Nearly 30 years into a career, it's rare - almost unique - to find bands producing some of their very finest work.

In The Go-Betweens' case, their new record Oceans Apart comes 15 years after an earlier incarnation of the band burnt-out in a mess of broken relationships, broken hearts and dead dreams of stardom.

In Robert Forster and Grant McLennan's case, the fact that there's any new album at all is a bonus - much less an album as brilliant as this.

The Australian pair reunited under The Go-Betweens name five years ago after ploughing solo furrows through the 1990s.

The two albums that followed - The Friends of Rachel Worth and Bright Yellow, Bright Orange - were welcome and boasted fine songs but, even the diehards would admit to a little disappointment.

The romance of the old Go-Betweens, masters of arch melancholy, had been replaced with something low-fi and low-key.

But, against all the odds, the remarkable Ocean's Apart, recorded in London with an attitude McLennan describes as "Listen to this, you f***ers!", simultaneously recalls the romantic sweep of the old while injecting it with some new vitality.

This is the record we needed to make," said a thoughtful and earnest McLennan, sipping a beer.

"With this one, we wanted to make a few waves, instead of being outside and throwing the stone into the pond."

Last year saw the band's three final three pre-split albums reissued with a wealth of bonus rarities.

A special one-off career retrospective gig at The Barbican in London also saw the band - now augmented with Adele Pickvance on bass and Glenn Thompson on drums - diving back in time for a little swim in past glories.

Even the new album's producer, Mark Wallis, was a face from the past. He mixed 1988's glorious LP 16 Lover's Lane, the band's most sonically sumptuous effort.

But nostalgia wasn't on the agenda with Oceans Apart.

"London was the main thing, the first impulse," said Forster, munching peanuts and sipping bitter lemon in the bar of a Lancaster Gate hotel.

"London is a town where you can reinvent yourself, it's a real f*** off town. It's competitive and we just wanted to make that type of record.

"Y'know, all our records have been analogue but it was like 'Mark's got a digital studio... we go digital!'."

"London records are, because it is so competitive here, so tweaked and everyone is just trying to take your head off, which I like."

Forster, thankfully, is exactly the same character off stage as he is on. A little eccentric, amusing even, you suspect, when he is trying to be serious.

"There are times when I want to make something more mellow and I might want to have us all in a room with a nice big studio and its all funky and woody.

"But this time it sort of felt like we should throw ourselves back into it all, throw the balls up in the air.

"Dave Ruffy works with Mark Wallis and instead of click tracks for us to play too, he was writing beats. Like on Lavender, which is reggae folk - a new musical genre that we have invented.

"It was like, 'let's work with these inventive click tracks, let's work in this funky dungeon, let's just drag the car over this way'.

"And London is a great town to do that in".

Ocean's Apart begins with Forster's Here Comes A City, an angular rock song, Talking Heads with a John Barry guitar line and lyrics describing a fevered train journey through urban sprawl and, because this is a Robert Forster song, why people who read Dostoyevsky look like Dostoyevsky.

"That song just blew my mind. The first three or four plays of it, I was breathless.

"It's definitely the band but in a way that I have never heard it. There's a groove on that that we have never had on any other song.

"That's really exciting at this stage in our career, to not be sitting around some campfire singing Neil Young songs but actually pumping at something new."

The opener, which the band plan to release as a single, comes across as a generational-inverting nod to Franz Ferdinand - ironically, a band heavily influenced by Josef K, labelmates of The Go-Betweens on Glasgow's Postcard Records in the early 1980s.

"I wrote Here Comes A City in October 2003 and it came out of nowhere. It was just there. Bang!

"Then I heard the Franz Ferdinand album in February 2004 and I could see people would think I had written it after hearing them.

"Which is interesting turn of events in my mind because I could see it's a song that could be on that album.

"The song is very timely in terms of what's going on, that's a song that any 24 or 25 year-olds in the UK would be thrilled to have done."

Forster credits his solo years, beginning with 1990's classic Danger In The Past and ending with the Edwyn Collins produced Warm Nights in 1997, with "saving" him.

The Go-Betweens mark fell apart in 1989 as the quest for commercial success turned sour and Forster's relationship with drummer Lindy Morrison and McLennan's with violinist Amanda Brown disintegrated.

"I don't mean to dance on the grave of what we were in 1989 but, for my personal life, for my musical life, the split saved me, it was a wonderful thing.

"For Grant and I, we got out of each other's way and we got a lot of frustration out in making our own albums with different people".

While Forster and McLennan's friendship has been successfully repaired, it is the differences between them as songwriters and personalities that continues to fascinate fans.

The cliched view about them is that Forester is the poet, the arch lyricist, the off-kilter partner to McLennan's heart-on-the-sleeve romantic pop aesthete.

Oceans Apart does nothing to disabuse anyone of that notion, with McLennan's yearning Finding You and No Reason To Cry sitting alongside Forster's Born to a Family, a skiffle-based essay on his childhood decision to become an artist in a "family of workers".

But it works. McLennan: "The older I get and the more music I listen to, the more I think what a great story The Go-Betweens is.

"Two completely different songwriters completely coexisting, I can't think of another band other than The Beatles like that.

"Not that I am comparing us to them too much, but I would like to think if John hadn't died he and Paul would have gotten back together by now."

Forster: "I look at bands from when we started who are still going and I can see they really got into jams and I think how lucky we were that we had that ten year break.

"Going out, separating and learning something else and then coming back... it's almost too perfect.

"It saved us both as people and as artists. We were very fortunate to break up when we did.

"If the band had kept going, there wouldn't be records now, we would have devoured each other by about 1994, we would have gone mad."

Just before the tape recorder gets turned off, McLennan looks down, thinks for a minute, and opens up a little.

"I'm in this funny position, I am trying to restrain myself... and I am not that kind of person, I'm really not.

"My friends, my enemies are . uhmtake the piss out of me because I am enthusiastic and... I know it, I know that I am."

Another little pause... "This sound really gauche... but this is a golden time. I feel The Go Betweens, more than ever, as an idea, as an emotion, I feel we are doing something that no-one else is doing.

"I also know that this is the first record we have ever made where we are holding nothing back. There's nothing tentative, no hidden agenda.

"It's really a case of 'We hope you like it but if you don't, f*** you, do you even like music?'"

He looks over his shoulder, through the hotel bar window, out towards Hyde Park.

"There are times when I feel like going out there to Speaker's Corner and letting it all out."

You just have mate, you just have.

* The Go-Betweens will be appearing at Carling Academy 2, Birmingham, on May 13.