It was the evening of 18 January 1986, and the Replacements had the biggest TV spot of their career. Alongside Harry Dean Stanton and Sam Kinison, they were to be guests on Saturday Night Live, the comedy institution that was must-see TV in US households. They were allowed two songs – their single Bastards of Young and Kiss Me on the Bus – both from Tim, their first album since signing to the Warner Brothers imprint, Sire.

Maybe the band had noted that SNL was having the most disastrous season in its history, and figured their behaviour wouldn’t matter. More likely, they just did what they were wont to do when presented with a golden opportunity: throw it down the toilet, then take a crap on it. The Replacements’ two songs passed in a blur of missed cues, bum notes, stumbling stage moves, appalling clothes, barely off-mic obscenities, and visible and audible drunkenness. They were immediately banned from SNL, and there went another opportunity for the great underachievers of American rock to live up to their talent.

If you want a single incident that encapsulates the Replacements, their bass player Tommy Stinson says, that’s the one. He’s right – because as well as all but falling off the stage, the Replacements were also sort-of-great that night – their performance of Bastards of Young, especially, is a blast.

The Replacements: 10 of the best Read more

“There was a game that had to be played that had nothing to do with music and everything to do with stroking someone else and fucking doing the whole song and dance that was completely foreign and, quite frankly, illegal to us,” Stinson says of their attitude to career management. “It was reprehensible some of the things they wanted us to do that were supposed to make our career bigger and ultimately make them the money. I swear to God we tried several times to get in line with that and we just couldn’t do it. Our personalities would not allow us to do that thing.”

“I admit there’s a lack of dignity,” says the Replacements’ singer, songwriter and rhythm guitarist, Paul Westerberg. “But that’s part of what being the band is. You have to go out on a limb and take a chance. Falling on your face when you’re young and good looking is one thing, but when you’re an old man it can be quite humiliating.”

Westerberg and Stinson are now going out on a limb and taking that chance. After playing their first shows together under the Replacements name in more than 20 years in summer 2013, they’re making their first return to Europe with five shows at the end of May and the start of June. And the whole thing has not been without its concerns for Westerberg, who has spent the last couple of decades on a quietly dignified solo career, while Stinson has stood alongside Axl Rose in Guns N’ Roses. “There’s a funny chemistry between Tommy and myself when we get together – we do tend to want to raise the devil a little bit,” he says. “And that’s a temptation. It’s so natural.” He laughs, a little ruefully. “I think I was afraid of the lifestyle of the band. And feeling like there was some obligation to do that.”

The story of one of the ur-bands of American rock – beloved by peers including REM and disciples such as Nirvana, and whose perfect, lovelorn songs have attracted admirers as unlikely as Matty Healy of the 1975 – started in unpromising circumstances in Minneapolis. Stinson was an 11-year-old tearaway – “I’d been to jail three times already, for fucking just being a little fuck-up” – when his older brother Bob gave him a bass guitar in 1978 in an attempt to keep him off the streets. Stinson was already a rock’n’roll fan, listening to a 50s oldies station on the AM radio he kept in the “Tommy shrine” in the closet jammed against his bed, and now the Stinson brothers started a band, Dogbreath, who rehearsed in the family basement, playing the prog rock Bob loved – “All the stuff that really makes my ears hurt now,” Tommy says – in versions Tommy concedes were approximate at best.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Replacements – Bastards of Young

One evening Westerberg, then an 18-year-old janitor in the office of Senator David Durenberger, heard Dogbreath practising as he walked home from work. He inveigled his way into the band, gradually establishing himself as its leader, and the Replacements were born. In May 1980 they recorded their first demo, got themselves signed to the local label Twin Tone, and commenced on a run of records that made them one of the most admired bands in America. Initially, they were trying to play hardcore punk, but it rapidly became apparent that they could and would try their hands at anything, with sometimes disastrous results. Given an audience of punks, they would reconfigure their songs into country or lounge music, to wind up the crowd. The internet is awash with recordings of Replacements shows in which the blind-drunk band toss off gruseome cover after gruesome cover: one of them got a semi-official release with the wholly accurate title The Shit Hits the Fans. Yet Westerberg also blossomed into an astonishing songwriter, with an equal facility for fearsome rockers and heartrending ballads.

Not that the band were always appreciative of his songs. “They all liked Takin’ a Ride, the first one,” he says. “After that it was a big argument for 10 years.” He laughs. He’s been insistent over the years that the rest of the band were especially unhappy with his penchant for ballads, but Stinson disagrees. “That’s a misconception he’s run with. I was never mortified by them. My brother was definitely not into them, but that’s because Paul and my brother had more of a competing nature towards each other. Fucking every song he brought in was a hit in my world – ‘Shit, let’s get out there and fucking tear it up!’”

The heart of the Replacements lies in the three albums they released between 1984 and 1987. Let It Be – what a hubristic title! – mixed utter stupidity, the last gasps of their hardcore beginnings, and a series of ballads that captured teenage life like few writers had done before, with incredible empathy; Tim contained what were arguably Westerberg’s best songs, but was hampered by a rotten period production (“It’s a terrible-sounding record,” Stinson says); Pleased to Meet Me was the most traditionally rocking album, but contained the perfect acoustic miniature Skyway (“I knew that was a good little song,” Westerberg says).

What enabled them to be so many different things, Westerberg says, is that “there’s more than one Paul. Paul is the rhythm guitar player and singer of the rock’n’roll band. And then Paul is the songwriter who really liked his Hank Williams and his Bob Dylan. That is something that I was always very cautious with around the guys. But that was part of what made us unique: we were utterly unpredictable. We had a metal maniac guitar player and an artist for a drummer. And me, a closet folkie. It made for a nice mix of unpredictablility. I think you’re hard pressed to find another group that had as many facets to them as we did, and going through the songs now there’s an unlimited variety of everything from quasi showtunes to fake speed metal. God almighty, what were we trying to prove?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Replacements live in 1981

Westerberg also had a gift for song titles and for lyrics that would alternate from vulnerability to one-liners, often summing up his own band’s situation: “One foot in the door/ The other one in the gutter,” he sang, accurately on I Don’t Know, from Pleased to Meet Me. “I read a great deal back then, a ton of fiction, Tennessee Williams, Updike and Flannery O’Connor. I’ve gotten away from that, but I think that was good for my writing process. And some of these lyrics are pretty good. It’s a shame that I threw them away, because I don’t remember them.”

But by their penultimate album, 1989’s Don’t Tell a Soul, things were going awry. Bob Stinson was long sacked, and Westerberg, by his own account, was trying too hard to write hits. He was also realising that maybe the Replacements weren’t only missing success because of their attitude, but also because people seemed to prefer their rock’n’roll to be polished and slick and big-haired, rather than sloppy and unpredictable. So he tried to be polished and slick and big-haired. “Our nemesis was the Cult – they were on the same label, and all of our records were pushed back or held because the Cult had a new record out,” he says. “So they’d hire someone to throw in a bunch of compression and reverb to make it sound like it would work on the radio and that kind of funny business. But it didn’t sound right, it didn’t look right. We were just … midwestern.” Stinson is more succinct about the album: “It was a bit of a disaster. Don’t Tell a Soul was our least honest record and we made it under duress.”

There was one more album, All Shook Down – a Westerberg solo record in all but name, though Stinson says it’s now just about his favourite Replacements record – and that was that for more than 20 years, years in which the legend of the band grew, in which they were namedropped more and more often, films were made about them, and the offers for them to reform got bigger and bigger. The records were reissued with bonus tracks scraped up from all over the place (“Stuff that came from my basement that a manager pocketed one day and however many years later it’s viable for someone else to make money off of,” Westerberg says. “I’m always wary of it”).

The Replacements on stage in 2013. Photograph: Steve Cohen

Westerberg thinks that if they’d become stars first time round, two things would have happened. First, several members of the band would have died (as it was, Bob Stinson died as a result of his addictions to alcohol and drugs in 1995, eight years after being sacked) from a lifestyle in which booze and powders were constants. Second, no one would care about them now. Their failure, he says, “certainly cemented the fans. And then the legend grew from us not playing – we weren’t debunking it by not going out.” After the split, not just their legend but their influence spread. The Goo Goo Dolls built a career on their admiration for the Replacements’ sound, but in recent years the focus has been not on the revved-up guitars, but on the content of Westerberg’s songwriting, resulting in some unlikely covers – Swingin’ Party, originally on Tim, was a centrepiece of Lorde’s live show, and has been covered by Kindness. Glen Campbell recorded a version of Sadly Beautiful in 2008. Now Miley Cyrus has just unveiled a cover – alongside Joan Jett and Laura Jane Grace – of Androgynous, originally from Let It Be.

The two founder members – they are now supplemented on stage by drummer Josh Freese and guitarist Dave Minehan – have markedly different attitudes to their band now. For Stinson, it’s a journey back with “attitude and nonchalance”, the chance to remind everyone that “the charm of the Replacements is that we’re not the greatest musicians on the planet, we’re a great fucking rock’n’roll band.”

For Westerberg, there’s the irritated awareness that after two years on the road, the Replacements have again become an opportunity for other people to make money. “There’s certainly whiffs of that these days,” he says. “There’s income being generated, and, like the song says, money changes everything. But once we get up there … We play for free. We get paid for waiting.” There’s also the problem of relearning the songs all over again, 25 or 30 years after they were written. “Literally, we haven’t played Treatment Bound in years, so I’m sitting there writing the words for the second time in my life. The first time was when we did it and the second time is here, 30 years later,” he says.

And there’s the fact that being a Replacement again has revived something in him. “Since starting up with the band again it’s kind of shaken every cobweb out of my head and got me rattled in a way – probably in a good way. I can’t relax any more. I can’t sit down and watch the television. I’m torn between the world of being a father, a homewowner and a creative artist and a rock’n’roll singer. I was doing the crossword puzzle waiting for you to call, and that’s about as relaxing as I get.”

When the Replacements take to the stage for the first of their two nights at the Roundhouse in London on 2 June , much of the past will be missing. There’ll be no guitarist wandering on halfway through because he was too drunk to play from the start; there will be no deliberate antagonising of the audience, no show so bad they’ll have to inscribe an apology into the runoff groove of their next record (as they did with Portland). But take a look at the clips from the reunion shows: there will still be a rock’n’roll band with the power to cut through the nostalgia and surprise the assembled thousands. Accept no replacements.

The Replacements play the Roundhouse, London, on 2 and 3 June. The Complete Studio Albums: 1981-1990 is out now on Rhino.