THE phrase ''haud me back'' usually springs to mind when you hear that a bunch of rock musicians, successful in the seventies, have decided to reform for a reunion album and tour. Rock and roll is a young man's game, after all, and there's no more sad a sight than a fat, balding, wheezing, geriatric old fart standing up there on the stage, moving his arthritic, nicotine-stained, fingers up and down a Fender's fretboard, and attempting (in vain) to recapture the magic of the music that once was his. Call him Mr Pitiful, if you will.

And then, as if to prove the exception, there is Steely Dan; doing it again after a 20-year career break and still as stylish, fresh, and sophisticated as ever they were. Listen to their new(ish) album, Two Against Nature, and it's like they've never been gone. Is there a cooler band in the popular music universe? I don't think so.

The secret is, of course, that Steely Dan never were your average rock group. They were always - oh, what's the old cliche? - ''musicians' musicians''. Innovative, influential, and shit hot. They were the paragons of quality in the decade of dross. Their 1978 album, Aja, is a ubiquitous entry on any discerning music fan's top 10 list. Their music was access all areas; it was jazzy, and bluesy, and rhythm-and-bluesy . . . but it never forgot that, deep down, it was filed under ''rock.''

But Steely Dan were, by all accounts, a tad prickly to talk to. Not in the habit of suffering fools gladly. And, if they were like that in the seventies, they would surely be even worse two score years and more down the line.

And so it was, with some trepidation, that this reporter, a Steely Dan fan (nay, Steely Dan anorak), approached the prospect of interviewing Walter Becker who, together with Donald Fagen, is the aforementioned Steely Dan (the rest being the cream of whatever session musicians were hanging around the studio at the time - including, for the record, Elliot Randall, Michael McDonald, Joe Sample, Jeff Porcaro, Steve Gadd, David Sanborn, Michael Brecker, Larry Carlton, Wayne Shorter, and Wilton Fedler).

Becker and Fagen were the guys whose posters would, almost certainly, have adorned my bedsit wall were it not for the facts that (a) Steely Dan didn't do posters, and (b) I wasn't living in a bedsit at the time. But, boy, did I love their music.

They made only seven albums in their first life (1972-1980). It started brilliantly with the seminal Can't Buy A Thrill, got even better with Countdown To Ecstasy, remained outstanding with Pretzel Logic, then Katy Lied, and The Royal Scam, and reached its creative and artistic peak with (what is arguably the Dan's finest moment) the aforementioned Aja. Then came Gaucho, their final effort before creative burn-out and that 20-year career break.

A Steely Dan album always possessed the highest, most meticulous, production values and the slick musicianship was never anything short of sublime perfection. Fagen and Becker couldn't write a duff song or make a poor record even if their lives depended upon it.

However, though generally recognised as one of the most exciting live acts of their time, they became bored with touring early in their career. The result was - and is - that much of their later work has seldom been played live to an audience (save for a brief ''Alive In America'' re-union tour and album in the mid-nineties).

So a very rare treat indeed lies in store for those of us who are planning to attend their concert at Glasgow's Clyde Auditorium. And it is not, by the way, some intimate Steely Dan with

just Becker and Fagen up their on stage. Not for them the cut-price ''unplugged'' performance. Our money's worth is pretty much guaranteed, with the duo backed by a band consisting of two guitarists, two keyboards, bass, drums, a four-man horn section, and three female backing vocalists.

''It's a very satisfying performance,'' said the 50-year-old Becker, sounding perhaps just a tad immodest when I spoke to him the other day in his home city of New York. ''We're doing a couple of songs from the new album Two Against Nature and a bunch of songs from the old albums which people are reacting to extremely well.

''You have to be careful because it's easy to ruin people's expectations by doing too much new material. But I think it works out very well. We're lucky enough to have a catalogue of songs that people actually know. And we've tried to make it all more interesting by re-arranging a lot of the material to play live.''

Becker (and he swears this is true too for his partner in crime) says he is genuinely happy to be back with Steely Dan. They never really intended to stay apart for two decades. So was it that other old rock-and-roll cliche ''musical differences'' which broke them up and kept them apart for so long perhaps?

''No. Because over the years we have had many musical differences. But I think the hallmark of a partnership that functions over time is that there is always a way of resolving those musical differences. And I think we are still able to do that as well as ever we did,'' he said.

''Donald and I have always had a lot of common ground in terms of our musical background and in the general idea of what we were trying to accomplish. Any differences then were usually differences of how to do the same thing. We are usually able to come up with a compromise,'' he added.

It's just possible that, on a basis of needs must, Becker and Fagen might have been forced to get back together a little sooner were it not for the fact that their back catalogue kept them going in serious money, royalty-wise.

Becker explained: ''We were fortunate in that all the work we had done in the seventies, it kind of continued much longer than we thought it would. People were still buying our albums and then, at some point in the eighties when CD technology really kicked in, they were re-buying our albums. And so, without really thinking about it too much, what we assumed would die down within a couple of years, was still going strong in the middle of the 1980s.''

Becker admits that the direction popular music was taking in the late seventies/early eighties was probably the opposite of Steely Dan's. ''Right at the point where we were taking our break, pop music was starting to go punk and new wave. There was an apathy which had almost a kind of political agenda, rejecting the idea of sophisticated, elaborately conceived, pop music. They rejected anything that was harmonically ambitious. It was not part of the aesthetics of the time. It was as if the people who were making the music, the audience, and particularly the critics who were writing about it, they all rejected many of the things that had gone before. And I think that what we were doing was considered anathema to them.''

But there you go. Becker and Fagen, it seems, get the last laugh. The transient music of punk and new wave lies buried and best forgotten somewhere in rock's graveyard. Meanwhile, Steely Dan enjoy the second coming. Prepare to reel in the years.

n Steely Dan are at the

Clyde Auditorium, Glasgow,

on Wednesday.