“It’s funny being back here because it brings back memories,” muses John Maclean, The Aliens’ keyboard player, “it’s nice to be here with Gordon because he missed out the first time. It’s good to get him down here.”

Maclean is speaking from Cornwall where he and the other two Aliens are putting the finishing mixing touches to their second album. ‘Gordon’, of course, is Gordon Anderson, the outrageously talented, severely fucked-up frontman and songwriter for this trio. As Maclean says, he wasn’t there when, as part of The Beta Band, Maclean was in the same studios ten years previously. Anderson was in the midst of his ten years in a mental asylum.

The resurrection of Anderson as a creative force began two years ago when the Aliens formed – the crowning glory being a debut album in Astronomy For Dogs that mixed Anderson’s innate pop with Maclean’s electronic tendencies and the power of Robin Jones’s percussion. The renaissance was continuing with the writing and recording of the new record – a UK tour was planned too.

Then, during the process of putting this article together, news came through that the June dates had been cancelled.

According to The Aliens’ website: ‘Unfortunately while trying to complete album number two, Gordon has become increasingly unwell. Most of you are aware of Gordon’s history, and his troubled mind, so I won’t elaborate. We feel it’s best for Gordon to cancel the four June shows and give him some time.” An untimely intervention for, if the past two years are anything to go by, among the most exciting live acts to emerge since, well, The Beta Band.

“You just have to take the ups with the downs,” says Maclean, speaking of Anderson before his band-mate’s relapse. “He makes this fantastic music but he hears all this other stuff as well. Over the whole two years of The Aliens has been the best I’ve seen him for years. The city just does his head in a bit, as it does a lot of people’s head in. So its nice to be down here working.”

Fortunately, this seems like a minor hiccup on the road to releasing their second album, which according to Maclean, while maintaining the psychedelia and 60s production vibe of Astronomy For Dogs, will offer a different side to The Aliens, and a natural evolution. For starters, the rural location in which they wrote and recorded it has had the biggest impact. They wandered off to a “little fishing village in Fife” to get their heads down, where they could afford to take their time, experiment, and satisfy their curiosity to take their style further. In addition, having cut ties with EMI in order to release on their own, there was no record label breathing down their necks to meet deadlines. This set-up is something of a risk, however, given the plight of The Beta Band, who ended up somewhat in the red after “spending hundreds of thousands on a tour budget and run into a sort of Man Utd or Chelsea style debt.”

The new music itself marks both a reprisal of previous times and new ambition.

“This is more like the EP,” says Maclean, referring to the Alienoid Starmonica EP of 2006, which was both rocking and very weird, “which is just us sort of experimenting and trying to make something other than just one song after another. It was good to get back to a cottage environment where you can take as long as you want to make stuff.

“Instead of going into the studio with drums, guitars and just banging them down, we’re doing a lot on computers. A lot of songs reappear in different forms, and it’s a bit more organic, flowing than the last one which was basically one song after another.”

These words might come as a surprise to those fans who enjoyed the first album, and the fact part of its charm was the fact refrains of ‘Robot Man’, ‘Happy Song’ and ‘Rox’ were reprised throughout. The Aliens are heading into the murky waters of the concept album, inevitably. “I think this one represents us a lot more. There are a lot of pop moments but its definitely not tailored for ‘ok, that’s three singles on this record and the rest aren’t. Hopefully it’s a kind of pop record though, because that is generally our favourite music. But yeah I suppose it’s less suited for the radio.”

Before Maclean, Anderson, Jones and Steve Mason formed The Beta Band in 1996, the three of them were school friends in Fife. Now in their 30s, they are of the famous vintage that produced Fence Collective artists like James Yorkston, KT Tunstall and, in particular, King Creosote, a.k.a Kenny Anderson, Gordon’s brother.

Maclean is the only member of the band to live in London (the other two remain north of the border) but talks wistfully and warmly about his home county – indeed, as he does his two band-mates.

“I remember the first time I met the Andersons as a family. I met Ian first I was about 10,” says Maclean, definitely not referring to the Ian Anderson who fronts Jethro Tull, even if the ages would fit if he were Gordon’s father. What a fun dinner time that would be. “Then I met Gordon when I was 13, and Kenny when I was 14 or 15. They were the Fife musical family. Kenny was in different bands when I was growing up, from bluegrass to rock bands. At the time you don’t really think of it, but looking back it was inevitable something would happen, especially with Gordon. He was writing great songs from an early age, it was just in his blood.”

That The Aliens exist at all, let alone have enjoyed reasonable success, is something of a miracle given Anderson’s illness, which he has referred to at various points as ‘demonic possession’ and ‘acute psychosis’ (needless to say, an interview with the great man was out of the question). Therefore when The Aliens embarked on a US tour last year it was to be marvelled at. Once, going out of the house was too much for Anderson. Maclean says: “It was kind of like starting again, with these small gigs. The reception was pretty amazing. Back then we were touring stuff from our first album, which was sounding like a kind of West Coast, psychedelia kind of thing. So when we hit the West Coast they treated us really well.”

Now for part two. Get well Gordon Anderson.

The Aliens play Guilfest on 5 July and Latitude Festival on 17-20 July.