As a singer, as someone once famously said of Keith Richards, Izzy Stradlin has a voice only a mother could love. Lazy, undisciplined, verdantly cool, as Izzy says: "I like [my voice]. Sometimes it's out of key, sometimes it's a little looser but it just has the right vibe, you know?"

It was four years after 'Ju Ju Hounds' that Izzy released his next album, '117" [featuring Duff]. "playing with Duff meant going back out to LA. "Once I was there, I was like, 'Hey, this is OK'. I met some new people and that's when I got back into the idea of making another record. [Me and Duff] wrote 10 songs in a week. I had such a great time..."

All the same, '117' was followed by another long silence, broken by last year's Japanese-only release, 'Ride On'. As if to make up for lost time, however, his latest album, 'River', is just the first of two albums he plans to release this year. (The other is an all-acoustic affair featuring former Rolling Stones and Faces keyboardist Ian MacLagan, who also appeared on 'Ju Ju Hounds'). Though his own material sounds markedly different from GN'R, he insists that is' not his style of writing that's changed, more that "I'm allowed to do the songs the way they were originally written now".

"In Guns N' Roses, I would come up with an idea for a song [starts playing simple chords] and the first thing that would always happen was Slash getting hold of it and going chunka-chunka- chunka!" He hacks out a blur of aggressive riffs. "I'd be going, OK, it's already changed a little bit. Then Axl would come in and go, 'We've gotta do more lyrics, we've gotta have more vocals, more back-ups, let's layer this'. So by the time it was finished it was like, holy shit! What a monster!"

Taz the big Texan drummer from Reverend Horton Heat who plays on 'River' had never heard raggae before Izzy turned him on to it, "but picked it up real fast". And even though 'Ju-Ju Hounds' featured a couple of reggae tracks, in the UK and Japan at least, [Izzy's always been a fan of Lee 'Scratch' Perry, "his stuff just floors me, man") in America Geffen talked him out of it. "The guy goes, 'You know what, Izzy, I don't think America's ready for reggae right now'." These days, as the album is self-made and independently distributed, it isn't a problem.

"These records I've been putting out, it's painless man. We just have some fun, get the songs going, work on 'em a bit and there's really nothing to it after you've done it a few times."

And will there be any live Izzy shows to hack up all this activity? Maybe dust off a few Guns tunes? "I'm hoping we can come back this summer and do a few weeks of clubs here and in Europe. Maybe 'Pretty Tied Up', 'Used To Love Her'. Maybe a reggae version of Paradise City, that'd be fantastic!"