Armed with their sweaty six-strings, a huge record collection and a fervent belief in American Rock'n'Roll, the Long Ryders are taking on pretty synth Pop. And they might be winning.

His eyes were uncannily, startlingly blue — the blue of the sky above the Mojave desert, the blue of Levis faded by years of the harsh Western sun. They stared out of a face framed by bushy frontiersman sideburns and topped by a thatch of straight, wheat-coloured hair; just the sort you'd see peeping out from under a battered wide-brimmed hat. A craggy grin split the granite lines of his chin as he straightened his long, lean grey-clad legs and shifted the worn leather boots on the tabletop. The creases around his eyes, doubtless graven there by endless hours of scouring distant horizons, relaxed as he took his gaze from the view through the window to me.

"Okay," said Griffin, "Shoot." For a moment I was tempted to whip out the pearl-handled Derringer and drill the lean stranger right between the eyes. Until I remembered who he was.

Not to mention where he was. More Chiswick, W4 than Phoenix, Arizona; to be exact at the offices of Island Records, to whom Sid and his band, the Long Ryders, have recently signed for their second album. He isn't, despite an uncanny visual resemblance, a gunslinger of the Old West but instead a guitar picker of the New Wave of American Guitar Bands (abbreviate that if you can — NWOAGB. Sounds like someone swallowing a handbag).

Nonetheless, it seems that every other day there appears from the recess of the US backwoods some new pretenders to the throne of American Guitar Band. Some, like REM, take the tradition and bend it until it very nearly snaps. Some, like the Violent Femmes, strip down the format until its skeleton shows. And some, like the Long Ryders (but rarely as well) take the tradition and re-write it in vivid neon letters; intact but, like an Andy Warhol portrait, with all its details etched out in glowing wide-screen Technicolour.

The Long Ryders are well-equipped to take the archives of Americana and recycle them accurately, because in Sid they've got a historian and collector of impeccable pedigree; he's recently had published in book form a biography of the legendary Country Rock rebel Gram Parsons. In case you didn't know, Parsons with his band The Flying Burrito Brothers did more to give Stateside music a kick up the traditions than almost anybody; he spent most of his (short) life fighting the rhinestone-suits-and-Nashville rules of his Country contemporaries and dragging the genre kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. In the process, of course, he went through a lot of heartache and not a few varieties of excess — the culmination of both being his remarkably premature death and subsequent probable cremation by a friend with the aid of several gallons of petrol and a nearby desert. Of course (as always in the living-legend-snuffs-it business) there is still some lingering doubt about the manner, or indeed the actuality, of his death. Just like Jimi, Jim, or Marilyn, Gram Parsons' death has become as surrounded by myth his life. In real life, however, one unshakeable fact is that Parsons wrote and performed some of the best ever Country music and put thousands more on the right track.

But back in Chiswick, Sid Griffin is still sitting and talking about his influences — and his band. They are not few; Sid is a self-confessed Diskhead, a person who has albums the way the Onassis family have money. He has thousands, from James Brown to Dick Dale and the Surfaris. But a large percentage might well come under the category of Country Music, for that's the seam his band ploughs. So what's good about his much-reviled type of music — and why exhume it from its truck-drivin' man/home-lovin' woman niche and push it into today's ears?

"Welllll..." he drawled laconically, "we don't really see ourselves as a Country band as such. If you put us on stage with a couple of real good Country acts in front of an audience that knew about that type of music, we wouldn't stand a chance. They'd blow us into the next county. They'd cut us to shreds.

"We do take certain parts of the music, though — we share certain attitudes with Country bands, although by no means all of them. It's like — are the Pogues a straight Irish band?

"A lot of the superficial aspects of the music we've tossed out; we have a lot of energy in our rhythm section because we've heard The Clash and we've heard Never Mind The Bollocks; our attitude to our country, however, is the same.

"The Long Ryders don't use many standard Country and Western instruments like pedal steel or fiddle because once you get started on those you get tagged a Country act and you'll die a Country act. We do feel some affinity with Country and Western lyrically, but I'd feel very uneasy if we were to be given the title of straight Country. We're.... Countryesque."

"Some people spend money on girls and dope — I just spend it on guitars and records"

And strictly roots — US style. How do you get the sound?

"Keep it simple, stripped down to basics, and make those few things sound as big as possible. Like the Byrds or the Lovin' Spoonful. For instance, instead of strumming chords, we have definite parts. Like when the lead guitar player's doing a fill I play a series of picked chords behind it. It makes the sound wider and gives more dynamic range if you work out parts instead of just strumming all the time. That way you don't have to have the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on stage to make you sound good. It's nothing I thought of, or the Byrds thought of — it's something Muddy Waters used to do with just harmonica, guitar and drums.

"I play a 1960 Strat, a real beauty that you'd sell your mother to the Arabs for, except that some idiot refinished it so I got a 12 dollar Strat for 700. I also play a National which I got in a pawn shop for 150 dollars, a Rickenbacker 12-string which cost me 500 dollars, a Dobro, a Martin D-35... I mention all these not because I'm a materialistic American but because they're all cheap. I'm the guy to ask if you ever want to find out which pawnshop in LA has which Telecaster. Some people spend money on girls and dope — ljust spend it on guitars and records. I use an Old English Vox AC30 which cost me as much to ship to the States as to buy, and a Vox echo unit, a tape-loop one, which is great; instant Sun records echo. It sounds just like the echo on Diddly Daddy — the Bo Diddley track the Stones stole for 19th Nervous Breakdown — but it broke down a while ago so I don't use it live now.

"Our lead guitar player, Stephen McCarthy, has a Telecaster which he plays through a Fender amp; bass player Tom Stevens plays a Fender Precision, and we're going to buy him a new amp because he blew up his old one... and the drummer, Greg Sowders, has just bought a 1936 drum kit to replace his Slingerland kit. And that's about it. Not the most impressive line-up, I'm afraid, but we're broke. Right now I don't have enough money to pay attention.

"The thing is, if you want to sound like a real band, you have to get the right gear. Those Boss pedals can do a good echo, but when the guy in the shop tells you that it can get just the same sound as my 1965 Vox tape echo, he's lying. If you want to make a Rock and Roll record, you've got to get Rock and Roll gear. I can tell what year a record was made by the sound of the guitars and the amps, and to get what you want you've got to use the proper stuff. If you're in the Clash or The Blasters or The Long Ryders you don't use a Jazz Chorus amp."

So once you've got the right gear, how do you go about becoming a star: What would you advise would-be Johnny Cashes to do, Sid?

"Listen to as much as you like, but the thing I would say is find your own path. Don't try and be another George Jones or whoever, because no matter how good you are are he's going to be a better George Jones than you are.

"Play in front of an audience as much as you can. Parties, in front of friends, whatever. There are plenty of bands who make great demo tapes but can't play gigs, and while that may be possible in Britain where the music press can break a band who have only gigged a few times, America is a place where live playing is valued highly. And even if you don't get a major label deal in the States you can still live by playing gigs all over the place. Once you lose that nervousness you can only improve, and that'll help the band's songwriting and studio work as well."

So who do you think is good now? Which bands would the Long Ryders like to see in their local saloon?

"The Redskins."