IT'S a bizarre twist of pop history that Eddy Grant, he of Electric Avenue and Gimme Hope Jo'anna, had a key role in the tale of Madchester.

The story, once told with wry humour by the late Tony Wilson, is that when Manchester's Factory Records needed a follow-up album to 1990's Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches from the Happy Mondays, they booked the band into Grant's studio in Barbados.

Shaun Ryder was at that time battling heroin addiction, and Wilson had heard there was no heroin on Barbados.

"But no one told us it was Crack City," Wilson once told me. "The day we pulled the recording, because it completely collapsed due to crack, a person from the band was stopped at 1am with the back fire doors of the studio open. He was taking two sofas out of Eddy Grant's studio to town to sell for crack."

To add injury to insult, the Mondays' dancer and maracas-merchant Bez also broke his arm after rolling a hired Jeep.

"I was not in Barbados at the time, but I was getting blow-by-blow accounts by phone on a daily basis," says Grant.

"My wife was saying, 'These guys are doing all kinds of crazy things. They're going to die before they leave here'. It has now passed into legend."

Sadly, the resulting album, Yes Please, was lacklustre and so late in coming that Wilson cited that as a factor in the 1992 collapse of Factory.

Other guests at Grant's studio down the years - the Rolling Stones, Sting, Elvis Costello and many others - have been better behaved. "This place has a magic about it. That's why I work nowhere else," says Grant.

No fan of America's place in the world, Grant criticises the US's reluctance to discuss demands for reparations to be paid to Caribbean countries for the legacy of slavery and says the debate last year as to whether Britain should say sorry for slavery was "an absolute nonsense" and "an insult".

"It's time we did our house-cleaning," he says. "You have actually dealt with the geneology of a people by virtue of the things you have done. It's a massive issue."

And he has trenchant views on the record business, which he says is 'bloody racist'. "There's no doubt about it," he says. "Nothing's changed. In England, where are the black executives of record companies?"

Grant's part in that history stretches way back. Born in Guyana, his family moved to London when he was 12, giving young Eddy a good grounding in the music of both the Caribbean and Britain. He formed the Equals - one of Britain's first multi-racial bands - and topped the charts in 1968 with Baby Come Back.

As a solo artist, his most successful era was the 1980s, mixing rock and Caribbean styles in songs like Electric Avenue. He moved to Barbados in the early part of that decade.

So, why, after 20 years, is he finally touring the UK?

"I was always coming to England, just not playing gigs. I have two daughters and two brothers in the UK, but my parents came back to the Caribbean," he says. "I turned 60 this year and my first question to my manager was, 'Can you get me to play Glastonbury?' because I've never played there."

So Grant will play Glastonbury before hitting the road.