'I just kept cool, you know. Travelled. Did a couple of porn movies'

There is within British journalism a cruel - if not unusual - practice known as monstering. The dark art of deliberately exposing your interviewees to contempt or ridicule, it's also known as putting the boot in, getting the hatchet out, shafting, hammering or doing a number on.

Enter Sigue Sigue Sputnik. There was a time (essentially three months in the spring of 1986) when that name meant something; when it meant glamour, controversy and the most happening-of-the-moment rock band in the country. Since then, of course, it's come to mean something else.

For anyone acquainted with the grisly mid-1980s pop scene, what Sigue Sigue Sputnik means is the red-faced sense of shame you get when you see your old school photos. It means silly haircuts, regrettable records and a group who, if they ever dared return to public life, would simply be begging for a monstering.

And in walk Tony James and Martin Degville, two thirds of the current band (cohort Neal X having absented himself), with the weary, wary look of those who have been monstered before and will - on the verge of the year's most implausible comeback - be monstered again. No, you didn't misread that. Fifteen years after their lairy sloganeering briefly set the charts alight, perhaps the most widely reviled band of their widely reviled era are asking for more. A new album, Piratespace, is lurking up the pipeline, accompanied by the hopefully-titled retrospective 21st Century Boys, and a tour of such fun-sized venues as Bedford's Esquires and The Leopard, Doncaster.

So James, an affable man of a certain age, peers out from beneath the fuchsia hair extensions balanced nervously atop his head and says: "God. You know, this is the first proper interview I've done in 10 years." And Degville, with his scrupulous goatee and loud purple suit, leans in and tells me Sigue Sigue Sputnik are back because "we were ahead of our time. Out in the rock'n'roll wilderness. So we're here on unfinished business."

Maybe Degville didn't mean to sound so melodramatic. Then again, he probably did. Back in their heyday, that kind of rampant hyperbole was Sputnik's best-known party piece. It was part of the concept, you see - concepts being profoundly important to founder member James and his then girlfriend, the throaty publicist Magenta De Vine.

Having spent the late 1970s playing bass for the punk hopefuls Generation X - led by the young Billy Idol - what James wanted for the 1980s was a "neon space gang from another planet", marrying the spirit of Elvis to the dazzling new technology of drum machines and primitive samplers. What he eventually got was a West Midlands dressmaker, Degville, as frontman, the guitarist X (nee Whitmore) and a pair of drummers called Chris Kavanagh and Ray Mayhew - now "replaced with computers" - trying to keep up with the trashily anthemic material the band knocked up in the studio.

Except the songs weren't what made them. What made them was their outlandish get-ups (a riot of exotic headgear and techno-fetishistic codpieces) and James's willingness to regale the press with tales of "designer violence" and "electric sex". Their EMI record contract earned them £1m - the first single, the definitively tinny Love Missile F1-11, went top three. And, for those few, short weeks, the band milked the industry for all it was worth, deafening fans at the Albert Hall while the tabloids ran fictitious exposés of obscene onstage antics and plots to assassinate Margaret Thatcher.

James grows misty when you mention those days: "I look back at it all incredibly fondly. It was the most fantastic time, because it was like creating this incredible movie script and living it out, scene by scene." Degville is less romantic: "Um . . . to be honest, I don't remember much of it."

He would, however, have plenty of time to try. Flaunt It, their debut LP, was released amid the now customary hullabaloo, not least concerning the advertising between its tracks ("our records sounded like adverts anyway"). Sadly, it sold in less impressive numbers than either the advertisers or EMI had bargained for. And, over the months that followed, fashion - as it does - moved on. In 1988, the belated follow-up Dress For Excess arrived, abortively produced by the pop impresarios Stock, Aitken and Waterman. Five years later, at the second-hand record shop I then worked in, we had a section entirely devoted to it, the whole rack priced at 50p.

"So," James says, "it was like we suddenly went from every journalist in the country saying this band is fantastic, this band is God's gift and Tony's so clever, he's using all of music history to create this incredible maelstrom of new, exciting rock'n'roll to," he shrugs, "we never really liked them - they're a pile of shit."

In James's lengthy account of the rise, fall and prospective rebirth of his dream project - which thuds on to my desk before I meet him - there's a section called The Lost Years. On paper, it occupies two pages. In reality, it went on rather longer. Summarily dropped from EMI, Sigue Sigue Sputnik soon became a synonym for clownish humiliation, as their personnel slunk morosely into the distance - James joining the goth icons the Sisters of Mercy, X working as a session musician and De Vine launching the yoof TV blueprint Network 7 with another of James's former sweethearts, Janet Street-Porter. And Degville? "I just kept cool, you know? Travelled. Did a couple of porn movies." Really? "Yeah. Well, one." What sort of porn? "Um . . . specialist." Specialist? "Yeah. Specialist ."

Despite spending their EMI advance "sending roadies to the supermarket in limousines", they both say money wasn't a problem. But how did it feel knowing they were pariahs, walking punchlines? "Oh, depressing," says James. "And I knew it was partly my fault. I mean, I look back at some of the interviews I did and think, 'Oh, Tone, why did you have to be such an arsehole?' So I sat in my house in Maida Vale, feeling miserable, like, 'OK, what do I do now?' " Ultimately, he returned to what he loved best. An attempted reunion in 1992 met with a predictable response. "We took some demos to the record company. They told us to fuck off."

And then he found his salvation. Because, should you ask James about the internet, his eyes take on the gleam you often find in unreconstructed Stalinists and born-again Christians. "Well, what happened was, in 95, I bought an AppleMac. And, of course, I get on the net and think I know, I'll look myself up. And suddenly 5,000 Sputnik sites appeared! From all over the world! Chile! Romania! Australia! And it was like this baby I'd had in the 80s, that had been killed by the media who helped bring it up, was suddenly alive and well and living in cyberspace . . ."

He's still going five minutes later. ". . . so I started this little site about Sputnik, and then out of nowhere I'm getting hundreds of emails saying, 'Oh, we really dig it, why don't you make another record?' So slowly we started living again! Living in cyberspace! Making records! Playing shows! Advertised in cyberspace! . . ."

While he's possibly the most zealous, James isn't quite the first 1980s trouper to reinvent himself on the net (he admits to taking his cue from Mike Peters, once of the overwrought rockers the Alarm). Yet what is odd is the nature of his fanbase - at their handful of gigs so far, he's insistent the band members have been "the only people in the place over 30. I mean, this isn't a nostalgia thing. It's not for mums and dads. These are kids of 18 that come. And they all go, 'Oh, I was too young to see you the first time, but my big brother had your record and I always loved it.' And they look like us now! They look more like me than me!"

The urge to advise parents to stop worrying about the corrosive influence of Eminem and watch out for pink hair dye in the bathroom is just too tempting. Yet, among the ranks of what James calls "the Marilyn Manson kids", his band look to have finally found their niche. I wonder uncharitably if they'll be able to get over the memory of the Albert Hall, when they're giving it some at the Leopard, and they smile benignly. "Well, I like smaller places," Degville says. "I always have. They're more," his face takes on the same expression he wore when discussing his porn film, " intimate ."

Still, you can't help questioning their motives for sticking so doggedly with both their sound - Piratespace being, at heart, a more polished update of Flaunt It - and their image. With their funny outfits and complicated hairdos, they still appear much the same band that were laughed out of existence along with so much other 1980s ephemera - the Sinclair C5, the Rubik's Cube, Pong.

James seems wounded by the comparison. "But Sputnik is more relevant now than ever. In '86, we could never realise our vision, because we didn't have the computers. Now we do. And as far as the look goes, there's a whole generation of kids coming up who don't want to join the trainer-wearing masses. I mean, we've been able to live in cyberspace for over three years now without having to go, 'Er, hello, NME? Guardian? Do you want to interview me - no, don't worry, I know you don't.' And we've done it anyway, playing club shows around London and, yeah, it's not Wembley, but we sell them out. Over the internet."

"Personally," Degville adds, "I can hold my head up and be proud of what we're doing. I don't think we'll ever get back to the pinnacle, and I know we're going to get slagged off, but none of that bothers me. I just want the group back together."

So you wish them well, sincerely, making a mental note to look on the bright side and not dwell on the occasional Spinal Tap-ism that all bands, young or old, come out with (even "we could have left the group in the annals of history"). After all, there are worse things for grown men to be doing - and more heinous crimes to have committed than making a spectacle of yourself back in the 1980s.

"You know, I never realised the dream," says James. "I was stopped, or maybe my own mouth stopped me. But now cyberspace has given me the chance to seize our moment. And I'm extraordinarily grateful to have this opportunity when most of my contemporaries are sitting at home in their slippers." He stares straight at me: "So now let's see if you go off and shaft us."

21st Century Boys and Piratespace are released through EMI and Sputnikworld.com respectively on Monday. Sigue Sigue Sputnik play at Esquires, Bedford (box office: 01234 340120) tonight; the Garage, London N5 (020-7607 1818) on February 17; and then tour.