Addictive personality: Perry Farrell

In the late Eighties, Perry Farrell's hedonistic lifestyle prompted Rolling Stone to predict his premature death. He tells James McNair how he cleaned up his act

Perry Farrell is a skinny man. So skinny, in fact, that in the course of the day's interviews at Virgin Records, he's managed to break two wooden chairs with his bony backside. While he changes his outfit post photo-shoot, I chat with his stylist, then the singer rejoins me at a canal-side table. We've just sat down (no further breakages) when some Canada geese honk past in V formation. Their cries drown out my opening question, but the laughter that ensues breaks the ice.

I've waited years to interview Farrell; he's one of rock's true mavericks, and a sculptor and film-maker as well as a musician. At the tail-end of the Eighties, his arty, LA-based band Jane's Addiction virtually re-invented hard rock, their sound a gripping fusion of caustic guitars, nursery-rhyme simple melodies, and loping, melodic bass-lines. It was Jane's Addiction's freshness and intelligence, many claim, that sounded the death knell for LA's poodle rockers. For that alone we should be grateful.

What made Jane's truly distinctive was the strange beauty of Farrell's effects-laden, nasal voice, and his controversial lyrics: "Been Caught Stealing" was a proto-hip hop/metal celebration of shoplifting. "Three Days", a stand-out track from 1990's Ritual De Lo Habitual, told of a heroin-fuelledménage à trois involving Farrell, his then-partner Casey Niccoli and a former girlfriend, Xiola Bleu.

Though Jane's Addiction recently reformed and will play further concerts this year, Farrell is in London to promote his second solo album, Song Yet To Be Sung. Drawing on dub, electronica, and drum'n'bass textures, the record is a joyous if flawed work which Farrell's fans will recognise as a laudable attempt to keep innovating.

He tells me the album is the result of a "three and a half-year meditation", reminding me that I'm now dealing with a less hedonistic Perry, whose social conscience has kicked-in with a vengeance. The source of his new found zeal becomes clearer listening to "Happy Birthday Jubilee", a song inspired by an Old Testament law given to Moses on Mount Sinai. "It asked the people of Israel to celebrate their liberty with a huge musical festival once every 50 years," Farrell enthuses, "and we're living in the Jubilee cycle right now. It's a time to let go captives, forgive each other and forgo all debts."

While Bono and co's Jubilee 2000 campaign achieved great results vis-à-vis the cancellation of Third World Debt, Farrell's outworking of the Jubilee ethos focuses on its condemnation of slavery. Soon after he began work on Song, he was approached by the American Anti-Slavery Group. "They invited me to hear former captives from Sudan, Afghanistan and Thailand speak about their experiences at a conference in Washington DC," he says. "Afterwards, when we sat down for lunch, I realised that I could help economically, and by disseminating information, too."

Though Farrell has always been politically and spiritually aware, his current lifestyle is something of a volte-face. This is the man whose fondness for heroin and cocaine "speed-balls" once led Rolling Stone to dub him "rock star most likely to die in the next year".

With hindsight, it seems reasonable to posit that Farrell's late-Eighties nihilism was reactive. His mother committed suicide when he was three, and the emotional baggage of that tragedy enabled him to bond with Jane's Addiction guitarist, Dave Navarro. No stranger to heroin abuse himself, Navarro had witnessed his own mother's murder at the hands of a jealous former lover when he was 15. It is not for nothing that many Jane's Addiction songs – "Classic Girl"; "Jane Says"; "Then She Did" – lend an almost iconic status to woman.

"I still mourn and it hurts, but I don't feel I'm any different from the next guy," says Farrell regarding his own loss. "When a person has something like that happen in their life, the better thing to do is to try to make some flowers grow out of it."

Listening to "Our Song" from the new album you realise how well Farrell has learnt to do this. The track's title acknowledges a happier bond, namely that between the singer and his two-year-old son, Yobel.

"I was with Yobel one day", says Farrell, "and even though he was just a few months old, I noticed that he was responding to this giddy, happy Stephane Grappelli music. My eyes were opened. You don't have to go very far to see pain, sorrow and agony, so I don't need that angry, pro-wrestler thing in my music any more. I still use strong sounds, but I try to make them reflect what's joyful, funny, deep, preposterous or... sexy, maybe. After that I start to filter things out."

Other than his work with Jane's Addiction, Farrell is probably best known for conceiving and spearheading Lollapalooza, the touring, multi-genre musical festival he launched in the US in 1991. Ten years on, it seems that his love of spectacle is undiminished.

"I feel the wind in my sails," he says. "I'm currently looking for musicians and dancers to join me for a huge Jubilee celebration in the Judaean wilderness." He seems to, remember something. "Meeting tomorrow with Asian Dub Foundation," he explains. "I think they have the right spirit."

'Song Yet To Be Sung' is out on Virgin on 16 July