Oh, what a jolly hour we spent in the company of Nigel Tufnel, David St Hubbins and Derek Smalls last Saturday on Radio 2. Spinal Tap are back, indeed Back from the Dead — the title of their latest fab (OK, terrible: it’s mostly the old songs revisited) waxing — and touring. They play Glasto on Saturday and Wembley Arena next Tuesday on their One-Night World Tour. And Peter Curran was delighted to meet the boys to talk about the album, the gigs and their rollercoaster ride on fame’s treadmill these past 25 years.

Of course, the Tap are not real, although they play gigs and record albums. They are a massive, wonderful spoof of rock that we all know is a spoof and yet buy into as though it weren’t. And if we gaze too hard into the illusion, as the boys might say, it shatters.

Curran asked about the album title. They hadn’t, they admitted, been literally dead, more “left for dead”. But they couldn’t call the album Back from Left for Dead because that sounded like an AA map. He also talked to them individually. Smalls, asked to expand on his comment in the 1984 documentary This is Spinal Tap, that he was “the lukewarm water” between the fire and ice of St Hubbins and Tufnel, said it was his role, as the bass player, to be “not the genius. I’m fine with that. I could have learnt to play two more strings if I wanted to.”

St Hubbins reminisced about his childhood, and being taken on holiday to a small town near Brighton called Fisting. “It didn’t have a beach, the main street just sort of ended in the sea. And we used to go and play on the tarmac.” Sadly, his six-year project to produce a new version of Carmen — same Berlioz music, but with scat vocals — had foundered because scat is improvised, and thus accrues no writer’s royalties.

Tufnel, not an easy interviewee, revealed that he had spent his time breeding miniature horses for racing, but being stymied because he couldn’t find any jockeys 2ft tall. He also went into some detail about one of his many inventions, the amplifier capo — “Like the little thing you put around guitar strings to change the key?” Curran asked. “It’s not a little thing,” said the permanently miffed Tufnel. “It’s a device.”

Curran plucked up the courage to broach the subject of Jeanine Pettibone, St Hubbins’s girlfriend, whose interference in the band led Tufnel to leave it at the end of This is Spinal Tap. But Tufnel wasn’t having any of it: “You’re not going to trap me into that, calling her a bitch or something.” St Hubbins was prepared to talk about her, though. They’d almost married, but an astrologer said they shouldn’t during a year with a nine in it. But by 2000 they weren’t talking any more.

The only jarring note (besides the music) was struck by the real-life pop stars (Glen Tilbrook, Jarvis Cocker, Suggs) who popped up to pretend to have had encounters with the Tap. They lived within the joke, but told it badly. Still, in retrospect, that was churlish — we all want to be part of the Tap experience and they, the lucky buggers, got the chance to do it.

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