DO YOU remember One Eyed Jacks, Spear Of Destiny’s best album? To mark its 25th anniversary, band leader Kirk Brandon is reacquainting himself with all the songs for a one-off tour where he will play the record in its entirety, following similar revivalist exercises by Love, John Martyn, OMD, Van Morrison and Simple Minds.

“It feels strange. It’s like, ‘Is that what we did? Why did we do that’,” says Kirk, recalling the experience of listening to the album again for a series of dates that include The Duchess in York on Wednesday.

“A lot of the album, not to be too ‘musical’ about it, is all ‘pushes’ rather than on the beat.”

Explain yourself, non-musically, Kirk.

“It’s the intensity thing, I guess. What I wrote in those days was very immediate and naïve, and 25 years down the line, a lot has happened but that naiveté and innocence was a good thing.

“We’re now trying to recreate the sound of the arrangements from the 1984 recordings, but with not too much interpretation because it could become a parody. So we’re still trying to keep the first approach that I had, which is virtually impossible, but they’re quite a unique set of arrangements.”

Significantly, Kirk will be performing with his present Spear Of Destiny line-up of drummer Robin Goodridge, from Bush, bass player Craig Adams, from Sisters of Mercy and The Mission, and guitarist Adrian Portas, from New Model Army, rather than the original band members from 1984.

“Stan [Stammers] is in America, Alan [St Clair] has retired to Spain, and I think Micky [Donnelly] runs a jazz club up north; they’re just strung around the world, they have families and have moved away from music being the centre-point of their life. So you couldn’t get that lot back together, you just couldn’t,” he says.

“And no, I wasn’t tempted, not really… wrecking those people’s lives to do this! They’re all good guys, but you can’t get them to align to do a long tour. It would not be physically possible.”

Kirk is keen to avoid this 25th anniversary tour being merely an exercise in nostalgia.

“I don’t want to be in a Kirk Brandon tribute band, so I’m trying to keep the freshness we had at that time, though obviously you can’t recapture the time, but we want to be faithful to the spirit of those days,” he says.

“The band I have now come to the album totally fresh and they’ve had to sit down and listen to it and learn it note by note, though it’s not like 12-bar blues.”

Kirk has enjoyed picking up some old Spears. “A lot of them tunes from that time haven’t been played since then, but what I want to do is play them all because in a year I won’t be able to do that, as I’m always writing new material,” he says.

“It’s a chance to play the album in its entirety and a chance to play songs that won’t get played again ever.”

Looking back on the ten songs that formed Spear Of Destiny’s second album, Kirk says: “Well, on the one hand, some are quite light hearted, like Rainmaker, a big stage favourite from that time, which was literally about that Burt Lancaster film.

“Don’t Turn Away is a blues song. Now I keep thinking it’s like Janis Joplin and Big Brother And The Holding Company, though it didn’t feel like that at the time.”

A visit to Yugoslavia sparked the album’s centrepiece, Playground Of The Rich. “Dare I say it, it was a socialistic song about raising the flag and going over the top,” Kirk reveals. “It was in the days when I had a conscience… but I’m OK now.”

At 52, Kirk continues to write as much as ever, his songs most often based around observation.

“They were back then and they are now, though some now are written about actual people, actual events,” he says.

“Perhaps in those days I wasn’t writing from a personal point of view but a socialistic one, so whatever you say will be in contention with other people and you have to be careful about pontificating about it or ‘Pontius Pilate-ing’ a bit, washing your hands of something you should or shouldn’t be involved in.

“But I’ve always had that contentious side. People used to say, ‘Look man, why don’t you sing about love?’, but I’m not a singer from Motown smooching about lurve.”

• Spear Of Destiny play Rio’s, Leeds, on Tuesday, tickets 0113 243 6743; The Duchess, York, on Wednesday, tel 01904 641413; Sheffield O2 Academy 2, Thursday, 08444 772000.