LAST year, the NME cited My Life Story as one of the greatest lost bands of the 1990s.

This year, My Life Story have been reactivated by songwriter and frontman Jake Shillingford with a "sleek new rock'n'roll line up" and new single The 24 Hour Deflowerer, released on November 1 via their own Exilophone Records label.

"We wouldn't want to be called a heritage act; that's when you stop being an NME act and become a Mojo act, though we have done a Record Collector piece, when your work becomes a canon," says Jake, who brings his streamlined, no longer orchestral band to Fibbers in York on Wednesday night.

“In the last few years, I’ve moved into writing for movies and TV with My Life Story tour guitarist Nick Evans, and as much as it satisfies my orchestral and filmic bent, I don’t have much time to write spikey three-minute pop songs anymore.

"So I sat down with my trusty old 12-string and all these twisted couplets started to fire out; a sort of machine gun of vitriolic social commentary. I felt like I’d been reborn."

The 24 Hour Deflowerer Tour combines My Life Story's first new material for 15 years with highlights from the Londoners' flamboyant Britpop Nineties' back catalogue, such as Strumpet, Sparkle and 12 Reasons Why I Love Her.

"While the orchestral line-up has been indefinitely rested, I felt desperate to get out and air the new material, to the most patient and loyal fans on the planet," says Jake. "The new songs and sound capture the New Wave influences that I grew up with. Despite the baroque pop and Britpop tags that were hung on us in the early Nineties, the heart of My Life Story was always the edgy, passionate and honest songwriting of Badfinger, Cheap Trick and [Elvis]Costello.”

My Life Story returned briefly in 2006 after a six-year hiatus to issue a compilation, Sex & Violins, and a B-sides and rarities collection, Megaphone Theology, since when Jake has played guitar on The X Factor and written music for documentary films and Sky Sports, and he also lectures at the Brighton Institute of Modern Music.

His life story felt incomplete, however, without a resurrection of My Life Story in slim form. "We were such a large band in the 1990s with a dozen musicians, but would a record company now hire a bus for 12 people?! Now it's duos, like Royal Blood and The Tings Tings, so for us to play shows again, it was always a question of bringing the mountain to Muhammad," says Jake.

"In the 1990s, we were one of those bands where there were so many of us we would always step outside the dressing room or we'd just leap off the stage and have a beer with everyone."

In 2015, a sleeker line-up is both practical and creatively stimulating. "It didn't make sense to have a smaller band just doing old material," says Jake. "Instead it's shaping the new material before we go into my studio."