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They’ve a singer, Eddie Vedder, who makes Lou Reed look like a happy-go-lucky bloke; they’re vilified in the press and manically suspicious of The Biz. Yet Seattle’s Pearl Jam have happened, big time, their debut LP outselling Nirvana’s Nevermind and sweeping the recent MTV awards. Mat Snow approaches with caution. Good move, as it turns out.

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LIFE, IT IS OFTEN ALLEGED, has the perverse habit of imitating art. But not with Pearl Jam. A Seattle five piece rock group of the grunge persuasion, their debut album Ten has quietly outsold, in the States at least, Nirvana’s much more publicised Nevermind. But Pearl Jam, already attracting attention because of that record, last year made further inroads into American and British consciousness through their cameo role in the hit movie Singles. Set, inevitably, in Seattle, Singles was written and directed by former Rolling Stone scribe Cameron Crowe and concerns itself with the amusing love lives of the twentysomething’s who occupy an apartment block. Though scored by such grungeful persons as Paul Westernberg, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains and, indeed Pearl Jam, rock groups only feature to provide nightclub background racket and comic relief.

Which is where the band ‘Citizen Dick’ come in. Fronted by one ‘Clifford Poncier’ (a fright-wigged and casually attired Matt Dillon), Citizen Dick (hot new record: Touch Me–I’m Dick) consist of guitarist Stone Gossard, bassist Jeff Ament and, relegated for the sake of the story to drums, singer Eddie Vedder– three-fifths of the real-life Pearl Jam (hot mew record: Five Against One). Our scene from the film has Citizen Dick sitting in a café and opening the paper to a review of their latest record.

Cliff: "Wow, snap, read it out man."

Jeff: "Once again, when the shirtless Cliff Poncier begins singing...’"

Cliff (with preening bravado): "Hey, wait a minute, man. I don’t want to hear anything negative. (Winks) Go on..."

Jeff runs his finger down the review, but it’s negative ink all the way: "more prompous, dick-swinging swill from a man who has haunted the local scene for much too long... relentlessly mediocre talent..."And so, negatively, on. He turns the page until, at last he finds something good he can read out loud.

Jeff: " ‘Other than that, he was ably backed by Stone and Jeff and drummer Eddie Vedder.’ I mean, that’s good; that’s a good review."

Eddie: " A compliment for us is a compliment for you."

Cliff (grim in his humiliation): "No, man. This negative energy just makes me stronger. We will not retreat. This band is unstoppable. This weekend... we rock Portland!"

In real life, things pan out a little differently with Pearl Jam. The scene now is a London hotel bar, and the band are being interviewed by Q magazine. An hour into the proceedings, singer and lyricist Eddie Vedder is handed a copy of Melody Maker containing a review of their latest show. His eye runs over such remarks as "that sensitive, overblown, preening, gibbering pretence of a poet... suffers from a messiah complex... sings like Phil Collins with backache... his band are cock-rock strutters extraordinaire..." the brows begin to knot.

"This is unbelievable," Eddie stares into the paper. "Just unbelievable. That guy’s not listening to music at all..." He continues perusing the review, face turning to thunder while the rest of us make nervous chit-chat. Eddie stands up. "Fuck these fucking people," he tosses the paper aside with a scowl; then, turning to your innocent Q reporter, he adds with unconcealed loathing, " Fuck you... Fuck ‘em, fuck the whole thing. Because," his voice rises to an anguished pitch, "it’s totally fucked. Totally ridiculous. That’s why I’m fucking quitting everything. I don’t need to be told anything. I remove myself from the whole situation. It’s unbelievable," he stalks out of the bar. "Unbelievable."

A moment’s silence. Then Stone imitates an ambulance siren. This sort of thing has clearly happened before.

"Psychoanalysing Eddie right now is not what we need to do," he sighs laconically. "Ask us about us, but don’t ask us about him..."

*

FOR YEARS NOW, SEATTLE IN Washington State on the USA’s upper-left corner has boomed like no other American city. A port now dominating America’s trade with the Pacific Rim, Boeing aircraft are based here, while the world’s most thriving computer company, Microsoft, has filled this city of a half a million with eager professionals. The many partially employed young people and nine months’ annual rainfall have further combined to nurture a now world-renowned rock scene.

A combination of locals and incomers, Pearl Jam sprung from this mulch, starting with the group Green River, the first band on the cultish Sub Pop label. They split up acrimoniously in early 1988 after a show in Los Angeles supporting Jane’s Addiction: singer Mark Arm joined Mudhoney while Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament teamed up with "glam-revivalist" singer Andrew Wood (the self-styled L’Andrew The Love Child) in the group Mother Love Bone. After an EP, Shine, and LP, Apple, they came to grief in March 1990 when Wood died of a heroin overdose. In tribute, the remnants of the band teamed up with members of Soundgarden and cut the album Temple Of The Dog, and decided to persist in the search for long-term stability. Stone’s old school chum Mike McCready was recruited as co-guitarist, Dave Krusen (since replaced by Dave Abbruzzese) was installed behind the traps, and the band lacked only a singer and a name.

Working the night shift at a San Diego gas station, Eddie Vedder had been singing in such obscure groups as The Butts when word reached him via his friend Jack Irons, then drummer with The Red Hot Chili Peppers, that a Seattle rock group had a vacancy. He traveled north, linked up with the band and they rehearsed solidly for five days, during which time they wrote three new songs. On the sixth day they cut a demo tape.

Jeff: "I was coming out of a period of turmoil and reflection after losing our really close friend Andy, and felt hopeful for me and Stone, and even for Andy and people who check out. The first three songs that Eddie wrote – ‘Alive’, ‘Once’ and ‘Footsteps’ – all delve into the dark side and I think we were both drawn into that at the time. Mother Love Bone was a really happy, fun, tongue-in-cheek rock band: on the surface, anyway. Eddie’s whole trip seemed to relate to us in a good way."

Born in December 1966, Eddie Vedder sings and writes with an enigmatic intensity that invites enquiry into his own personal wellsprings. Here, things are vague. The oldest of four boys brought up on The Jackson 5 and The Who’s Quadrophenia album in Evanston, Illinois, Eddie did not know his father’s true identity (he was a struggling singer) for many years, while the family ran a home for orphans. A high school drop-out and subsequent auto-didact, later Eddie may or may not have studied music in Boston. A keen surfer, Eddie also shared his new band’s enthusiasm for basketball: indeed, for a while they traded under the name Mookie Blaylock after the hoop-meister of the New Jersey nets (now of the Atlanta Braves) whose picture card had found its way into the demo tape package they sent to their manager Kelly Curtis, also employed by Alice In Chains. After a few weeks, the band traded in the name Mookie Blaylock ("I sent him a gold record," recalls Jeff, "and he sent us a pair of spray-painted tennis shoes") and instead styled themselves Pearl Jam after, apparently, Eddie’s great-grandmother and her recipe for hallucinogenic fruit preserve.

Things happened fast for Pearl Jam. Seldom seen outside Seattle, they got a record deal with Epic and cut an album, titled Ten after (what else?) Mookie Blaylock’s shirt number. Backed to the hilt by Epic, the single ‘Alive’, in many ways as much a new rock anthem as Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, rocketed chartwards, dragging the album in its wake. Released in December 1991, it currently tallies six million sales in the US alone, having overtaken Nirvana’s Nevermind in that country this February. Eddie, however, has not found the pressures and side-effects of success easy to deal with. Shocked by how much it cost to make the video for the single ‘Jeremy’, Vedder pledged to release only live footage to promote records: when he discovered that US radio stations were playing the album ballad ‘Black’, Eddie personally telephoned station managers to make sure that Epic had not released it as a single in defiance of his wishes. Stories of his strenuous efforts to divest himself of his new-found wealth (including the suicidal financing of a giant free festival outside Seattle) abound.

A supporter of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, pro-choice and, with his long-time girlfriend Beth, an opponent of pornography, Eddie Vedder holds the rock industry in deep suspicion. He was therefore dismayed when Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain remarked in an interview that Pearl Jam were "a corporate band", a line sustained ever since in this country by Nirvana’s groupies in the weekly rock press (hence the Melody Maker review).

Contrary reputation preceding him, Eddie Vedder, elfin owner of no fewer than 14 khaki army surplus T-shirts costing $1.75 each (worn in conjunction with equally tawny and budget-minded trousers) ambles in with paperback in hand and sits down besides Jeff Ament. Ah, one remarks by way of breaking the ice, you are reading Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

"His sense of ironicism is unparalleled," ruminates Eddie in pipe-sucking professional mode, voice drawling in sleepy approximation of a man twice his age. "I’m inspired by this kind of thing... irony. It’s a good way to look at the world, you know. A sense of irony. Seems a good way to get out of it without feeling suicidal, to kind of get a laugh out of it. Seems like the English are pretty ironic..."

Forswearing philosophical chuckles, Eddie almost self-destructed mid-tour last year when a valuable note-book was stolen. Instead, it seems as if Eddie Vedder, often described anyway as being a vol-au-vent shy of the full buffet, has tried to reconcile himself to rock’s pressures by checking out the old masters: of late, he played at the Bob Dylan 30th anniversary tribute and on bills with Keith Richards and Neil Young.

"Neil gets obsessed with his work, and when he does, everyone says, ‘OK, he’s going to be building a bridge out of toothpicks for the next six months, leave him alone.’ That’s great. I ‘d love to see what would happen if I was left alone for six months to make music instead of having to find time to do it. Isn’t it silly? That’s the biggest shock of this whole scene: I thought that if your job was to make music, then you’d be able to write songs during the day, take a piano lesson at four o’clock, come home and work on the four-track, make your girlfriend dinner and go out and see a show. But somehow that hasn’t worked out. But I’m going to try to make that time, and who ends up alienated, I don’t know."

As for Dylan, Eddie won’t talk about his conversations with the old goat because (a) "it’s a long story" and (b) "it would be a desecration. But, yeah, he calls me Eddie and I call him Bob. He actually likes our music a lot. Did he ask me to write a song with him? I didn’t take that seriously. We’d had a few pints that night. It was about seven in the morning and we’d been up all night in this Irish pub in New York, Tommy Maken’s. Bob had some advice, the biggest piece being, ‘Go to Dublin’. His song we sang that night, ‘Masters Of War’, still has relevance. That night made you think how nice it is to have a body of work. It made you just want to lock yourself in for six months, not talk to anyone and just do this. Especially if you’re capable of doing it."

*

STONE WILL EXPLAIN HOW Eddie’s threats to retire into songwriting purdah are sincere but unlikely to eventuate. That Eddie is "the emotional leader" of the band is admitted, but so far he needs the band just as badly as they need him. Too old for the rocker’s traditional all-for-one, one-for-all gang solidarity, Pearl Jam are caught in the constant tension of humouring their singer while respecting his creative temperament and high ideals. Kurt Cobain’s unprovoked attack, therefore, particularly stung Jeff, but, as leader, Eddie has healed the rift.

"I didn’t talk about it to anybody except for my little brother the next day, when we went surfing. But that’s all been taken care of." A rapprochment was engineered with Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love and the rest of the Nirvana camp. "It was a sacred moment and I just kind of feel weird talking about it. We slow-danced; everything was fine. It was actually an apology." Pressed, he goes into more detail, describing a tender moment soundtracked by Eric Clapton’s ‘Tears in Heaven’ and involving no hankypanky or category A drugs whatsoever.

Problems, problems. Almost worst of all is the tendency of so many fans to look to Eddie to solve their problems. A former problem-teen himself. Eddie used to write back personally until engulfed by the numbers.

"A fucked up person who’s had bad things happen can relate to me because he sees someone else who’s fucked up. But I get out through the music; that’s what helps me. That’s what helps them too, but then they think that the person it comes from has answers or can help them more. They don’t understand that, at bottom level, we’re both fucked up. And whenever you do have answers, it’s at 3:30 in the morning, and you’re alone– and you can’t find a pencil and paper. I can’t get to those people one on one, whereas with the music, if they have fresh batteries in their Walkman, they have access to it 24 hours a day: it’s always there. But I’m not there for myself all the time. And why aren’t I there? Because I’m putting so much into this music thing!

"Everyone says, you’ve got to expect it, because you put yourself out there. So maybe I won’t put myself out there. I like my privacy too much to deal with that. I don’t like to be talked about, so what the fuck am I doing? You would think that what I create would be enough. I don’t like rock stars yet here I am being turned into one," he sighs.

" My life – it’s all interesting stuff: my father who dies before I know he’s my father and then I find out... But I just feel really weird talking about it. I feel like my life is going to be trivialised. Wouldn’t you feel strange about that? One day I suppose it’ll all come out," he jests darkly. "All my relatives have been warned not to talk."

"He had 14 young boys under his basement floorboards?’" hoots Stone. "But he seemed so quiet and friendly!’"

At which point Eddie picks up the copy of Melody Maker and settles down in his chair to read the review of the Pearl Jam show...