To listen to Robert Pollard speak is to spiral at 45 rpm through the worn-out grooves of a mind so stuffed with obscure musical ephemera, you’d swear he was spieling rock-star cocaine-babble. Except that it’s 10am on a Monday in Dayton, Ohio, and Robert Pollard is a 38-year-old primary-school teacher with two teenage children who has given up his job to concentrate full time on the Sunday afternoon hobby band Guided by Voices that has suddenly taken over his life.

As a schoolboy, Pollard performed all the usual adolescent rock-fan rituals, scribbling exercise books full of song lyrics and designing imaginary album covers. And then he grew up, and just carried on. Since 1983, Pollard has been putting his childhood fantasies into action through Guided by Voices, with the assistance of a shifting set of acolytes, a four-track home recording studio and an incurable addiction to the onanistic vice of songwriting.

In 1993, after releasing 10 primitively engineered albums and about 117 psychedelic/beat-pop songs, Guided by Voices suddenly found themselves at the centre of a bidding war between Warner Bros and the ultimately more attractive indie label, Matador. Now Pollard is the trainspotter who has somehow found himself managing the railway.

The last three Guided by Voices records have averaged about 25 songs apiece, none much more than two minutes long, with Pollard tossing away more melodies and infuriatingly catchy hooklines in one album than most bands write in a career. The band’s devotion to basic recording techniques has made them icons of musical integrity for millions of misguided musos who equate tape hiss with honesty. “I never strove to be some example of indie credibility,” counters Pollard. “I always just wanted to be a big tunes rock band. We only used the four-track out of necessity, not choice. We wanted to be spontaneous, and not to squeeze the life out of the songs.”

It seems amazing that Guided by Voices learned to make a stylistic virtue of no budget and to exploit the varying timbres of each other’s bathrooms and basements, but the early Beatles albums are still used as a yardstick of quality today, and they were all recorded in one take around a piece of bare electrical wire tied to a stick. The sleeve of Hard Day’s Night talks of the innovative double-tracking of Lennon’s vocal with the kind of reverence usually reserved for the discovery of an astonishing new medicine. “I think that raw 1960s stuff sounds better anyhow,” says Pollard. “Most studio stuff is overproduced. With Matador’s money behind us, we’ve been using an 82-track studio to try and duplicate the sound we had before.”

Pollard’s love of the Beatles reflects his own ambitions for Guided by Voices. He admires Lennon for his “impatience, for wanting to write and record quickly”, and the more pedestrian McCartney for his “sequencing skills, for the way the tracks are ordered. You can’t beat the late 1960s Beatles. The White Album was esoteric and spontaneous, everything you want.”

Pollard’s catholic range of tastes and influences embraces old 1960s garage bands, early 1970s British and German progressive rock, REM, and the post-punk of English bands such as Wire and XTC. “I loved all British music up until about 1981, but not any more. I think the New Romantics broke everything down, and British music has never recovered.” Tragically, Pollard is right. The new album by Guided by Voices, Under the Bushes, under the Stars, sounds like a hit-single compilation from a parallel universe where Dolby was never invented and it was not Merseybeat that gripped the imaginations of 1960s youth, but Daytonbeat. A 38-year-old American man in sneakers and, I expect, a backwards baseball cap with the logo of some farming machinery company on it, is writing better guitar songs than any of our feted Brit-pop bands.

The new single, The Official Ironman Rally Song, is an insinuating piece of self-mythologisation comparable to the Clash’s Garageland or Glen Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy. Pollard sheepishly maintains that all he does is “spin unrelated phrases together because of the way they sound”, but the song goes some way towards a definition of the Guided by Voices ethic, describing the band as a mechanism to “trigger a synapse” and “free us from our traps”.
They promise to take the “freaks and happy little babies with red cheeks” suckered by the bombast of post-grunge rock and “rock them gently out of sync”.

“Matador keep telling me to quit writing songs for a while as they’re not ready to put a new record out,” concludes Pollard. “`Take a vacation,’ they say, `watch TV.’ But I can’t…”