“We were John the Baptist, we weren’t Jesus Christ.” Doctors of Madness frontman Richard Strange is talking about his band’s prophetic-but-premature relationship to punk. “We didn’t know what was coming, we were just bored with what had been,” Strange adds, describing how mid-70s entropy – the lull between glam’s twilight and punk’s dawn – goaded the group into existence.

In recent years, cult interest has fastened on a phase in the 70s that has been called “punk before punk”: a catch-all for a musically motley bunch of bands who anticipated one aspect or other of 1977’s insurrection. In this not-quite-a-genre you’ll find stompy boot-boy rockers the Jook, the theatrical menace of Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Oi!-anticipating Cockney hooligans Heavy Metal Kids, the spiky New Wave premonitions of Jet and Ultravox, Musical Vomit’s shock-rock, and the back-to-basics blast of the Hammersmith Gorillas.

But no band fits the punk-before-punk tag better than Doctors of Madness. In 1976 alone, they released two major-label albums of fierce, scrawny rock with apocalyptic lyrics (one UK tour was named “End of the World”). Despite their heavyweight management, Doctors of Madness never made it. But many future punk luminaries – the Damned, Penetration, the Adverts, the Skids – were in the audience. Others – most significantly the Sex Pistols – played support to Doctors of Madness at gigs. Now, nearly 40 years after disbanding, the Doctors of Madness story is being retold thanks to the comprehensive box set Perfect Past. There’s even a happy ending, as the band are reforming for a UK tour this month.

Doctors Of Madness, Kid Strange promo photo, 1976. Photograph: Handout

The story starts in mid-60s south London, where the teenage Strange – sparked equally by Dylan and Beat writers like Ginsberg – decided that rock was the right arena for his poetic ambitions. Early on, he was an acoustic-strumming troubadour, a fan (and friend) of Roy Harper, whose declamatory style and dark absurdism is an influence secreted deep in the Doctors of Madness mix. But then Bowie hit the scene, spurring Strange to form a band with a kick-in-the-eye image and domineering theatrical presence. Ziggy had already done orange hair, so Strange went up a level: blue hair with green sideburns. In combination with his angular 6ft 4in frame and aquiline features, the look was striking.

Strange’s lyrics bore Bowie’s imprint, especially Diamond Dogs’s doomy visions. “I was singing about urban psychosis, control systems, paranoia, drugs,” Strange recalls. “All with this Burroughsian subtext of a dysfunctional dystopian society, where everything’s on the point of breakdown.” The band’s name also came from Burroughs: specifically Dr Benway, a recurring character whom Strange describes as “a total charlatan who masquerades as a doctor purely and simply to get his hands on drugs. As often as not he’ll be pocketing the codeine or cocaine while massaging the patient’s heart with a toilet plunger!

The name Doctors of Madness was, “a dream for copywriters and photographers”. The latter would dress the group up “in surgical clothes” or as asylum inmates. Each group member adopted a comic-book name: Richard Strange became Kid Strange, their electric violinist called himself Urban Blitz, while the bassist and drummer went by Stoner and Peter DiLemma respectively.

Doctors of Madness, London, 1976. Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images

The sound that the four worked up alternated between a harsh, high-energy roar propelled by Blitz’s John Cale-like screech, and ramshackle epics keening with desolate violin melody. Because they sounded like nothing else on the circuit in 1975, Doctors of Madness initially had to book their own gigs. At the fourth of a series of shows at a Twickenham pub, during which attendance doubled each week through word of mouth, not one but two high-profile managers approached the group. Strange had only just turned down Jonathan King when industry big-wig Brian Morrison walked into the dressing room. “Or rather his cigar came in first!” says Strange. “He said: ‘I could make you boys into stars. Come into my office on Monday,’”

Morrison and partner Justin de Villeneuve were classic London showbiz hustlers with flamboyant largesse. After financing six weeks of rehearsal time so the group could develop their stage act, the duo threw a massive launch party even before a record deal was signed. Formerly Twiggy’s manager, de Villeneuve had an address book crammed with A-listers. All received invitations to the big bash at Ladbrokes Casino in Mayfair, where they sipped champagne while listening bemused to the Doctors’s tumultuous racket. “That evening we rubbed shoulders with the glitterati of international film and stage – Peter Sellers, Sophia Lauren, Omar Sharif, John Mills, Yves St Laurent,” recalls Urban Blitz. “Justin was upset because Warren Beatty didn’t turn up!” De Villeneuve also wrangled the group onto Twiggy’s BBC variety show, where – swathed in dry ice – Strange and the supermodel duetted on the song Perfect Past.

Another Morrison / de Villeneuve coup turned calamitous, though. Aiming to stir American record business interest and win a lucrative contract, they persuaded NBC to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a rock band’s rise to stardom. “The crew lived in our pockets for two weeks - they came on tour, into the recording studio, to management meetings,” recalls Strange. “They were incredibly charming and plausible.” But when the show aired, the footage had been edited into “a total hatchet job, about this manufactured band with no live pedigree, being hyped by a pair of industry hustlers. They had shots of Brian on his polo field! So that scuppered our American ambitions.”

Doctors of Madness subsequently signed with Polydor for the UK and Europe, in a handsome three-album deal worth £150,000 (more than £1m in today’s money). During 1976, they gigged constantly, playing ever-larger halls, and released two albums, Late Night Movies, All Night Brainstorms, and Figments of Emancipation. At a time when there were murmurs of discontent and clear signs of hunger for an angry young sound, Doctors of Madness fitted the bill. Out, on the second album, is a classic anthem of maladjustment – “out of time, out of place, out of touch/ I’ve lost everything but I guess that’s nothing much.” – that looks ahead to the scowling misanthropy of the Stranglers. It even features the word “fuck” a full year before similar expletives shot out of the vinyl mouths of Johnny Rotten and Ian Dury.

So why, then, was it the Pistols and their peers who led the charge, and not Doctors of Madness? Perhaps it was the violin, which – even though Urban Blitz drove it through distortion pedals and often used it as a hard-driving rhythmic bludgeon – was associated with prog-rock acts like Curved Air rather than street kid music. Maybe it was because for every frenetic pummel like (the song) Doctors of Madness, there was a slower melancholy tune like Afterglow or an epic like the 18-minutes-long Mainlines (the stand-out on Late Night Movies). “It’s very much a sound that’s between two genres, a schizophrenic sound – sometimes tender, almost contemplative, and other times an amphetamine rush, like the song can barely wait to get to the end,” says Strange. It could also be that Morrison & de Villeneuve’s promotional tactics tarnished the group: these “two really wide London boys”, as Strange puts it, were well-connected showbiz veterans, not outsiders touting revolutionary spiel, like Malcolm McLaren and other punk managers.

In Strange’s telling, the turning point in the tale comes when the Sex Pistols supported Doctors of Madness at Middlesborough Town Hall, on 21 May 1976. “Watching them from the side of the stage, I realised it was all over for us – the goalposts were suddenly moved. We were probably three years older than them, no more, but the generational difference was seismic.” Compounding the injury and insult of being consigned to the old wave in one fell swoop, Doctors of Madness’s clothes were rifled for cash during their headlining performance, with the guttersnipe Pistols doubtless scarpering from the dressing room and cackling all the way to the nearest pub.

Doctors of Madness, 1976. Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images

Polydor shifted all their energy to signing New Wave artists (including the Jam, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure) while Doctors of Madness were shunted into the “last year’s things” file. They made one more album, Sons of Survival, recorded on a lower budget than the preceding Figments (done at Abbey Road) and with a discernibly punked-up sound and styling. Then, shrewdly, they called it a day.

Strange wasn’t done with the music business, though. He developed a solo act, using backing tapes and slide projections to stage a performance piece titled The Phenomenal Rise of Richard Strange. “It was my political fantasy of a glamorous but cynical character using what he’s learned in showbiz and advertising to become president of a united Europe.” Rather than money or even power, the character is “interested in doing it for the game, as a conceptual exercise almost,” says Strange, pointing to Reagan, and now Trump, as fulfilments of his prophetic satire.

The Phenomenal Rise was released first as a 1980 live album. By then Strange had become newly hip as founder/host/curator of Cabaret Futura, a Soho weekly where early performances by Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, and Shane MacGowan jostled with performance art and absurdist comedy (like Keith Allen’s nude ventriloquist act using a steak-and-kidney pie as a dummy). Although there would be other music ventures, Strange’s career then took a swerve into acting for TV, the stage, and most successfully, movies (roles in Mona Lisa, Batman, Robin Hood, and Gangs of New York, amongst others). Strange recalls that early on a director said, in reference to his commanding physical presence, “You’ll always work – you’ve got a look about you.”

In the 21st Century, Strange published a superior contribution to the rock memoir genre with 2002’s witty, well-observed Strange: Punks and Drunks and Flicks and Kicks. In 2010, encouraged by his teenage step-children, Strange relaunched Cabaret Futura as a monthly, which is still going. Doctors of Madness reunited for a one-off concert in 2014, as part of Strange’s Language is a Virus From Outer Space, a celebration of Burroughs’s work at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. But with Stoner now dead and Peter DiLemma not keen to travel, the current re-formation tour has been made possible thanks to a bizarre product of Japan’s super-advanced retro-culture: the Doctors of Madness tribute band Sister Paul, whose rhythm section are joining with Strange and Blitz to play 11 dates across the UK this month, in support of the Perfect Past box set.

Of the box’s contents, Strange says: “It’s lovely to listen to the songs again. They don’t sound particularly dated. Certainly the subject matter – the paranoia, the anxiety levels – really chimes with my teenage and twenty-something kids. They say, ‘I can’t believe you wrote these songs 40 years ago. This is exactly how things feel now.’”

Perfect Past is out now on Cherry Red. Doctors of Madness tour the UK from 24 May.