff solo, but there’s something about being in a band. You relinquish control and it opens up a new space. It’s kinda like proper rock’n’roll should sound like,” Johansen concludes. “Full of happy accidents.”

The New York Dolls have been involved in plenty of accidents over the years, few of them happy. Soon after they formed in lower Manhattan in 1971, their first drummer, Billy Murcia, suffocated following an overdose. Of their classic five-man line-up from the 1970s, only Johansen and the guitarist Sylvain Sylvain have survived. Arthur “Killer” Kane became the third Doll to die prematurely when he succumbed to leukaemia in 2004, shortly after the Meltdown show.

Their reputation hasn’t had it easy, either. Though celebrated locally as the androgynous poster boys of the East Village scene — a loose coalition of “artists, drag queens and revolutionaries”, according to Johansen — the early Dolls didn’t fit the wider world’s idea of glam rock. Their raucously witty vignettes of New York life had less impact than the lipstick logo and lurid stagewear.

Unfortunately, the band’s galloping drink and drug habits got rather tangled up in their art, with chaotic results. “When we made our first record, there were too many people around us drinking beer, doing whatever. We were impetuous, and soon we were all like, ‘F*** you!’ ”

After their second album, 1974’s Too Much Too Soon, sold poorly, the Dolls were dropped by their record label. Living on a combined income of about $200 a week, with some expensive habits to maintain, they fell in with an expatriate English clothes designer, Malcolm McLaren. “We asked Malcolm to make some clothes for us, and I think he booked a couple of gigs. But he never really managed us. He just used our phone.”

This is not the way McLaren tells it, of course. He went on to use his time with the Dolls as a calling card in his propagation of the doctrine of punk rock — a genre that Johansen, one of its supposed godfathers, heartily dislikes. “I can’t stand the term ‘punk band’. It sounds like marching music. With punk, you’re painting yourself into a corner. I like music that swings.”

Johansen shut down the Dolls in 1977 and embarked on a remarkably varied solo career. Since growing up as a blues nut in the 1960s, old music has been his first love. Over 14 albums, he has appeared in a number of guises, from the lounge crooner Buster Poindexter to an alt-country interpreter of the American ballads collected in the interwar years by the late Harry Smith. For the past five years, he has also hosted a weekly show for the New York satellite-radio broadcaster Sirius XM, in which he intersperses his track selections with pronouncements he describes as “short, metaphysical and thought-provoking”.

The latest phase of the new New York Dolls found them reunited in January with Todd Rundgren, the producer of their first album. The intention was to avoid the glossy sound of their 2006 comeback,

One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. “We just wanted something less processed, more raw,” Johansen explains.

On ’Cause I Sez So, Rundgren and the band have done a great job both of re-creating the hell-for-leather boogie of the old band — on the opening title track and the closer — and of wandering off in new directions in between. The real head-turner is a version of their 1973 classic Trash, which appears here with a reggae beat and gently strummed guitars.

According to Johansen, this was partly inspired by their surroundings — Rundgren now works out of a studio at his home in Hawaii — and partly by the passage of time. “Trash sounds very Hawaiian to me on this record, but I’ve always thought of it as quite a romantic love song. It grooves more now because this arrangement has got more empty space, more holes. And I can certainly relate to that.”

’Cause I Sez So is released by Atco on May 4; the band will perform on Later... with Jools Holland on May 12 and May 15, on BBC2; nydolls.org

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