ZODIAC Mindwarp, West Yorkshire’s wild man of rock, is celebrating the even wilder men of Volsung on his new album of Norse shenanigans.

Where better could Zodiac start his latest tour than in York, home of the Jorvik Viking Centre?

“Never thought of that, the Norse connection. But hey, we’re Vikings; we’re from the north,” says Zodiac, the rock front-man alias of Mark Manning, who will lead his leathery band at The Duchess tomorrow.

Why did you call the album We Are Volsung, Zodiac? “What it basically was, I’d written a couple of books with my friend Bill Drummond, from the KLF, and the last one was to find the devil in Congo…”

Did you find him? “I think it was in us already,” says Mark, a rasping laugh accompanying his answer.

“So anyway, we thought ‘What should we write about for the third one?’, and as we’d found the devil in the Congo, we said, ‘Now let’s find God’, and I thought, ‘Hang on, it doesn’t have to be God, the white-bearded fella; there are more gods than that’.

“It went from there to me thinking ‘I must get in touch with my pagan roots’, so I started reading about Norse mythology, and the Volsung were the baddest of the bad asses, the meanest bad asses of all!”

On tour, the band will be promoting We Are Volsung and new single White Trash, as well as recalling the lascivious, dumb and dirty Eighties’ glory days of the Wild Child EP, Tattooed Beat Messiah album and their signature smash, Prime Mover.

“We save the best till last. To be honest, we’ve done lots of s**t songs; well, every band has, so we play that last because it gets everyone going home happy,” says Zodiac.

He will play nine dates this month on his return to Britain from his adopted home of New Orleans. “It’s a cheap place to live. I just like it,” he says. “You get the odd thunderstorm, but I love the music and the crickets, and I’ve got a beautiful girl there.

“And I like writing there. I just write. That’s what I do. I just write and paint my pictures. I’ve been painting a series of Rupert paintings.”

Rupert paintings, you say? “You know, Rupert Bear. I just copy them out of the Rupert annuals. I’ve no idea why I do it, but it seems to calm me down,” says Zodiac.

Is he not so wild these days? “On tour, the band are like a bunch of animals and I’m like a mild fella. I get off stage, I put my glasses on, and all these groupies who come backstage think bassist Jack Shitt is me and I’m the roadie!” he says.

On the horizon is Zodiac and Bill Drummond’s next travelling escapade. “We’re going to Haiti, as Bill’s been there already and apparently they think he’s a god, and I was thinking, ‘Hold on a minute, if you’re going to be a god there, I want to be a god as well’.”