“I think he found we were marginally less unpleasant than other popular music but no more than that,” says Becker.Apart from the striking appendage, did Burroughs’ writing particularly inspire them? “He brought something new into literature – but most of his work is unreadable,” says Fagen. “The way he influenced us was through his use of science fiction and the erotic, though his flavour of the erotic was not the same as ours.”"And the use of addiction as a metaphor for existence was very interesting. He wasn’t just a Bohemian joker: he had points to make,” says Becker.And so of course did the Dan. Between 1972 and 1980 Walter and Don were the unassailable hepcats of East Coast Cool, subverting the West Coast mainstream with lyrical intrigue and dazzling crafted intelligence, their twitchy finger on the pulse of popular taste.They wrote about gambling addicts (“Do It Again”), a stock-market crash (“Black Friday”), cruel decadence (“Showbiz Kids”), drug dealers (“Kid Charlemagne”), fugitive gunmen (“With a Gun” and “Don’t Take Me Alive”). Albums such as Pretzel Logic and Countdown to Ecstasy presented a quintessential American songbook filled with characters that ranged from the seedy and desperate to vengeful dreamers (“My Old School”) and lost romantics (“Midnight Cruiser”).Steely Dan has always been the duo supplemented by an ever-changing line-up of the finest musicians money and talent can buy. “As musicians we have had dream careers, just being in the studio or in the control room with those guys was all you could ask for really,” reflects Becker.Looming large in Dan mythology is Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, the moustachioed guitarist responsible for jaw-dropping solos on “Reeling in the Years” among others. Bizarrely, as Becker explains how their former associate is now “a self-instructed expert on numerous weapons systems”, a military helicopter thunders up the coast rattling the windows of the hotel as it passes “See what you get when you mess with The Skunk Don’t fuck with him,” exclaims Becker.

“His U2 plane will be along in a minute,” warns Fagen.In 1974, before they’d recorded their biggest hits, Steely Dan ceased to function as a live band, and by 1981 signs of studio exhaustion were evident beneath the meticulous design of Gaucho. Shortly after it was released they ceased operations completely. For the rest of the decade they engaged in fitful solo careers and waged personal battles against tragedy and depression. Becker’s girlfriend OD’d in his New York apartment and he struggled to conquer heroin addiction, Fagen had a breakdown and suffered a long period of writer’s block.Their comeback took time to blossom after the 1993 reunion tour, but they are now on a creative roll, which even their deeply imbued cynicism can’t stop.

Listening to their repartee it is hard to imagine how they coped with being apart from each other during their extended separation. Did the duo each feel they were only half there without their sparring partner? “By that time I was only half there,” laughs Becker, alluding to his drug problem, “but I managed to get about 30 per cent of it back.”The comment causes Fagen to guffaw uncontrollably – a weird whinnying sound that resembles a mule in traction. Other artists who have undergone trauma and recovery favour personalised songs of survival and anguished confessional interviews. That is not the Dan style: gallows humour has been an essential part of their survival mechanism, although past personal experience does feed into their lyrics, however obliquely. “We are constantly competing with the monsters from the id,” as Becker puts it “The unseen reptiles within,” Fagan adds. Becker: “All of the good things we tried to do and all the bad things we tried not to do, as James Brown once said.”Becker and Fagen are many things – laconic revolutionaries, mischief-makers who seem irrevocably altered by past chemical intake, jazz buffs with a still bright pop sensibility and, perhaps most surprisingly, concerned parents too.

On the new album, “Pixeleen” is born out of unease with present-day teenage reality.”I have step-kids but Walter has had experience of parenting teenagers, he contributed his knowledge of teenage mores,” says Fagan.Becker: “I think what television and video games do is reminiscent of drug addiction There’s a measure of reinforcement and a behavioural loop. Even from a metabolic point of view, a person sitting on a couch watching television burns fewer calories than a person sitting on a couch. Though far be it from me to preach.”"You mean you can lose weight just by turning off the TV?” says Fagen, “that sounds like a good diet.”‘Everything Must Go’ is released on Monday on WEA. Everything Must Go, Reprise

It’ll doubtless grow on me with prolonged exposure, but judged by the first few hearings, Everything Must Go sounds like the first generic Steely Dan album. It’s full of the usual Dan trademarks – Donald Fagen’s characteristically wry inflections, Walter Becker’s buttoned-down jazz-guitar fills, the jazz-funk hipster cool of tracks like “The Last Mall” and “Godwhacker”, any number of sharp lyrical barbs, and of course, the impeccable performances throughout. There’s another addition to their gallery of young, dangerous Lolita figures, “Pixeleen”, and at least one track, “Green Book”, which brings to mind several slick arrangements from Aja, Gaucho and Fagen’s The Nightfly. But there’s a shortfall in the kind of bravura flourishes and knock-you-dead melodies one expects from Steely Dan, reflective perhaps of the more resigned, entropic tone of songs such as “Blues Beach”, “The Last Mall”, “Things I Miss the Most” and “Everything Must Go” itself.