If ever a band deserved the tag "They should have been huge" it's the Chameleons. Emerging from the Western side of the Pennines in the early 1980s, they never reached the enormous world-wide audience their music deserved. However, two and a half decades after they released their first album, many people who have never heard of the Chameleons certainly own records that probably could not have existed without them. The Verve, Interpol, Editors, Bloc Party, the Wedding Present and Spiritualized are just some of the bands who include Chameleons fans in their line-ups and within whose music the sound they made reverberates to this day.

A year after the band formed in Middleton, near Manchester, some similarly sensitive and excitable chaps up the road called the Smiths developed a sound which also bears the Chameleons' distinct DNA - urgent, impassioned, anthemic, with wonderful guitars. However, no other band has ever sounded quite like them.

Their distinctive debut, Script Of The Bridge, from 1983, introduces what soon became Chameleons trademarks: Dave Fielding and Reg Smithies' hypnotically entwined, plangent guitars, and singer-bassist Mark Burgess's powerful lyrical themes: the yearning for lost innocence and the seductive but dangerous power of nostalgia. This is the sound of young men attempting to make sense of the world around them and within them, looking inwardly and outwardly and asking the Big Questions about life, the universe and everything and then documenting the results within waterfalls of guitars while the rest of us would settle for talking about it in the pub.

Something certainly hit home, as these songs generated the late DJ John Peel's approval, earned rave reviews and kicked off the still enormous cult following that meant people were still singing along to these anthem at the band's brief but memorable 2000 reunion. That went the way of everything else in the Chameleons' eventful career. Forever dogged by personal and contractual problems, rarely has a band been so entwined in greatness and the curse of rotten bad luck. Perhaps if it had been different - particularly had manager Tony Fletcher not died in 1987, causing the Chameleons to fall apart just as they were finally on the cusp of mass acceptance - then we would be talking about a massively popular band, not just an influential and loved one. But then again, if those tensions hadn't existed in and around the band, perhaps the music wouldn't have sounded as haunted, or haunting.

The path from their formation in 1981 to Script Of the Bridge was typically problematic, as they dispensed with a drummer (Brian Schofield, who made way for powerhouse John Lever) and a major label (CBS subsidiary Epic, who released the 1982 debut single In Shreds) just prior to recording. Engineered by Colin Richardson but produced by the band themselves, the story usually told is that Epic wanted to pair the band with a big name producer, but the Chameleons refused and fled for indie label Statik. The tone for their career was set right there: a band whose sense of identity may have cost them commercially but who - all these years later - sound exactly as they wanted to.

1983 was a year of enormously-impacting long players, from Michael Jackson's Thriller to New Order's Power, Corruption and Lies. But as pop headed towards the dancefloor, the Chameleons produced a debut that didn't define the era - there's nothing about Script's passion and poignancy that screams "1983" - but transcended it. It opens with a memorable - and never correctly identified, despite many fans' efforts! - snatch of dialogue the band recorded from the television. No matter where they come from - not Gone With The Wind, as is often speculated - the words "In the autumn before winter, comes man's last mad surge of youth" uncannily but perfectly set the scene for the madly euphoric but troubled and unsettled anthems which follow.

It's an album that still sounds packed with instant classics, from powerful opener Don't Fall - Burgess in less regular role as out and out rocker, under attack by unseen enemies and screaming of "backs against the wall" - to the quietly hushed promise of Pleasure And Pain, or Fielding and Smithies' almost breathtakingly tear-jerking intro to Less Than Human.

But if there's one song that sums up Script - and possibly provides the highlight of their whole career - it's the six minutes and 51 seconds of almost hallucinatory perfection that make up Second Skin: a brilliant song about transient highs and illusory beauty with a melody to match Burgess's memorable chorus: "If this is the stuff that dreams are made of, then no wonder I feel like I'm floating on air." In 1983, Second Skin tore up John Peel's Festive Fifty, the first signifier that among like-minded souls around the country - as they later would around the world - the Chameleons' songs were striking a chord.

And so here we are 25 years later, with the 25th anniversary edition of Script Of The Bridge that is appropriately the best version of the album ever released and for that we can thank Mark Burgess's Mum. Amazingly, the original master tapes were found in Mrs. Burgess's attic, in a fragile state, but thanks to a modern technique known as "baking" they've been restored to their original glory for this digital format. For the first time, unlike any previous release, this is the sound the band themselves heard in the studio in those mythical, far off days.

The Chameleons made three further studio albums - 1985's What Does Anything Mean Basically?, 1987's Strange Times (for major Geffen, following Statik's collapse - another major blow) and the post-reunion Why Call It Anything? Each of them is as wonderful as they are different, and all bearing Reg Smithies' distinctive artwork. But for anyone new to the Chameleons, Script is the obvious and perfect place to start: at the beginning. If this album were being recorded today, it wouldn't sound at all out of place among the Bloc Partys and Interpols, although at 25 years and counting, will probably outlive them all. One song is particularly ironic. "Tomorrow, remember yesterday," Mark Burgess sings poignantly on Nostalgia. He couldn't have been more right. Script Of The Bridge is timeless.

Dave Simpson, February 2007