They are Alice Cooper's "life-long addiction" and cited as a key influence by everyone from Jim Morrison and Syd Barrett to Frank Black and Robert Plant.

Their songs have been covered by a host of artists as diverse as Mazzy Star and The Damned, and Robyn Hitchcock spoke for fans everywhere when he summarised their music as "what your mind feels but your mouth never gets around to saying".

Yet Arthur Lee's Love, unlike fellow Sixties alternatives, such as The Velvet Underground, have never succeeded in going overground. While their 1967 opus, Forever Changes, is regularly listed as one of the ten "essential records" of all time, it didn't even make the top 100 of the US album charts and re-issues have only served to confirm the band's status as highly influential but steadfastly obscure.

All of which might well be attributed to the vagaries of Memphis-born frontman Arthur Lee, whose creative and commercial potential as "the first black hippie" was curbed by a parallel talent for disbanding line-ups, tiring of touring and winding up in prison.

Inspired by seeing The Byrds perform their folk/rock blend at a club on Sunset Strip, in 1964 Lee set about launching himself on the LA circuit with a similarly eclectic sound, appearing as The Grass Roots, with a core team of guitarist Johnny Echols and co-singer and songwriter Bryan Maclean, until an audience vote resulted in the adoption of the legendary moniker Love.

In their brief but productive heyday, Love captured the look, sound and attitude of a society in change. They became the first multi-racial rock band of the psychedelic era, dressing in striped trousers, triangle shades and moccasins (often worn on only one foot), while producing a lyrically confrontational yet musically subtle sound which veered from acoustic folk to electric blues and jazz-tinged pop.

"Variety is the spice of life," says Lee, "and God gave me a talent to be able to use any kind of music I choose. I can play the blues, I can play jazz and I can play classical music. Why be categorised?"

But Love never capitalised ontheir appeal with touring, holing themselves up in the communal Los Angeles mansion known as The Castle and even refusing, following the release of Forever Changes, to drive a few hundred miles up the coast for an appearance at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival.

"Well, the band was strung out on heroin," reasons Lee, "and you can't go on tour with a band that's asleep."

But the excess wasn't all confined to the ranks. In the Seventies Lee pulled a knife on Maclean on stage at the Whisky A-Go-Go, in the Eighties he was jailed for "the malicious setting of a fire", and in the Nineties he spent six years in prison for firing a gun during a dispute with a neighbour.

Much of the audience for this tour, which sees the return of original guitarist Johnny Echols, will know Lee more by his police record than for his music. He, meanwhile, is simply "out to blow minds".

Support comes from Primary 5, the new offering from Teenage Fanclub's Paul Quinn.

Start: 8pm, tickets £16.50, tel: 01273 673311