We chat to the Goo Goo Dolls ahead of their gig at Newcastle's O2 Academy

Goo Goo Dolls have a long history – when the band started they were a post-hardcore/thrash band, ripped jeans, baseball cap backwards, guitars slung low.

There are few better examples of post-punk perfection than Ain’t That Unusual.  Then in 1998, came Iris, arguably one of the biggest rock songs of all time and things would never be the same for them again.

It brought them to a whole new audience, the album from which it came, Dizzy Up the Girl, has sold over five million copies worldwide.

Recently, three of the band’s songs were placed in Billboard’s Top 100 of 2002-12, with Iris standing at No.1.

Now, this multi-platinum, Grammy-nominated group, at the O2 Academy Newcastle tomorrow, are feeling particularly good about their tenth album, Magnetic.

More to the point, the Goo Goo Dolls are feeling particularly good. Period.

“This album was really upbeat and fun,” says John Rzeznik, the trio’s primary singer, songwriter and guitarist since they formed in Buffalo in 1986.

“I don’t think we’ve made a record like this in a while. We just had a great time doing it.”

Bassist Robby Takac, whose partnership with Rzeznik has been the band’s foundation since the start, has just had his first child, and Rzeznik got married this summer.

That joy is all there in the spirit of the 11 new songs on the album, for which Rzeznik, Takac and drummer Mike Malinin – the lineup steady since 1995 – recorded in New York, London and Los Angeles with Gregg Wattenberg (Train), Rob Cavallo (Green Day), John Shanks (Bon Jovi) and Greg Wells (Katy Perry).

From the celebratory single Rebel Beat to the love-rediscovery ballad Slow It Down, from the blue-collar anthem Keep the Car Running to the meltingly romantic Come to Me, Magnetic is an album bursting with a spirit of renewal.

John Rzeznik has been honoured with the Songwriters Hall of Fame Hal David Starlight Award and most recently Goo Goo Dolls honoured President Barack Obama with a headlining slot at The Creative Coalition’s Inaugural Ball, in Washington, DC.

At the core throughout is the Goo Goo Dolls’ blue-collar Buffalo origins, the same energy that fueled the group when if first garnered buzz on the local, then regional and then national club scenes.

Nowhere is it more explicit than on Keep the Car Running, a song about the disillusionment of youth, about wanting to escape, but also an earnest love-letter to home.

“Buffalo had its own unique sound,” Rzeznik says. “I think we definitely retain that. When I pick up an acoustic guitar and start singing, it’s me. We can’t be anybody else. I like what I sing. We like what we write. And if we don’t like it, we don’t play it.”