Crime & the City Solution have finally begun to realise the potential they've always been capable of. Ann Scanlon is blown away by their new single.

'This is the weirdest record I've ever made,' says Mick Harvey, who, in his time, has probably made quite a few, of Crime & the City Solution's latest LP 'Paradise Discotheque'.

'But at the same time it seems to be very immediate and likeable and hangs together really well. And, basically, I expect it to get the same response as usual,' he stops and laughs aloud. 'People not knowing what the hell to make of what we're doing!'

People have been wondering what the hell to make of Crime & the City Solution ever since they first crawled out of Sydney 12 years ago.

It probably hasn't helped that singer Simon Bonney has put together four different versions of the band (in Sydney, Melbourne, London and Berlin), and that the London incarnation was built around former Birthday Party members Mick Harvey and Rowland S Howard, bringing inexorable comparisons with that group.

After a couple of half realised LPs, Harvey, Bonney and Simon's partner Bronwyn Adams relocated to Berlin where they recruited Einsturzende Neubauten's Alexander Hacke, Thomas Stern and DAF's Chrislo Haas and began to allay the ghosts of Crime's various pasts.

1987's 'Shine' LP was an indisputable classic, which showed exactly what the band were capable of. It was followed by last year's 'The Bride Ship' which, although an excellent record, was a very two-headed affair: on the one side, tracks like 'The Dangling Man' simply retread old ground, while 'The Bride Ship' trilogy showed what a fine, stylised writer Bonney had become and 'The Shadow of No Man' unleashed the full force of Crime's potentially commercial sound.

'Paradise Discotheque' draws on the best elements of 'The Bride Ship' and takes them even further. Certainly 'I Have The Gun', with what Mick Harvey terms 'Metallica bits in the middle', is the sort of loose, joyful affair that you'd associate with a wild blues band rather than a group that history has termed as dour and introspective as Crime & the City Solution.

The single aside, the most outstanding track on 'Paradise discotheque' is 'The Last Dictator', which sprawls itself across the second side and only seems to have been restricted to four parts by the amount of space available. It was Bronwyn who suggested to Simon, at the time of 'The Bride Ship', that he should develop his story telling abilities and this was the central idea that took him through the making of 'Paradise Discotheque'.

'When I was younger,' he explains, 'music gave me a sense of belonging to the rest of the world. But nowadays, rather than looking to the people that I looked to when I was younger - Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, David Bowie - I would look more towards someone like the writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The imagination in something like One Hundred Years of Solitude captures a whole load of things, but fundamentally, it's a really great story.

'You can express more truth, more compassion and more humanity in the third person than you could possibly express in the first. For example, these people who are portrayed in songs - especially old country songs, cutting their wrists and so fourth - would be really ugly in real life, yet in songs they're romanticised and turned into something of beauty. And on the last two records, I've tried to put things into a much larger perspective, which I think works better at conveying what I think I feel than actually speaking directly about it.'

Whereas the early Crime concerns were those of anger, alienation and abject misery, these days there's room for humour, albeit a characteristically black one. Take 'The Last Dictator' whose greed inadvertently leads to tragedy.