John Lurie is the Lounge Lizards. He's also fast becoming a multi-media mega-star. Martin Aston sat in awed admiration. Meir Gal snapped.

OK, so the man with the racy paperback sitting in London's St. James' Square didn't even momentarily stop reading when John Lurie faced the camera, standing right next to him, but in other parts of the world recognition comes just that little bit easier (maybe it was a great read). There's the worldwide cult acclaim for this 33 year old New Yorker's part in Jim Jarmusch's 1984 movie "Stranger Than Paradise" (following bit parts in "Subway Riders" and more noticeably, "Paris, Texas" as Natassia Kinski's pimp) that should by rights mushroom with Jarmusch's forthcoming and reputedly brilliant "Down By Law" where Jim finds himself in a copy prison cell alongside Tom Waits. Then there's John and brother Evan's more full-time ensemble The Lounge Lizards, the reason why Lurie is in London for the first time since 1981.

Now a roving, brash septet after forming at the tail end of the No Wave art movement in New York in '80, The Lounge Lizards are Big in Japan, a Cool Cult in Paris, accepted as The Real Thing — they've recorded with Miles Davis — on the European jazz circuit as well as lounging like real lounge lizards in their home town. Not only but also by evidence of the new "Big Heart" album (only their second release), recorded in Tokyo earlier this year and five London dates, the group have crystalised into a potent cool bitch of a blowing brew.

So, actor, musician, cult hero... quite a vapour trail behind the comet's ascension: Lurie wears it well; hence all this talk-talk about his Cool quotient: the ability to sweat star-elect qualities without so much of a glimmer of effort or condensation, I guess. The high-cheekboned, gaunt face, slightly chiselled, the sharply-creased stage suits, the cool breeze of Jazz and the cool shape of Lurie's alto sax, the 'natural', minimalist acting style as witnessed in "Stranger Than Paradise", a film so overflowing with Cool itself with its grubby B & W, its long, drawn-out shoots and detached New World imagery... then you meet Lurie and you detect a wry 'n' dry nonchalance that must refresh the parts that normal ego-tripping usually turns right off... Lurie must have Attitude stencilled under the brim of his hat.

My own feeling is that Lurie's personality wouldn't be quite so fascinating to all and sundry without the knowledge of his dual careers; that his music wouldn't get pounced upon with so much glee if it wasn't for his new-star-in-the-firmament acting, and vice-versa. But to be ushered in with such regard — Lurie has already appeared on the cover of L'Uomo and Vogue — so early on in his career, is surely some sign of Coolness.

Naturally, the attachment of Cool to any public figure inevitably refers to what the Cool wears, ie style and fashion and the relegation of the real ingredients. In Lurie's case, the music.

"The Attitude has something to do with it all but the Attitude's something I'm not in control of" Lurie declares. "I just hate to be self-conscious about my Attitude. That's why it annoys me. OK, we can talk about the Attitude but we should really talk about the music first, don't you think? Sure, the Attitude's part of it — if I was reviewing somebody, I would talk about their Attitude, where it's coming from, the sociological part, y'know..."

I hear you dislike the fashion-before-music reporting, yet you wear suits and talk about your shoes.

"Oh man, you go out on stage... these shoes are cool but they aren't sharp-creased shoes. Do you really think we have some presentation of fashion? We just wear suits. I'm getting a little into clothes but only in the last six months, and only because in the last six months can I afford to get into clothes. But usually they're the most generic suits in the world. It's not a statement.

"The first time I wore a suit" Lurie adds, "I thought, it's become a uniform. It just defines what we're doing. I know where I'm going. I put on this suit, I put up this sax, y'know what I mean. I lock onto a certain thing."

I know, I know, it's just a state of Coolness.

"I don't know what it is, it's vague to me too. It's imagery to me to some extent. What I wanted to create with The Lounge Lizards was a very film-noir feeling. At that point, the only decision that's ever been about clothes was for the first gig — let's all wear black suits, black ties and white shirts. And that was that."

The film-noir confession points back to the term 'fake-jazz' Lurie coined for the original Lizards. 'Fake-jazz' allowed the group to pastiche jazz, to pay homage to it while throwing a series of irreverent right-hooks at its establishment jaw, bending categories, clearing the space for tongue-poking and manipulations of styles and period settings.

"I think the new album really throws out a certain violence and decadent poses. There is still some violence in it but I feel like the pose now is much more optimistic. Now I'm talking about the attitude! I've had it!... I feel like the thing is going more like a hellish pleasure than just a hell which is what the sound was before.

"Where it's going now is that we're trying to juxtapose something beautiful next to the cacophony. We're trying to do both things. We used to be embarrassed to play anything musical" Lurie sighs. "It was jazz in the concept of being intellectually difficult but it wasn't in it's language.

"The first stuff was definitely a pastiche in the sense that it was my influences, but the first band was really about energy. We used to get together and just roll down hill in this immense thing and sometimes it would work and sometimes it would be a trainwreck the whole way. It was a power band. It was more like a sports event than a musical one. We were shooting for that kind of intensity."

Like boxing?

"More like boxing or American football. Now it's more like basketball."

Lurie still floats Lounge Lizard jazz through barriers and definitions — "Hair Street" is a New Orleans stripper's anthem amplified into a Cop TV themeland — but as "Big Heart" shows, there is an added seriousness and virtuosity, a greater commitment to the music. It's still a version of jazz — hear brother Evan's brassy tango formation for proof — but it's not a New Age Jazz like all this New Age Classical guff. It's eminently suitable for New York as the Lizards echo the wildly variable structures of the city, calling out into the cool night air: honking horn stampedes and glittering neon laments reflecting the eyes of Bobby De Niro in the rear-view mirror of "Taxi Driver"; hunched, blue-black nightclub smokezone soloing, in pursuit of the Jazz Gods, like a hip Blues Brothers; best of all, the swaying skyscraper-high ensemble blowing that builds up a breathless brutality that transcends the nagging awkwardness of a gritty but mundane rock rhythm team.

The Lounge Lizards can show you a good American time — blues, whites, blacks, tangos, ghettoblaster jazz street sounds, out of the gutter and the ghetto and into the soupbowl.

"I've learned more about music" Lurie shrugs. "I was always serious about it but I wasn't capable of doing anything better. But as I learnt how to play and to write and to lead a band, as I chose the people better, I was more able to mould it into something that had more conscious thought than just 'let's get at this and knock 'em dead...' literally!

"I listen to that first album and I find it a little indulgent, a little bit jerking off. And it was the reason I had gone away from playing avant-garde jazz.

"Also we were five young guys playing a music that obviously wasn't going to be accepted unless we were black in America, and I didn't want to be part of that. It's like now if you play jazz in America, you can play while people eat steaks, and I'm not interested in doing that."

Not a very Cool thing to do. For his part, Lurie, having 'grown' up, is now "really taken with really obscure stuff — some stuff from America, the pygmies, Balinese music, Bartok string quartets, Sly And The Family Stone's 'Greatest Hits'. I like what Tom Waits is doing. I don't listen to much jazz hardly at all now."

The change has done Lurie good to the power of infinity. Years after "an existential nausea — nothing makes any sense to do, so why do it?" as Lurie terms his pre-stardust days that saw Lurie running on empty, he can now smile and talk about how proud he is of himself, his music, his brother, and how he can "still see that there's all kind of injustices all over the world, but maybe I'm getting callous in my stardom... I feel like I'm being paid off for 15 years of poverty and hard work, and I like that.

"I don't know what changed it. Just the ability to have ideas and realise them whereas before they were always going to be thwarted somehow. You have no idea of what a thing that is" he barks as though he'd discovered sliced bread. "That's why I'm so happy. I used to be disgusted by any kind of success at that time" as he refers back to the nausea period. "So what am I doing now? I have no idea. I was a totally isolated person then. To actually become part of the world and to meet people who are intelligent, who had similar ideas..."

Time and (lack of) money had left Lurie to history as a marginal jazz-totin', drug-daring no-hoper, not on Cool and low on high society success. Although there is a tendency to believe that the often false inflation that accompanies critical praise might be the catalyst for all this bonhomie, the signs are all there that Lurie has extended his music Attitude to his acting, and so benefits the recognition and dream-sequencing of two arts. Two arts beat as one!

"I might be at the Big Jazz period of acting" he muses. "I'm beginning to get serious about it. In 'Stranger Than Paradise', I got serious. Before, I felt embarrassed pretending to be something else. I didn't rehearse a thing. But then I saw James Mason in 'Lolita' and it just turned me around. I felt like acting was kind of a frivolous thing to do, and then I realised that it really isn't acting, it's just this... you're never in control of what you're doing."

Which was exactly what Lurie dislikes as well about the experience. "I didn't want 'Paradise' to go that slow. It was a kinda cool thing because it was a collaboration between Jarmusch and me and it unfolded, and then what he did in the end, I felt like I would have gone a whole other way. He slowed it and cut it down, any kind of action thing. I didn't want the black spaces between the scenes either.

"Well, when I saw it, I agreed" Lurie concedes modestly, "but as an idea, I didn't. I had to slow myself down a bit to meet his aesthetic, and that was very tough" he shrugs again.

Reservations and grudges have hardened with the new "Down By Law" — "It's me and Tom Waits. He plays a DJ and I play a pimp (again! Cool!) who winds up in jail together, and then we meet the most hilarious person in the world, Roberto Bernini, who's an Italian tourist, and we escape together, developing certain camaraderies. I think it's really good. The score is really good. But there's all this stuff when my character goes insane and it's the best acting I've ever done, the most big acting, and it all got cut out by Jarmsuch 'cos he chickened out in the end.

"I would play two scenes, like catatonic, and then I would go nuts, and then you would just see me being catatonic and again for two more scenes because you don't see the scene where I go nuts. So it is kinda flat. I was real frustrated when it all got cut out because that was what I had intended."

Going by Jarmusch's achievement with "Stranger Than Paradise"'s sublime, restrained atmosphere, and Lurie's talk of 'big' acting and wanting to direct — already! But then the man is on a real crest of a wave right now — I think I'll side with Jarmusch. Lurie didn't even like "Paradise"'s slow naturalism either, and no, he doesn't identify with his character, Willie, who's Deadpan Cool incarnate, so what's up? Not only that, but Lurie's not so worried about his tax forms or whether he's going to let Island sign him up for a five-album deal as he is about his image. Because of the minimalist roles he's played, Lurie's scared of becoming seen as one "and if you see a movie, you're not doing your job as an actor if people don't think you are that person" which is arch-paranoia if ever I heard it.

"The way I listen to music, I've got to know where the person's coming from" he says reasonably again. "They gotta be for real and be believable and honest. If you see a movie and a music hero was playing a bad guy or an idiot, and it was the only movie you ever saw him in and you didn't know what he was like except for his music... it would make me question his music.

"What is a drag is that I'm known as a musician, my image is as a musician. Now I have to act in a lot of movies to show that I can act and to show I'm not like these people."

If Cool is a battle to be only Cool, then I figure Lurie contradicts his nonchalant individuality with this sudden fame-flecked anxiety. Still, back in New York, along with recording a new Lounge Lizard studio set, Lurie will be choosing the next valuable film part.

But will it be music or film in the far-flung future? No doubt he will rely on his antennae of Cool to see him through; Lurie can afford to lose his self-conscious Attitude after all.

"No, I really don't want to know why I do things. The part of my brain that my ideas and inspiration comes from, well I don't feel like I should muck around with. The only time in my life when I did try and analyse what I was doing, I got pimples on my face, I'd get constipated, and I would walk around and I couldn't have sex.

"I know when it's good" Lurie grins, pimpleless, regular and virile, "and when its bad. You can just feel it."

Which is a cool way of saying that Cool can't be answerable to.