The five-piece created a fistful of alternative anthems. Now they're back, but they swear it's only until October.

It was when Steve Wall saw Bryan Adams walking offstage with a towel around his head that he knew things were getting strange. Summer 1992 and Adams was the biggest draw on the planet thanks to that (Everything I Do) I Do It For You nonsense the previous year. Everywhere Adams went that summer the kids wanted to rock, so naturally he topped the bill. Except at a festival called Féile in a town called Thurles.

On a wet Sunday night in August that year Wall watched as Adams walked past and headed for the tunnel. If Wall had stood there all day he'd have seen Christy Moore, Extreme, The 4 of Us, Del Amitri, Buddy Guy, Sharon Shannon and more take the same long walk after their trips to Tipp.

As Adams disappeared back to the dressing rooms, the steam rising from his head, Wall and the rest of The Stunning walked onstage, picked up their instruments, played some songs that everyone in the audience knew by heart and sent 'em home sweating. You'd never think they were shaking with nerves.

Top of the bill, ma, top of the world.

Eleven years on Wall can recall plenty of good days like that one. Hindsight is great for that. You forget the door on the van used to fall off every couple of days. You forget about the tiresome trips you made in that fecking van from Galway to London to play nothing gigs. You forget about the promises made about releasing your record in the US. You forget about the frustrations that caused you and your band mates to clock out when the going was still good and you were the biggest live band in the land.

Eleven years on The Stunning are returning. For one month and one month only the original line-up will play about a dozen shows around the country and Paradise In The Picturehouse, their debut album, will be available once again. Already some of the shows are sold out and people are getting excited. Those who met at Stunning shows as boys and girls are preparing to return as men and women, as long as they can get a babysitter.

"OK, it's a bit of a nostalgia trip," says Wall, who with his band mates is at Willie Campbell's lovely little venue in Headford, a dozen miles beyond Galway, rehearsing for the tour. The original gang who made the break in 1987 are all here: Wall and kid brother Joe, Cormac Dunne, Derek Murray and Jimmy Higgins. "We're finding that the songs are sounding a bit slower. We played them too fast back then. That's youth for you I suppose."

For Wall this is a strange one. Since the Stunning called it a day, in 1994, he and Joe have been making music as The Walls. After a false start with a major label they've been getting on fine and haven't yet had to resort to robbing banks. On the contrary, one of their tunes has turned into a nice little earner, thanks to its appearance in an advert for a bank.

But The Stunning has refused to go away. "We're always getting asked about the album. When we started the Walls website people were e-mailing us about Paradise and asking us to release it again. Most people had it on tape, and they wanted it now on CD."

The original notion was to make it available only through the website, but Susan and Donal Scannell, their management team, persuaded them to go the whole hog. Get it in the shops, they urged, go on tour, do it properly.

During the Walls's slot at the Witnness festival in July the others came on, and they played three Stunning songs together. The earth didn't move, but it felt right.

Ask Wall about the band's 1994 demise and the answer is still hard for some fans to fathom. "We needed a new challenge, we were getting stale. We were doing loads and loads of Irish tours, but we were getting nowhere abroad. We couldn't get the record released in Britain or America, we had hired really bad management in America and it just wasn't happening for us.

"We were getting really frustrated by this, and we felt we were running out of creative steam. We didn't want to fall out with one another, so we decided to call it a day. I think our manager at the time [Pádraig Boran\] was relieved, because we were probably driving him around the bend with our complaints about everything."

It's a fact of life that musicians are all-star whingers, yet on the face of it the Stunning were hugely popular and had little cause to grumble. Wall remains adamant that they couldn't survive on Irish success alone. "We had to do something else. I remember me and Joe were really excited during the last Stunning tour, thinking of what we were going to do as the Walls."

Yet many Irish acts now use success at home to support their efforts further afield. When Wall talks about using money made from Stunning concerts here to subsidise trips abroad for showcases and gigs, you think of The Frames, who've used a solid Irish support base to fund successful tours of and releases in Europe, the US and Australia.

Back then, Wall believes, bands had a very different mindset about the business.

"We were after a major deal, and it didn't happen. If you look at all the bands who were around at the time, the likes of Something Happens and An Emotional Fish, they were all signed to majors. That seemed to be the only thing to do, so we'd play gigs in London and New York because so-and-so from Sony or Warner was supposed to come down. It never happened."

Now, looking at how even The Walls have steered a resolutely independent course, he feels they should have pursued other options, but "no one told us about them at the time; there didn't seem to be an alternative".

This return, then, is not really about unfinished business. The Stunning were the biggest band in the country; tracks such as Brewing Up A Storm, Heads Will Roll and Half Past Two are still alternative anthems. They've nothing left to prove as The Stunning, so this time round is simply for sport.

There's a bit of a pause when you push Wall about if it's really just for a month. There must be a temptation to keep her lit for a while longer. What about a December tour, a turn at the AIB Christmas dinner dance, a few festivals next summer, another go at cracking the charts outside Ireland?

He says The Walls start recording a new album in October and two of the band - Murray and Higgins - have touring commitments until the end of the year with The Sawdoctors. You might think it will be hard to say goodbye at midnight on September 30th, but Wall thinks otherwise.

"It really is just for a month. I mean, I'm really excited about what we're going to do with the new Walls album, that's something I'm looking forward to. This is going to be great fun, but once it's over, it's over."

The Stunning's Irish tour begins at the West County Hotel in Ennis, Co Clare, on Thursday.

See www.thestunning.net for more tour dates. Paradise In The Picturehouse will be released on Earshot Records on Friday