The East End Social season of events in 2014, organised by the Bridgeton-based Chemikal Underground label, was one of the highlights of Glasgow's Commonwealth Games cultural programme, but there is another more mainstream side of the city's musical identity that has its roots in that quarter, and embraces the main men behind The Fratellis, Glasvegas, and the group appearing in the East End's venerable Barrowland venue tomorrow evening, Gun.

Gun frontman Dante Gizzi is proud of his East End roots and the band still base themselves there, with a rehearsal and recording studio in a business centre on the edge of Glasgow Green. And Gun are very much back in business, having revisited all the albums from their 1990s heyday in a series of gigs at King Tuts and now releasing a new album, Frantic, that is the equal of anything that saw them topping the chart back then. It comes with a bonus disc that collects some of the live highlights from the Tut's retrospective, just to make it an even more attractive proposition.

Gizzi and his brother Jools are the partnership at the heart of the Gun operation, reunited after Dante's excursion with five-piece glam-rock combo El Presidente at the start of the new century, and a songwriting force that has served other bands, including two singles for hirsute Glasgow group Kassidy.

"We have had our ups and downs," says Dante of his relationship with Jools, "but we need each other to bounce ideas off."

There is mutual appreciation too. "On the new album, Jools' favourite track is Hold Your Head Up, and that's pretty much all mine, while the title track is all his, and that the one I like best."

The disc was launched with a playback and brief acoustic set in the intimate second screen auditorium of Glasgow Film Theatre where the cover photograph was shot, for an invited audience of fans. It is a collection that wears its rock heart on its sleeve, with T Rex riffage, and nods to the stadium acts like the Rolling Stones and Bon Jovi that Gun opened for in the 90s, as well as poppier tunes like Frantic and infectious closer Never Knew What I Had.

"We spent two years writing and recording the album," says Gizzi. "We needed to find a direction that we should go for, a style and sound that would appeal to the Gun fanbase but also reflect what is happening now."

That "now" was not necessarily bang up-to-date and includes a love of old songs that the Gizzis had heard on the soundtrack of the Coen brothers movies, as well as the gospel singing of Mahalia Jackson: it is all grist to the mill. "Gun have always been difficult to pigeon-hole. We are a rock band but there was always a different edge to it."

That funky edge was best illustrated by their biggest hit, a cover of Cameo's Word Up that is a close relation of the Aerosmith/Run DMC collaboration Walk This Way and was originally slated as a B-side but became a global hit, and a UK top ten, back in 1994. There is no question of Gizzi being irked that it is not one of their own tunes. If you go to Barrowland tomorrow, there is a cast-iron guarantee that the song will be in the set alongside the new material.

"You can't be precious about things like that, that would be short-changing people. It is part of Gun's legacy."

That is the sort of attitude that fuelled the revisiting of the band's back-catalogue, playing the Taking on the World, Gallus and Swagger albums in full at King Tut's when that 1989 first album was reissued in an expanded edition last year.

"We learned them all again in just two months, and there were quite a few songs that we had never played live back then when we were young and hungry. Gallus proved to be really difficult to play. It is quite atmospheric with lots of changes and different parts to know. That turned out to be the best night, but it was the one where I was most nervous."

The nerves are understandable because although he looks born to the role now, Dante Gizzi was not Gun frontman at the time of their greatest success, but the bass player. The current line up has Andy Carr on bass, a newcomer who also had to learn the back catalogue from scratch, alongside drummer Paul McManus, with Jools Gizzi and Johnny McGlynn on guitars.

McGlynn came into the line-up from Dante Gizzi's El Presidente project, a band noteable for its female rhythm section of Dawn Zhu and Laura Marks. While Gun is Gizzi's focus at present, he is not ready to bury El Presidente just yet.

"I really liked that mixed-gender thing. I'm a big Prince fan and his group with Wendy and Lisa was a great band, really exciting. We'd written all the songs for El Presidente's first album so it was just a question of finding the right people to play them."

Gizzi reveals that there is a second El Presidente "in the can", shelved by the record company during a change of ownership, and he clearly has not given up hope of it eventually seeing the light of day, when his other group may also ride again. "Never say never," he says with a grin.

For the present though, it is Gun that is the unfinished business the Gizzi brothers want to see on a sound footing. He admits that they were burned by the experience of the band's demise in 1997, their last word being an album entitled 0141 632 6326, a phone number that gave fans updates on the group's activity in those pre-website days. In a fairly well-documented story, their promising set of demo recordings became a ludicrously expensive and poorly received set, recorded with INXS keyboard player Andrew Farriss producing. "He was not a pleasant guy," says Gizzi candidly,"and we didn't want to leave Gun like that."

Frantic was completed in three weeks on vintage gear in ICP studios in Belgium, using Trevor Horn's team of Simon Bloor and Tim Weidner, with some additional work at Horn's Sarm studios in London and Gorbals Sound in Glasgow. It was, says Gizzi, an altogether happier experience - and sounds it. With its release, Gun is back in the manufacturing business again, while the live operation is still taking on the world with that old gallus swagger.

*Gun play Glasgow Barrowland tomorrow, Frantic is out now on Caroline.