“Well, my life is an ongoing concern,” he says with a chuckle. “I’m very concerned about it.”

In 1971, the Staten Island-born singer teamed up with Johnny Thunders, Sylvain Sylvain, Arthur ‘Killer’ Kane and Billy Murcia to form the New York Dolls. The band’s stripped-down, balls-out sound – rooted in the groove and swagger of Chuck Berry and girl groups rather than the boogie’n’blues jams prevalent at the time – plus their outrageous, gender-blurring fashion sense helped pave the way for punk and glam. But the Dolls were beset by chaos. Murcia drowned in a bathtub following a drug overdose on the group’s first trip to London (he was replaced by Jerry Nolan), and their two albums – 1973’s New York Dolls and 1974’s Too Much Too Soon – flopped commercially. By the time punk’s moment arrived in 1977 the Dolls were no more.

Johansen, however, never slowed down, juggling musical projects and an acting career that included memorable turns in 1988’s Scrooged and, more recently, HBO’s prison drama Oz. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the surviving Dolls (Thunders died of an overdose in 1991 and Nolan of a stroke the following year) reunited at the request of superfan Morrissey when the ex-Smith curated the 2004 Meltdown festival. A live album and a touching documentary were released following the triumphant show and, despite Kane’s death soon afterwards, the Dolls went on to tour and release three more albums.

Perhaps it’s just as well, but Johansen, now 64, is sanguine about a career that’s more succèss d’estime than box-office blockbuster. “The less you try to accomplish, the better it is, ” he says, “the more loose, the more musical, the more fun. When people start getting serious about it, then it’s not really conducive to making good music.”

What’s the first music you remember hearing?

I think I heard Fats Domino or something in my father’s car. My father was a very musical guy, he sang – my mother sang, too, but my father sang in front of people. I have five siblings, so there was always a lot of music there, and I kind of took it for granted. I would play my brother’s records, much to his chagrin. I would go into my room – really the boys’ room – and by listening to music, I could get away from the politics of the household for a while. My brother is five years older than me and when I got old enough to use the record player, maybe six or whatever, he was digging some pretty deep doo wop. He was into the Diablos and things like that.

When did it call out to you as something you wanted to be involved in?

My time was so consumed as a child that I rarely thought about the future too much. I dug singing and dancing, though. I was maybe 13 and I started really digging Lightnin’ Hopkins and Howlin’ Wolf. I liked a lot of other things, as well; I like so many different kinds of music from different places in the world that it’s hard to keep it all straight. It’s all in this kind of primal musical ooze in my head. But I would get a record and sing along. I always sang along with The Platters, singing The Great Pretender and those really operatic songs, and Wilson Pickett, stuff that came out when I was coming of age. And then I got into wanting to perform it.

Was the Dolls sound identifiable from the beginning?

The whole thing with the Dolls, there was nothing really manufactured about it; it was just us doing the best we could do. It wasn’t like we would talk about what we were going to sound like or what we were going to look like or anything, we just kinda did it. We would play and people would say, “You guys are great,” and we’d say, “Hey, people like it, let’s just keep playing.” At that time in the East Village there was a lot of burgeoning liberation movements going, so we became the band for those people. When we played Mercer [Arts Centre] it was a place for all these people who saw each other on the street but didn’t really know each other. A lot of them went on and did really great things, so we were like the band of that scene for a while.

Were there bands that you looked on as peers? Were you looking at The Stooges or anyone as doing something comparable?

I don’t think I would compare like that; maybe some of the other guys would. I would see The Stooges and go, “Wow!” But I wouldn’t compartmentalise or anything. At that time we knew what we didn’t want to be, but we didn’t know what we wanted to be. There were certain bands I really liked in the late ’60s. I thought Big Brother & The Holding Company was a really great band. Not on purpose, but I think we sounded a little like them – faster, but sonically some similarities there.

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