“Eddie Vedder’s going to be hosting a Pearl Jam album playback event in London on Thursday. And there’ll be tequila!”

I’m not sure which part of that email gladdened my heart the most, but here I am at the designated time of 5pm in the Lafayette, a Whelan’s-like venue in the King’s Cross area, which is far less seedy than it was in the 1980s when The Pogues sang about it on ‘The Old Main Drag’.

It’s not long before BBC6 Music’s Matt Everitt welcomes the main man to the stage. Resplendent in a rakish hat and sporting a Zapata-style moustache, Eddie is still buzzing after jamming out ‘The Punk And The Godfather’ with The Who at last night’s Teenage Cancer Trust in the nearby Royal Albert Hall.

“All of the most important bands are from this spot,” the lifelong Anglophile tells us. “I remember my first time in London, walking through Hyde Park with my skateboard and thinking, ‘This feels like the fucking Moon Landing!’ I went and stood outside the Royal Albert Hall because of the live album that Creedence Clearwater Revival recorded there. Thirty years later, the door opens, I’m invited in and get to play with my heroes. I was overcome with emotion and like, ‘I can’t believe my life!’”

Pearl Jam playback event in London by Fraser Taylor.

Comparing his Who fandom to the other artistic things he holds dear, Eddie continues: “There are books that I’ve maybe read five times. I might have watched 2001: A Space Odyssey two hundred times. I’ve listened to Who songs a million times, maybe two million times! Nick Cave possibly 500,000 times.

“You don’t stand in front of a piece of art and scream, ‘Great painting!’ You don’t cover it with a sheet and shout, ‘One more time!’ What’s volume to a painting?

“Music is the most powerful of all art forms and working in it is one of the best jobs on the planet.”

And so say all of us! In a further reflection on the role music plays in our lives, Eddie observes: “There are people who fucked at Pearl Jam shows. Maybe not at them but afterwards. And continued fucking. They’ve had kids and named them after me. That’s weird! I’d prefer them naming their dog after me. ‘Here Vedder!’”

As for Pearl Jam, “We’re a family who’ve been through all these things together. Getting along... because we haven’t had artistic decisions to make for two years now! How are we going to handle that (this time round)? Is someone going to take the position of devil’s advocate? We don’t need Satan in the room!”

Moving on to Dark Matter, Eddie admits that, “I thought it was poetic to be making a new record after 33 ⁄ years together, but I got the fucking maths wrong. It’s 34 years, but hey!

“I love that magic time when you finish a record and have it to yourself for a while. You’re the only ones hearing it – apart from the neighbours! I remember driving out to a secret Fugazi show in the desert, listening to a pre-release copy of Nevermind.

“Andrew Watt (producer, musician and one of Eddie’s bezzies) is great for sharing stuff. Mick Jagger sent Andrew an unreleased Rolling Stones song. I was so happy; it was liquid gold.”

The mood turns serious for a moment as Eddie talks about the epidemic of mass shootings in the US.

“I have to get this off my chest,” he intones darkly. “There’s one every other day. I know the parents of a dead child. One of them is a neuroscientist who killed themselves four years after the shooting. Couldn’t live with the pain. There are more regulations placed on my body than there are on guns and automatic weapons.”

There’s mass clapping in the room when a visibly emotional Vedder finishes his harrowing story. It’s time now to listen to Side A of Dark Matter which, as Edwin McFee rightly says in this issue’s review, is up there with the likes of Pearl Jam, Vs. and Vitality.

As we shake legs, bottoms and other body parts to the likes of ‘Scared Of Fear’, ‘React, Respond’ and ‘Wreckage’, its primary songwriter produces a giant bottle of tequila and starts pouring, Patrick Kielty eat ‘yer heart out, free shots for everyone in the audience.

In between barman duties, Eddie throws shapes, lip-syncs and generally goofs around with the invitees as the Dark Matter title-track and ‘Won’t Tell’ crank it up another few gears.

At the half-way mark, and with his 19-year-old daughter Olivia looking down from the balcony, the singer talks about one of his Side B faves, ‘Setting Sun’, which has “that slinky Velvet Underground vibe.”

“It’s a song about maybe being a parent… having faith in your kids but also being terrified,” he says. The tequila pouring, shape-throwing, lip-syncing and general goofing around resumes with ‘Setting Sun’ as Velvet Underground-y as advertised.

“Did you like it?” Eddie inquires after the end of Dark Matter is greeted with more mass applause. “I don’t fucking care, I like it. It’s genuinely not bad. “

This is the most fun I’ve had in a long time, thanks for coming!” The feeling, Mr. Vedder, is entirely mutual.

• Pearl Jam’s Dark Matter is out on April 19. They play Marlay Park on June 22 with Richard Ashcroft and The Murder Capital. pearljam.com has details of April 16’s one night only cinema event.