After a chance meeting D:ream – famous for New Labour Anthem Things Can Only Get Better – are back recording and back on the road

The D:ream had been over for a few years when Peter Cunnah stormed out the back of his house to tell some noisy teens to shut up.

As he approached them in the darkness, he realised another former member of the band, Al Mackenzie, who had randomly sat there on his way home from the local pub “with his beer goggles on”, was among the hoodies.

The chance meeting – neither had kept in contact since the split – would reunite the band responsible for New Labour anthem Things Can Only Get Better.

“Al and I split on bad terms when the band broke up,” said Cunnah. “I was crossing into the charts and he wanted to concentrate on the club scene. We didn’t keep in contact. When you’re a young man, you’re quite up yourself.”

Mackenzie was running a bar and Cunnah was settled down with two children, but D:ream was revisited, albeit with three members now not in tow, notably a certain famous physicist and television presenter Brian Cox OBE.

Cox, who started out as the band’s driver back in the early 90s, has contributed to the new album In Memory Of… but he won’t be playing at the band’s gig (as part of Kisstory, also featuring Alison Limerick) at the Indigo2 on Saturday night.

“If there was an event big enough, he may grace us with his presence, but he’s pretty busy.”

Cunnah sounds as proud as ever of big hit Things Can Only Get Better, but he was surprised by the political reincarnation of the song.

“It was the drug anthem of a generation that was a party political song.”

“It was originally inspired by a job I had in a place that was like the TV show The Office. I worked in dispatch and they were constantly taking the piss out of me.”

It was an epiphany for Cunnah, but it would be several years before the idea became a song.

Cunnah, who has two girls and is now divorced, says both he and D:ream’s music have grown up.

“I’m an old chap in pop parlance and we’ve moved on. If the new album was full of cheesy house remixes it wouldn’t sit well. But we’ve definitely still got some balls dangling away down there somewhere.”

For tickets to Kisstory see www.theo2.co.uk/indigo2.