“I WOULDN'T Know You From The Rest" is fab. The jazzy piano motif straight from Dave Brubeck, the angry slide guitar, low-down bass and syncopated, boggy beats deliver the song's message with ballistic intensity, and that message is - "Play me again!" I did. You will. This is good.

And here's the rub. THE DOVES used to be The Thrashing Doves who disappeared from sight two years ago amid legal hassles with their then record company. But they have now returned with something of a vengeance. "Know" is to be followed shortly by an album fashioned at Paisley Park studios with Prince's right hand man, David Z

Ain't it a bit late to be going baggy though?

As so often, things are not what they seem. Its easily forgotten that, when the whole Balearic thong began to take off in the summer of '88, there were three tunes by indie-style guitar bands that were adopted by the fledgling Brit House scene. One was The Woodentops' 'Why? Why? Why?" The others were "Jesus On The Payroll" and "Sympathy For The Devil" by The Thrashing Doves. They've been here from the beginning. So what happened?

"That was all pre-Happy Mondays," explains guitarist/singer Ken Foreman ruefully "Everyone was playing our 'Jesus' track, and I remember Danny Rampling calling me up and saying, 'You gotta get your record company to put this out'."

A&M wouldn't do it. They said the song had a lyric that the radio wouldn't play, completely missing the point. Furthermore, they added, this Acid House thing will have blown over by the end of the summer. "I think we suffered extensively from that," Ken continues. "You see, unlike, say, The Soup Dragons or The Charlatans, these rhythms were always inherent in our sound; it always made sense for us to use a drum machine."

This pre-dated the Primals "Loaded", let us not forget, by two years. And in the meantime, the Mondays cornered the market. Now, things are looking up, however. The Doves are pleased with David Z's work on the album, "Affinity", and found living in the shadow of Prince for those couple of months invigorating.

"Originally, David was just going to do five or six tracks, but in the end he postponed his next project so he could finish the album. It was really good to work in that environment."

Did you meet Prince?

"He was there all the time, yeah. He's very shy, very retiring. He just sort of nods, he doesn't really speak. He does some wacky things, like one night we were in studio B and Prince was at his club, The Glam Slam. Suddenly the phone rang and this voice said, 'It's Prince - set the disco up!' So our engineer had to go get the crew, and within half an hour they had a full-scale disco in the foyer at Paisley Pork, complete with a massive sound system and a bar along one wall stocked with every kind of alcohol you could imagine.

"Then the doorbell rang and about a hundred people piled through - he'd brought everyone with him from the club. Half an hour later, Prince himself arrived, danced for 10 minutes, chatted to a couple of his mates for a bit, and walked out Then 15 minutes later they just pulled the power and threw everyone out! That's the rule, apparently, 15 minutes after Prince leaves, the place closes down. There's some really bizarre shit goes down there."

And some of it does seem to have rubbed off onto The Doves. Signed to an American record label, they had to pay for the excellent dance mix of "I Wouldn't Know You From The Rest" themselves. The battles are still being fought, but now they're being won. High time, too.

ANDREW SMITH