In the American deep south during the 1930s, two black men are hung for allegedly raping a white woman. Their case becomes a symbol for justice-miscarrying and the pair goes down in history as the "Alabama 2."

Over half a century later in South London, the son of a Welsh Mormon preacher meets the offspring of a Glaswegian trade unionist at an underground acid house party and they embark upon the mischievous mingling of Hank Williams, gospel and acid house. Expanding in the mid 1990s into a Brixton-based collective, they call themselves "Alabama 3" and go down in late 20th Century history as one of the most joyous, righteous, provocative and inspirationally delinquent bands Britain has ever spawned.

Whoever it was they met that sulphurous night at the cultural crossroads, they've been working hard on behalf of Alabama 3. The likelihood of a crew of miscreant, theo-pharmacological, neo-situationist, holy music junkies floating high in the anemic river of mass entertainment, was never realistically that great. Yet, come the new millennium, and the band, now calling itself A3, is lodged firmly in both subculture and mainstream. There they are, as you might expect, quoted in songform at the start of Scottish council estate-verité author, Irvine Welsh's "Filth." There they were, as you'd never have thought, flickering in front of 25 million American television viewers, guiding a 26-piece gospel choir through "Woke Up This Morning" on the fabled "Tonight Show w/Jay Leno," a crucial cultural signifier and emblem of arrival-on-the-scene for real.

Initially, it was the use of A3's "Woke Up This Morning" as the theme to America's hippest TV show, the neurotic Mafia series "The Sopranos," that accessed blanket exposure for the band in the US. It also set them up in New York, New Jersey and Chicago with the sort of permanent dinner invites you can't refuse. Critical and popular acclaim for the track--which originally appeared on the group's 1997 debut album Exile On Coldharbour Lane--was vindication and poetic justice for the band members, who are no strangers to the underworld and have frequently been upbraided for wanting to "reduce Americana to a sample." It also helped carry the group through a 12-month period which has stained the follow-up album La Peste a darker shade of blue.

For La Peste, the creative core of A3 remains the same. Rob Spragg (a.k.a. Larry Love) and Jake Black (a.k.a. The Very Reverend Dr D Wayne Love), comrades-in-country-and-blues-obsession, form the vocal and preacherman MC frontline. They're joined by programmer Piers Marsh (a.k.a. The Mountain of Love), percussionist Simon Edwards (a.k.a. Sir Real Congaman Love), keyboardist Orlando Harrison (a.k.a. The Spirit), guitarist Mark Sams (a.k.a. Captain Empiricist) and Jonny Delafons (a.k.a. LB Dope) on drums. The house band for A3 convened in the First Presleytarian Church of Elvis The Divine and continues to feel the spirit, but this time they're assisted in the studio by Chemical Brothers mixer, Steve "Dub" Jones, who co-produced the album and refused to wear a Stetson, along with regular studio-head Segs.

La Peste started life in an isolated studio farmhouse near Lincoln where the new direction was pinned down. 1997's Exile On Coldharbour Lane had found committed cult approval thanks to the arch, but soulful, clash of anti-redneck country, snakepit spirituality, dirty rave tones and ideological perversity exhibited in "Ain't Goin' to Goa" and "U Don't Dance 2 Tekno." La Peste would whittle A3's needling pleasure implement down to an even sharper point.

"We tried to condense it and narrow it down to the strongest elements that work, and work in that particular genre," says Rob. "Now every biog of band says we mix tablas with theramins and that we're really eclectic--with a broad palette of sonic colors running from Brazil right on through to Krakow--and that's supposed to suggest it's good. I think sometimes that can be a f**king cover-all excuse for cluelessness."

La Peste is A3 getting high on the low-swinging chariot of the group's milieu. It's a techno-country-gospel shadowdance, acting out sad and beautiful narratives from the urban mess. It's Hank Williams and Robert Johnson re-animated. It's Lee Marvin and Underworld. Through "Too Sick To Pray," "Mansion On The Hill," "Wade Into The Water," "Sad Eyed Lady of The Low Life," "Cocaine Killed My Community," "Strange" and "Sinking," an hallucinatory cityscape of drugsickness, Godsickness, busted parties, burned-out hookers, crackheads, prison cells, kinky coppers, bereft families and struggling humanity is summoned up, with a horizon of chemical, religious, and emotional hope glimmering just out of reach. Camus got to La Peste's title first, but Rob is updating its resonance.

"We've had a particularly bad year in terms of the fact that there's been three suicides and two drug and drink deaths in our immediate environment and I think generally there's still a lot of casualties," says Rob. "I think we are entering the plague years, whether it's computer viruses or whatever, this is the age of the virus. I think unless we get a handle on them, viruses are going to f**k us up technologically or physically or spiritually. You're talking plague, you're talking about HIV, Rwanda, Bosnia, and technology's creating a massive underclass who will be more and more marginalised.

"Maybe it's that classic second album thinking of 'we want to be taken seriously.' I think there's a bit of that in it. Cause I think a lot of people got us wrong."

Of particular note in terms of provocation and politics, are the cover version of "Hotel California" and the song "The Thrills Have Gone" featuring Birmingham 6 survivor Paddy Hill. The former re-interprets The Eagles über-hit as a twisted, ragga outrage, tilted to emphasize the song's symbolic value as a bloated, end-point for country musicians (Rob: "It's also a wicked lyric about cocaine alienation."). "The Thrills Have Gone" meanwhile follows through on a chance meeting between Rob and Paddy Hill at a 20th Century's end party. Hill and five others spent 16 years in British prison after being wrongly accused of an IRA bombing. He was eventually released on appeal. Having had personal experience of the iniquities of the British penal system, A3 connected with Hill and invited him to contribute spoken word lyrics to "Thrills."

"The Birmingham 6; Alabama 3, the name is about that kind of thing," says Rob. "Incarceration and diagnosis of mental illness are increasing, as the police lose control over the inner cities and these issues, they're going to hit the techno underclass and the underclass generally. The only good thing with technology is it's allowed c*nts to f**kin' organize".

The Miscarriages of Justice Organisation (MOJO)--set up by Hill and John MacManus to provide a coordinated central unit for campaigns on behalf of the wrongly convicted--is supported by A3 on La Peste (http://www.mojo.home.beseen.com/belies/mojo.uk).

A3's politics are not grafted on. Resistance to social programming has been innate since Rob was fighting a Mormon upbringing by dosing himself with magic mushrooms and The Velvet Underground. D Wayne Love was schooled in Marxism from an early age. From their involvement in illegal raves (notably the infamous Castlemorton gathering which set the UK's anti-rave Criminal Justice Bill in motion) through the "Straight Outta Rehab" banners which hung over their early Brixton gigs, the band have been rigorous in their counter-culturalism. Their blues-ing up of sterile house and techno was in itself an act of defiance.

What Larry Love once described as "a nostalgic notion of the empowering ability of underground culture" continues to drive them. In the past year, they have played shows in support of Mental Health Service Users (MAD Pride) and London's now defunct Anarchist Book Center and helped organize the anti-Brixton Bomber show, Resistance. They also set up the Memphis 9 web site, claiming that they were a renegade paramilitary outfit, who'd killed A3, and engaged in drunken one-to-one dialogue with the Police Commission about Larry Love's MI5 file.

Cultural provocation and cathartic, celebratory music make for cantankerous bedfellows, but on La Peste, A3 has proved that the group can mess with tradition any way they want and still keep within spitting distance of "pop" and "dance."

"What's kept us buzzing--and I think the same thing was there in 'Ain't Goin' To Goa'--is I think dance music, back in the day an' all that, it was cracking underground warehouses and getting in trouble with the law and people going to prison for f**kin'" Es and there was a renegade attitude in that. All these f**ckin' glossy dance mags and star DJs and superclubs and girls in fluffy bras, I mean, fair enough, people wanna do that, but for us it's about something else."

The immediate "something else" for A3 involves playing a summer 2000 gig in the local Brixton Prison, followed by an appearance at the Hell's Angel gathering The Bulldog Bash. The group then heads back to the USA after a brief Absinthe-fuelled visit to Rimbaud's birthplace in Paris.