Michael Quercio didn’t mean for it to stick. Having come up with the term while ad-libbing lyrics in rehearsals, the singer of The Three O’Clock repeated it during a sit-down with LA Weekly at the back end of 1982.

“Michael and I were talking to this writer at Denny’s restaurant on Sunset Boulevard,” recalls Danny Benair, his then-bandmate. “And he just stumbled into saying ‘Paisley Underground’ in the middle of the interview. For some reason, people grabbed onto that name and it turned into something. There was a romantic feel to it.” The scene that Quercio inadvertently christened had been bubbling along in the hippest quarters of LA for over a year. Hair metal and new wave pop were the dominant forces in post-punk California, but the Paisley Underground bands offered an alternative. The nucleus of the movement – The Dream Syndicate, The Bangles, The Three O’Clock and Rain Parade – all took inspiration from 60s psychedelia and garage-rock, offering fresh perspectives on the modern age through a vintage lens.“We were all bands who wanted to drag the 60s kicking and screaming into the 80s,” explains The Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs. “And because we didn’t quite fit into any of the categories that were happening in LA at the time, we all found each other quickly. The Dream Syndicate were more like The Velvet Underground, The Salvation Army – who became The Three O’Clock – were punk and psychedelic and The Bangles were sort of Beatles, Byrds and The Mamas & The Papas. And before he formed Rain Parade, David Roback and I had been a couple during my college years at Berkeley, where we had this band called The Unconscious. I’d seen the Sex Pistols and Patti Smith at Winterland and I also loved the New York art scene stuff and Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello, so for us it was the 60s filtered through punk and new wave.”

“Paisley Underground was a scene more than a sound,” says The Dream Syndicate’s Steve Wynn. “We didn’t fit in with what was happening in L.A. That’s what really made it: we had enough in common with each other and almost nothing in common with anybody else. And none of us were hearing what we wanted to hear, so we just did it ourselves. It was a very definite and particular movement and an exciting moment in time, but it wasn’t like we were all doing the same thing. We were going in different directions.”

The seeds of the Paisley Underground weren’t necessarily all sown locally. Four hundred miles north, in Davis, California, college students Wynn and Kendra Smith had formed The Suspects in 1979. The band split after one single, but Wynn relocated to his native LA the following year with fresh incentive. By early 1981 it was all starting to happen. Roback, another returning Angeleno, had co-founded Rain Parade with his college roommate from Minnesota, Matt Piucci. Quercio was up and running with The Salvation Army, while sisters Vicki and Debbi Peterson had answered Hoffs’ ad in a free paper and begun gigging as The Bangs. Elsewhere, Dan Stuart had moved to LA from Tuscon, Arizona, and changed the name of his band from The Serfers to Green On Red. And Sid Griffin, a 26-year-old from Kentucky, was making ripples on the live scene as leader of The Unclaimed.

For Griffin, who would quit to form The Long Ryders before the year was out, California represented liberation. He’d first arrived in 1977, to attend grad school as a scriptwriter at USC.

“I got to Pasadena and collapsed after driving across the country in a Chevy Chevette, which was like the Morris Minor of the US,” he remembers. “California was so different from the South. It was so much freer and nuttier. Peter Case, my good friend from The Plimsouls, likens Southern California to when your parents go away for the weekend, except they’re gone the whole year. Suddenly there’s a party at your house with 200 people, most of whom you’ve never seen before in your life. It was incredible. The opportunities were there, the fun was there, the danger was there. It was crazy.”

Paisley Underground’s big bang – or smallish bang – was 1981’s That’s What You Always Say/Last Chance For You. Credited to 15 Minutes, a short-lived trio led by Wynn (who released it on his own Down There label), the A-side would later be revived in his next project, The Dream Syndicate. Not that he even dared plan so far ahead at that stage.

“The reason I called the band 15 Minutes and made that single,” he explains, “was because I’d been playing in bands, on and off, for 10 years and had never really done anything of note. I wanted to make one single so that, 30 years later, I could say to my kids or my buddies at the bar, ‘Look at this! Back in the 80s I made a record.’ I thought that little 15 minutes of personal fame really would be the end of it.”

Within months, The Salvation Army had brought out a single (the suitably psychedelic Mind Gardens) and The Bangs had formed their own label to issue a garagey 45, Getting Out Of Hand. “I drove over and hand-delivered it to Rodney Bingenheimer at The Odyssey, where he used to DJ on a Monday night,” Hoffs recalls. “Things moved pretty quickly after that. [Audibly wincing] Kim Fowley called me to try to get his hands on the band, but I said ‘no’. Then Miles Copeland signed us to Faulty Products, where we met the wonderful Craig Leon, who produced our little EP.” By then, in May 1982, the band had expanded to a four-piece and renamed themselves The Bangles.

The Paisley Underground groups were now regularly sharing bills around LA, usually at either the Whisky, the Cathay De Grande, Club 88 or Club Lingerie. It was a union strengthened when The Bangles, The Dream Syndicate, The Three O’Clock and several members of Rain Parade took a trip out to Catalina Island that summer.

“We all really liked each other and had certain connections – Vicki and I were roommates in a rock’n’roll hangout house at the time – so I think Michael Quercio had the idea to go on a little vacation,” says Wynn. “Catalina is a half-hour boat trip from down in San Pedro. We all went out there and walked around, drinking and talking. We had no money, so when nightfall came someone had the idea of sleeping on the golf course. I think the sprinklers went off about four in the morning, so that was that. It was back to the mainland.”

Recalls Hoffs: “My little relationship with Louis [Gutierrez, of The Three O’Clock] blossomed on that trip. Vicki and Debbi were like, ‘You were in the same sleeping bag as Louis!’ Our bands had been playing together for a while and then we dated.

It was quite incestuous, because I’d dated David Roback before that.”

Danny Benair, who became The Three O’Clock’s drummer just as they transitioned from The Salvation Army in the summer of ’82, describes the scene as “this little band of people who got to know each other, played gigs together and, in some cases, dated. We saw a lot of Susanna, because she would come to a lot of our gigs and we’d go to hers. At one gig, The Bangles were our backing singers. And I remember Michael coming

in one day and saying that he had this song he’d co-written about Sue: The Girl With The Guitar (Says Oh Yeah) [from 1985’s Arrive Without Travelling]. She probably had a few songs written about her. That’s the impression I got.” For the record, Hoffs reveals that she’s an uncredited presence on the finished version: “Michael Quercio had me just say, ‘Oh yeah.’”

Meanwhile, Wynn rehearsed with a prototype of Griffin’s Long Ryders, prior to concentrating on a reunion with Kendra Smith in The Dream Syndicate. “To me, Sid was already a rock star,” offers Wynn. “I’d been a big fan of The Unclaimed, who were really the one band in LA who’d played unfiltered, unadulterated garage rock. My Rosetta Stone was the Nuggets album and then all the Pebbles records. I ate that stuff up.” According to Wynn, Griffin was shocked when he told him he was throwing in his lot with The Dream Syndicate, “but he accepted my resignation and got this guy named Stephen McCarthy, which was probably the best thing he could’ve done.”

It’s a prime example of the kind of camaraderie that existed within the Paisley Underground, which soon grew to include The Long Ryders and Green On Red. Unlike many other music scenes, it didn’t appear driven by competitive jealousy or antagonism. Benair has a vivid memory of “a road trip with The Dream Syndicate pretty early on, when they had a white station wagon and we had a white van.

And somewhere in the middle of that trip we became Dream O’Clock or The Three Syndicate, but basically the bands split in half and we started sharing travel.” Griffin has his own theory about the unique nature of that LA scene. “It could only have happened in Southern California,” he suggests. “My take is that the warm weather and positive vibes left over from the 60s meant that you weren’t rivals. Everyone was friendly. When New York bands like The Fleshtones or some of the Boston bands would tell me how competitive their scenes were, about how people wouldn’t even speak to each other, I was stunned.

I remember loaning amps to Rain Parade without worrying about when they were going to bring them back. And Matt Piucci was kind enough to be a roadie for The Long Ryders at a few gigs. No money exchanged hands. I sold T-shirts for The Bangles and The Three O’Clock when their merch guy didn’t show up.”

Much of the socialising happened at Green On Red’s gaff in East Hollywood. “We’d play shows together to hang out,” Wynn says. “But if there was one unifying place for the scene it was the Sunday evening barbecues at the Green On Red house.

We’d get together, have barbecues, lots of alcohol and play records till dawn. The great thing was that we all paid a lot of attention to each other and were all simultaneously cheerleaders and competitors. I’d hear The Bangles play a new song and think, ‘Oh, that is so good. I have to write one tomorrow.’ When each new record came out, we’d try to raise the bar a little.”

On the album front, The Salvation Army struck first with a self-titled effort in May 1982, just prior to the name change. The Dream Syndicate followed suit in October, issuing the glorious The Days Of Wine And Roses on Ruby Records, a division of Slash. “Everyone talks about the Velvets and maybe a few other bands, but the influence of The Fall on that record was huge,” Wynn explains. “They were the touchstone of what I wanted to do.”

It would be another year before The Three O’Clock launched themselves with Sixteen Tambourines, while the hard-driving EP 10-5-60 marked the studio debut of The Long Ryders. Griffin notes that Stephen Carthy’s arrival brought an extra dimension to the band: “His Clarence White-style country guitar-playing gave us a direction that nobody else had. When we started playing straight country music – but played by young men with a rock’n’roll attitude – people applauded. I thought, ‘Jesus, we’ve really got something different going here.’ That was a big deal.”

On Wynn’s recommendation, Green On Red signed to Slash and released their own long-player, Gravity Talks, in the autumn of ’83. But it was The Bangles, who’d survived the loss of their bassist and the collapse of Miles Copeland’s label, who became the first of the Paisley Underground set to be snapped up by a major. All Over The Place, issued on Columbia in the early summer of 1984, didn’t exactly set the charts ablaze, but it did at least give them a minor hit single with their cover of Katrina & The Waves’ Going Down To Liverpool.

Both The Long Ryders and Rain Parade agreed deals with Island Records within the next 12 months. The Paisley Underground had grown inexorably upward and outward. “The Bangles were off on the East Coast, Rain Parade were over in the UK and we were about to tour the US South,” Wynn recalls of that period, which saw The Dream Syndicate shift over to A&M.

“It was crazy. Every time I picked up a magazine, we’d be in it. We were all finding new things, different levels of success and looking for new excitement. So there was really nothing holding us together by that point.”

The psychedelic inference of Paisley Underground, in the meantime, had piqued the interest of one of the decade’s new superstars. Prince came knocking at The Bangles’ door after he’d taken a shine to one of their singles, Hero Takes A Fall (ostensibly about Wynn). “Within a few days of hearing When Doves Cry on the radio for the first time, somebody came up to me and said, ‘Do you know that Prince really likes The Bangles?’” recalls Hoffs. “He’d seen the song on MTV and the next thing I knew he’d just pop up at our shows. And several times he’d get up onstage with us. We jammed with him a couple of years later, after he’d invited us to Sunset Sound, on Sunset Boulevard. He just wanted to play Bangles songs. He knew them all, which was crazy. That was when he offered us the cassette with Manic Monday on it.”

It proved a game-changer. The Bangles’ recording of Manic Monday, released in January 1986, was a massive international hit, reaching the second spot on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the UK charts. Parent album Different Light went triple platinum.

Prince wasn’t quite done, either.

Months later, before The Bangles capped a dream year when Walk Like An Egyptian gave them their first US No 1, his Purpleness turned his attention to The Three O’Clock. “It might’ve been Sue Hoffs who said that Prince had seen our video of Her Head’s Revolving and really liked it,” explains Benair. “Then his LA office sent a woman to come see us play at the Palace. She really liked what she saw and reported back. Shortly after that, we signed to Paisley Park to record Vermillion [1988]. We also got a tour of Paisley Park, then afterwards there was a giant party, where Prince played until four in the morning. That was the only time that we met him. We kept getting threats that he was going to come to the studio, but he never did.”

Sadly, none of this was built to last. Rain Parade split later in ’86, with Roback and Kendra Smith having already formed Opal (Roback would go on to steer Mazzy Star). The Long Ryders folded a year later, The Three O’Clock called time in 1988 and both The Dream Syndicate and The Bangles decided they’d had enough before the 90s dawned.

The Paisley Underground seemed consigned to history. That is, until 2013, when The Three O’Clock unexpectedly got back together for Coachella and a series of other festival dates. Then came two gigs, at the Fillmore in San Francisco and LA’s Fonda Theatre, centred around the scene’s original core: The Bangles, The Three O’Clock, The Dream Syndicate and Rain Parade.

Both shows were so well-received that the participants started talking about making an album together. As is the way with these things, though, the momentum was lost, before finally being picked up again more recently by Wynn, Benair and Vicki Peterson. The result is 3 x 4: The Bangles, The Three O’Clock, The Dream Syndicate, Rain Parade – a twinkling record that finds each band covering one another’s songs, restyling them in their own inimitable way.

Steve Wynn sees it as the reclamation of an overlooked legacy and a vital link to the present. “I love the bands that are continuing what we did back then, whether consciously or unconsciously,” he explains. “I love the Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Mikal

Cronin and The Allah-Las. We were playing a festival in Italy quite recently, on the same bill as White Fence. I was sitting at dinner with their singer, Tim Presley. At one point I said: ‘Y’know, we were actually once part of this movement called the Paisley Underground.’ And he just looked at me like I was insane. He went: ‘I know who you are!’”

For Susanna Hoffs, the album is a warm reminder of just how durable those emotional ties to the Paisley Underground are.

“They were such fun times,” she concludes. “We were young, we were in our twenties, we were so high on just being able to be creative artists. We had a community, which is the greatest thing. We were our own little outcasts in the scene. It was like our own little club. That’s why we clung to each other.”

3×4: The Bangles, The Three O’Clock, The Dream Syndicate, Rain Parade is out now. The Long Ryders’ new album Psychedelic Country Soul is released by Cherry Red.