TRUE ROCK 'N' ROLL IS A PERFECT MARRIAGE OF SEX AND VIOLENCE. I WANT TO LEAVE THE STAGE BLOODIED, BEATEN AND GORGED..'

THE RI BALD rock'n' roll spirit of Guns N'Roses and their ilk has long since evaporated into the Los Angeles smog. Once they owned Sunset, roaring up the Strip in outlandish automobiles, yelling and brawling and fucking on these very streets. The vogue was always for excess, in all manners and guises. But no more.

There's no bandanna-sporting hellions raising a ruckus on Sunset tonight. A sleepless night on the Strip nowadays is more likely to be the fault of coked-up Trustafarians straight out of 'The OC', blaring Death Cab For Cutie till the wee small hours, than the noisy arrival of Nikki Sixx and a harem of strippers. Right now, Los Angeles feels as barren as the desert this city was built upon.

Drive for about an hour from Sunset, across the wrong side of the tracks, to a deserted busi-ness park in Burbank, and you'll find Lavish Studios, a deceptively modest cubby-hole hidden amid these wastelands. The crib of one Scott Weiland, it's a messy collision of club-house and recording studio: musical gear is littered every-where, the walls are furnished with exotic rugs (lend-ing the room a Bohemian, bacchanalian feel) and Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver platinum discs (the gong for his appearance on limpbizkit's 'Significant Other' sits in the toilet, perhaps to keep Scott humble). Memorabilia abounds, from framed screen-printed Coop and Jermaine Rogers gig posters, to the megaphone Weiland wailed the Pilots' 'Sex Type Thing' through.

Peer through the fogged window he spray-painted 'Fucking Fuckl! I I!!' upon one wild night, into the control room, and you'll find Weiland himself, rail-thin and sporting a skintight maroon Velvet Revolver tee and corduroy hipsters that hang around razor-sharp bones.

He looks good. He looks like something that LA has-n't thrown up in a long, long time - a rock star.

YOU'LL LIKELY know some of the back story. How Weiland swept away early accusations of grunge-bandwagoneering to developing his Stone Temple Pilots into one of the most fascinating and flamboyant rock bands of the era. How he's tussled with personal problems in a very public arena, before hooking up with a motley crew of ex-Gunners in Velvet Revolver to record 'Contraband'.

But until you saw Weiland back onstage with VR-fronting a band chock-full-of-frontmen, his bone-brutal body clad in slutty skintight rock gear, topped off with a Fuhrer's cap for more evil, authoritarian cool - commandeering the audience, dancing a chainsaw stadi-um-ballet that no-one who ever saw it would ever for-get - you might just have forgotten what a charismatic presence the man has.

Here is a rock 'n' roll frontman, he seemed to be baying, a man to follow in the footsteps of Ozzy, of Iggy, of Bowie, in the preening, messianic, blood-stained rock star stakes. Finally, someone who could own the very stages he trod.

And yet here too, ultimately, is a man, with all his mortal frailties on display.

Weiland got here today a little late, the delay being caused not by the need for a fix or some trouble with the police, as it might once have been, but a late-running birthday party in the park for one of his son Noah's friends. You can tell, given the choice, Weiland would still be at the party, spending time with his family; he's only just won them back, after all, and still keenly remembers how their loss felt.

It's one of the most charming things about Scott Weiland, this sense of gratitude for the second chance he's been given and embraced, a tale he tells with the sincere fervour of the born-again. The passion with which he declares his love for his wife and children is positively molten. Funnily enough, Kerrangl undertook this interview on the under-standing that Weiland's private life would be off-limits for discussion, but the singer offers these tales of heartache and redemption himself, seemingly gaining an empowerment from the retelling. Certainly, it would seem there's a grand distance between Weiland the man, and Weiland the Rock God, the Imp Perverse prowling the
stage.

"I always looked at myself as an artist in the studio, and a performer onstage, the dark clown playing out dark theatre," he explains, launching into the first of a sequence of extensive responses, many of which answer the bulk of my questions before they're asked. "It's performance art. If I can't be taken over by that character, then there's no use in doing it at all. I'm not myself onstage, it's another person who I allow to take over the person you're speaking to."That guy up onstage is the person I used to be... I used to get confused, though, and that's why I used to have so many problems getting loaded all the time. I used to get confused about who I really was."

"I've been diagnosed with Bi-Polar disorder for years, and if I was perfectly medicated, I would be the most boring songwriter ever. My wife says, 'Thank God our relationship isn't perfect because otherwise you wouldn't have any songs anymore'."

He grins, but you can sense the tension, the pain, underneath his words. None of this, you guess, is easy.
"When I'm writing songs for a record, I start tearing apart my soul, digging up journals, napkins, dredging up a year's worth of therapy, locked up with a needle in my arm... When I started writing the record, I had to make sure I was tightening my shit up and getting my family back together. So I had to leave that person behind, the person who was the inspiration for this record, and prepare myself to go on the road and be strong enough to handle this whole media thing that's happened.

"Where I'm at, my whole thing was, was I ever really a man? No, I don't think I ever really was. I think every musician gets to the point where you realise being Peter Pan for your entire life only works for a little while. My chief goal was to achieve a rapid emotional puberty, or I wouldn't have been able to get my family back."

He pauses. And your eyes run across his face to see if there's yet more to unload. He's inviting the next question, ready to go again. So... is it frightening to reconnect with this Mr Hyde-type alter-ego up onstage?

"No, the music takes over. When I'm actually recording the song, that's when I'm close to the emotional content. Live, it's a primordial thing, a sensual thing. It's about the beat; it's sexual and violent."

How conscious are you of what's going on when you're out onstage?

"It depends upon what mood I'm in before I hit the stage. The best gigs are the ones where there's something that absolutely infuriates me before I go onstage, something that causes me to have a psychiatric meltdown up there. I'll throw a full-metal wobbler. But that will inspire the most majestic performance. What really gives Velvet Revolver their impact is this sense that anything could happen. There could be a trainwreck at any moment.

"There are some big egos in this band, there's some tension. But it's that tension which creates absolute brilliance: it's the tension that means everybody's feeling it, everyone's testosterone is at boiling point, and everyone's hair's standing up on the back of their neck, playing with complete intensity and complete passion. Nobody's falling asleep onstage."

IF YOU'VE seen Velvet Revolver you'll understand what Weiland means. Every night the band teeter between majesty and bust, chasing a mercurial promise of rock 'n' roll nirvana. Weiland, a man rudely acquainted with how live performances, and life itself, can collapse into the ugliest, most exhilarating trainwrecks when you're least expecting, is at the centre of the chaos. But hasn't this high-wire act always been the stuff of great rock 'n' roll?
"There's two sides to me as a performer," he offers. "There's the theatrical side, and then there's the side of me that is willing to be torn apart and leave the stage bloodied, beaten and gorged. True and real rock 'n' roll is a perfect marriage of sex and violence. And that's where the energy has always been created; it's been that way since the '50s. Rock 'n' roll inspires you to do one of two things, and that's to fight or fuck. Or both."

Oddly enough, this confirmed Arena Rocker says he "sorta missed out" on the glory days of Arena Rock.

"I never had an older brother to take me to the shows," he explains. "The first show I ever played was at a club called Radio City. We weren't even an actual punk rock band; we were more of a postpunk band, nancy boys, all doom and gloom with eyeliner and big fringes. My first show was in front of 15 people. I felt like I was already a rock star."

Young Weiland must've been quite a sight. Though he grew up singing in the choir in church - "They always made me sing the solos, and I remember it being horrifying because, when you're little, all the other little kids out there would snicker and laugh at you, but music was everything I ever wanted to do" - by the time he hit Eighth Grade his heroes were David Bowie and The Sweet.

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time dressing up in costumes, he smiles. "I always used to spend a lot of time pretending I [was] somebody else. My mother and father thought I'd become an actor, and in a sense that's what I do when I'm onstage. In Fourth Grade, when the whole Glam thing was going on, I came back from staying with my dad in California with a pair of skintight angel-flight pants made of polyester. When I got back to Ohio I was trying to put together the right look, so I got this silky blouse of my mother's and I wore it unbuttoned to my navel. My grandmother, who was visiting, had a pair of platform shoes, but they were women's platform shoes, about an inch-and-a-half on the sole, and the heel was three inches."

How did that go down?

"I wore it all to school one day," he smiles. "The whole outfit. Needless to say, that was the only day I wore the outfit. It didn't go over so well in Fourth Grade. The teachers might've thought it was cute, but the other kids... I was probably trying to get a reaction from the chicks, but I didn't get the reaction I was looking for."

Like his future VR bandmates, Weiland kept searching for music he could genuinely call his own. And then he found punk rock, via a school friend - one John Wild -who'd returned from a summer vacation in Europe with a clutch of records by wild-looking bands with names like The Plasmatics, The Ramones and the Sex Pistols. Weiland was hooked.

"John was the one guy in my small town of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, who actually knew about punk rock," he recalls. "The jocks in high school used to look down at my friends and I for being skinny, make-up-wearing pussies; 'art-fags', they used to call us. "It's funny, because a lot of them were friends with us at school, when they weren't drunk. But when they got drunk at parties they would get violent and give us hassle. You'll see these exact same guys rocking their fists in the air at shows, especially in the Mid-west, when I'm wearing a black patent leather corset, singing 'Sex Type Thing'. It's quite a turnaround. That's my revenge."

In the past the singer has struggled with the contradictions inherent in being a globally recognised rock 'n' roll star and, as he explains, "a father of two beautiful children, a husband who takes care of his wife, who provides for his wife, who fucks his wife whenever she's willing to 'put out".

You imagine that there are similar contradictions inherent in playing such a grand, theatrical 'character' onstage when the Velvet Revolver lyric sheet is so rooted in his own, real-life and down-to-Earth conflicts.

"I kinda struggle with that myself, to tell the truth," he answers. "I cannot make a record with just one flavour, I'm not just feeling one way all the time. There are so many different emotions on this record."

He pauses, perhaps considering how far to go with what he's on the edge of saying. You can sense him deciding. All the fucking way.

"I went through the worst, most depressing period of my life," he begins. "I didn't think I was gonna get my family back, but, at the same time, I was filled with so much venom towards her because, in my mind, I thought she was fucking someone else. She wasn't, but in my mind I thought she was. I wanted to fucking have her killed, that's how I felt sometimes. But other times I would remember everything we'd done together, and experiences that we'd had, look at our wedding video. I would just break down.

"There's so many different emotions, running the gamut from A to Z. It's not a black album, it's not a white
album, it's everything. It's not a completely depressing, 'poor me' fucking album, like some of the earlier STP records were. You wanna know why? Because I won't sit there and say 'Pardon me' anymore, I'm a fuckin' man and I'll own up to what I've done now. I've made my mistakes and I'll fucking own up to them.

"A lot of times, on certain songs, the riff and the beat inspired me to write music that's pretty fucking sleazy and dirty and, for lack of a better term, music that girls and guys should fuck to. It's good stripper-fucking music, and there's nothing wrong with that. I think, everybody should just spend more time fucking."

ALONGSIDE ALL the "stripper-fucking music", Velvet Revolver's debut album harbors potent power-ballad, the epic and dark 'Fallling to Pieces'. Telling Weiland's recent history in the plainest most poetic language, it's the subject of one the more chilling, poignant, powerful music videos on television now, dramatising the recent flashpoints in

Weiland's turbulent marriage, and his relationship with illicit and dangerous chemicals. Bravely, Weiland and his wife Mary play themselves.

"It was pretty heavy," remembers Weiland ‘But it was the only way to go about doing it. It could’ve gone either way-either it'd turn out amazing and have a huge impact on a real emotional level, or end up really cheesy, a pile of bullshit.

"I didn't even watch MTV or VH1 for the first of weeks, I didn't want to hear any feedback on it. But the feedback has been great. That song is the pivotel point on the album; that was where it all started changing, for me and for the band. It was written the day after I was arrested, and if things hadn't changed there, then the band couldn't have worked. That was the exact moment where I realised that Slash and I could be one of those classic songwriting teams.”

ITS TIME for Weiland to return home. He offers kindly, to answer more questions on the phone later, but nothing's going to interrupt this next appointment, a quiet evening in with Mary and the kids.

One last quick question. What does Noah think, when he sees Velvet Revolver up there onstage? Does he Scott Weiland: Nazi Rentboy Frontman Or does he just see Daddy?

"My son thinks he’s in the band," Weiland laughs. When he comes to the shows, we have to put a little micstand right on the side of the stage so he can sing and dance along. If it's not set up he throws a bit of a fit.

That sounds like great rock star training....

"Exactly," he laughs. "Throwing a fit is definitely great rock star training."