Mick Jones likes his guitars shaken, not stirred and his drums like electronic elephant bollocks. It must be about time Richard Gere joined Big Audio Dynamite. Audio output: Tim Glynne-Jones. Dynamite photography: George Bodnar

It's a long time since anything really exciting hit the charts. Naturally the temptation is to look back to the last golden age, Punk Rock, and to swathe oneself in nostalgia.

I take Mick Jones, benign dictator of Big Audio Dynamite, back to the days when he was a snarling cheapskate guitar hero with the Clash and ask him what was so good about it.

He says Punk Rock taught him everything he knows. Not about guitar playing, about the spirit that makes something exciting. Punk was a spirit. The spirit to ignore musical rules, the spirit to create something new.

So surely some good has come out of it?

The answer is brief and to the point.

"Big Audio Dynamite."

Kaboom! I'm blasted forward again, face to face with the present. The face is grinning. It seems things are a little different now.

"I ain't into suffering at all for it. I'm not into suffering for my art."

"I want to enjoy myself. I'd like to make some money as well but I'm not into putting myself into purgatory because, you know, I'm a bit older now."

So this is the modern Mick Jones. A few years older but definitely not old. Self preserving, funny, thinking about the here and now and still exuding that spirit.

"We're going to do another LP," he tells me through a mouthful of sandwich, "so that everyone will know that we're a proper band instead of some geezer's solo project. We'll get over the second album crisis. We're going to do it in June. Just go in there and bang it out. We've got nothing written for it. It's going to be brilliant."

It takes him anything between five minutes to half an hour to write a song which suggests that inspiration must be fairly abundant. With the group's involvement in promo video in the shape of Don Letts, could it be that some of their songs actually begin as an idea for a video?

"No. Never an idea for a video. What comes first is a song, not an idea for a video. It comes with just an acoustic guitar in the front room."

Is video really important?

"Yeah. Well, no. I like film. I don't like video tape. Well, I do actually in my own home but I don't like it when they shoot promos on it. I like them to shoot it on film because video looks crappy."

For the uninitiated among us the difference is as follows.

"It's the difference between Coronation Street and Dallas. You know that gloss you get with the American one? That's what you get with film. You know that dross you get with the English one? That's what you get with video."

He dunks his Jaffa Cake in his tea and we discuss the advantages of promos as a medium for promoting a band. Video is convenient but playing live on television is surely more profitable.

"Yeah, it is better to be able to be a proper group and play live. It's better to be on television showing people what you can do... except you're only miming anyway."

These days he does his miming on a Bond guitar. I ask him what he likes about the Bond.

"I like the way it drinks a Martini."

Shaken not stirred.

"No. I tell you what. I think it's a great guitar. It's a real shame they're not going to manufacture them in England because there's a load of jobs gone to Japan that we could have had. It's the best guitar that's come along in... a few years.

"It's got no frets so you can go up the neck and it's a dream, going up. Going down's a bit bumpy. Ha Ha!

"It's, like, a hi-tech guitar. It very much appeals to me, it's got that crisp sound you only get with those kind of guitars. It's not like a Steinberger but it's made out of the same kind of stuff. Carbon fibre. Concorde material. Leo uses a Steinberger bass. Well, we're waiting for a Bond bass guitar to come along and then we'll probably switch over. It's funny, that. It's got no head."

When I ask about Don Letts' musical department — stickers on the keys and funny noises — Mick gets to his feet and conducts a guided tour of the living room.

"Well, it's interesting because when you're trying to make something new happen musically, right, it's very Heath Robinson.

"He was a turn of the century artist who devised all these contraptions which were tied together with strings and things and they all work on little pulleys and it's kind of like that, what we do.

"We go to Woolworths and we buy a sampling machine, the cheapest possible one, and we hook it up with bits of leads and stuff. Even right up until the album we had the cheapest keyboard we could find which is an SH101, this very one here."

He points to the bright red thing sitting by the window.

"This is it. And things like this."

He holds up a bootlace from the window sill.

"And this (a lead) and we sort of stick it in there and this goes here and we hook this up here like this and then we have this stuff here (a fistful of wires and a cassette) which we must add to it and then maybe we stick this in but we're not sure about this... we don't want to advertise anything because no one gives us anything for nothing... and then we stick this stuff in here like this and er... then we turn the television on (laughs) and we wait for something interesting to come along — we sample it, you know, off the television. Bonk! On the record."

And that's BAD.

"Yeah. Brilliant, innit. But that's about it. That's a practical demonstration of what we do."

How much does it all cost?

"As cheap as possible. We don't like to spend any money. We're so cheap although we won't get any sponsorship deals because no one's phoned us up so we probably won't do 'em. I ain't going to do nothing with Roland. They can get stuffed. I've used their gear for ages and they've never given me nothing so sod 'em."

His advice to new groups is to get straight down the cobblers and get some boot-laces.

"Otherwise you can't walk."

The chocolate digestive threatens to burst from his beaming mouth but as the laughter fades I can see the sense in what he's saying. It's another Punk lesson.

"When we started we used to nick other people's equipment. Just slowly build up your own collection of equipment. I know it's unorthodox but there you are. It's either that or saving up from your job and I did that too. I had a job and for my first ever guitar I saved up £10 a week for however long. That was probably all my wages. I know it's difficult. I think that's what's wrong with it. All the gear is too expensive."

At last he's getting serious.

"So I ain't interested in advertising them when it's out of the reach of normal people. That's why I encourage getting the cheapest possible gear and making it up the best you can. A hotch-potch is better than some great Fairlight thing that's cost you twenty grand that you're never going to get in a million years, that you have to sell your house and car for.

"We called ours the Tesco Fairlight. We got the cheapest possible piece of tin rubbish that was a sampling machine and we had the hook-up that all these other guys, your Trevor Horns, had."

When compiling the group Mick was looking for a combination of non-musicians and unknown musicians. People who didn't necessarily have musical ability but had other ideas instead. He also wanted people who could contribute more than just a musical role. Greg takes care of all the cutting. Dan is the Big Audio art department. Don takes care of the films. Leo looks after the tapes and Mick...

"The new regime gets to mean I can lie in bed all day. I think the best thing to do is lie in bed and watch telly and see how it turns out."

We digress briefly from my quest for the sensible answer and discuss image — "Image is a thing invented by record companies for groups that ain't got no ideas" — the target audience — "I never think about that sort of thing. I just do the best I can and I'm very pleased and surprised that so many people are digging it" — and songwriting — "I don't do as much as I should. I hate hard work."

The quest resumes.

"Alright. I told you what Don does and Dan does pretty much the same on the other side except he has a built-in clock-radio and teasmade on his.

"He's very talented and he's sort of musical director of the group as well which means he makes the tea.

"Greg we got from a magazine. We just opened the magazine and out he popped. I honestly thought he was going to be the English Richard Gere. He said, 'Look. I really think I ought to be in your group,' and I said, 'Why?' and he said, 'Because I'm the one for you, Mick!' So I thought, 'This boy is Richard Gere, isn't he?' but I must have been in some kind of stupor at the time because it just turned out to be plain old Skint Beastwood.

"When we were in LA he bumped into, um — what's the guy who was in Rocky IV? Dollop Lump — and he said, 'You commie bastard' and nutted him one.

"Anyway, we scraped him up off the floor, took him back to London, put him back together and he's and first bionic drummer. The 'Six Million Pence Man'.

"What kit does he play? I don't know, to be quite honest with you. He plays drums, I'm sure he does. I know he's got a drum box. I've got a horrible suspicion that he uses it but I can't quite be sure. But lots of times he's just sitting there and he's not doing anything and there's drums coming out so I've got a feeling that he uses a drum box but I couldn't confirm that.

"He plays these clip-clop things. They look like great big elephant bollocks. There's about three or four of them of various different sizes and he sort of plays these. I don't know what make they are though. I think that Simmons do elephant bollocks now. Yeah, I think they do electronic elephant bollocks."

Are they expensive?

"Yeah, I think they're too expensive really. We blagged ours off a real elephant."

The laughter gives way to the sound of the telephone bell. It's Greg.

"Ask him what drums he plays," Mick calls to the voice in the hall.

Rogers bass drum.

"You've got to give that back to Roger, you know..."

But the bottom line (to coin a phrase) on the BAD gear is...

"You shouldn't be too hung up on equipment. It's not the equipment that's the important bit. It's not the instrument, it's the bloke who's doing it. It's the ideas behind the instrument that's important. That's why I don't think it's important to say what make your stuff is because that's not going to get you it.

"You ain't going to get the sound because you've got the equipment. You're only going to get the sound if you've got the ideas behind it or the motivation. The idea is the important thing. A bad workman always blames his tools. I think that you've just got to do it with what you've got. That's Punk mobility."