Some Kind of Wonder Stuff : Existential crisis passed, Miles Hunt and band-mates are back on the road, for ‘Construction for the Modern Idiot.’ They’ll be at the Coach House Sunday.

Miles Hunt of the Wonder Stuff concluded a few years ago that being a rock star, or at least something approximating one, wasn’t so wonderful after all.

To hear the English band’s singer tell it, 1991 was a year of fear and loathing on the campaign trail as he and the Wonder Stuff tried to promote their then-current album, “Never Loved Elvis.”

One of the low points came July 29, on Hunt’s 25th birthday, when a friend invited him to celebrate by attending a Guns N’ Roses concert at the Forum in Inglewood.

Hunt had spent the previous three weeks crisscrossing the United States on a publicity tour without the band, chatting up the “Elvis” album in a round of interviews and other promotional appearances. As he watched Axl Rose strut, Hunt found himself questioning the terms of his own existence.

“Guns N’ Roses came on in all their stupidity. I was extremely intoxicated, and I was looking at them and the audience, and I hated everyone in the room,” Hunt recalled over the phone last week from Seattle, the first stop on a tour that brings the Wonder Stuff to the Coach House on Sunday.

Hunt remembers wondering exactly what it was he was striving for: “I spent three weeks whoring around America to pacify my record company, and this (GNR-style arena-rock godhead) is the end result? I got very upset and decided I would stop being in the group and get a job. I’m not saying I’m a victim (of rock’s promotional machinery). I know it’s my choice. But it came to a massive confusion for me.”

At least Hunt got a song out of his moment of revulsion. On a plane flight the next day, the badly hung-over singer began scrawling diary notes that subsequently emerged in “Hush,” a song from the Wonder Stuff’s new release, “Construction for the Modern Idiot.”

The song, which begins with the line, “If this is the prize, it feels like a threat,” expresses Hunt’s misgivings about the chase for fame and his reluctance to divulge too much of his inner self to the public. The song’s last line goes, “No, you don’t know my relatives, and that’s as deep as you get in.”

Instead of getting a job, Hunt soldiered on with the Wonder Stuff, which nearly staged its own Waterloo in a Tokyo hotel room.

“I was very serious” about quitting, Hunt said. “Things came to a worse head by the end of the year, when the whole band came to blows with one another. I attacked everybody. The first thing I threw was the lamp,” which meant that the Wonder Stuff’s internecine free-for-all took place in the dark.

“There was no light in the room, I was hurling things at everybody,” he said. “The next few gigs were difficult. We were all on stage wondering who had hit who.”

As the long, glorious and occasionally pugilistic careers of the Who and the Kinks attest, a bit of brawling among band-mates seems to do British rockers some good. The Wonder Stuff got over its blow up, and reconvened determined to take the idea of a “fresh start” as literally as possible.

As the band prepared to record again, Hunt said: “We wrote and rehearsed all the songs as if we were a brand-new band getting together its first set. The old cliche about a band’s first album being the easiest and most enjoyable to make--there is a little bit of truth in that.”

The band rehired Paul Collier, the producer who had recorded its first two albums, “The Eight Legged Groove Machine” (1988) and “Hup” (1989). Those had established the Wonder Stuff as a cheeky but exuberant and catchy band that managed to sound bilious and frolicsome at the same time.

The folk strains that dominated “Never Loved Elvis,” the band’s more reflective third album, were de-emphasized in favor of a louder guitar-rock approach.

Hunt reports that this was not a problem for Martin Bell, the fiddler/mandolinist/accordionist whose playing was highlighted on “Elvis.” Looking for a new challenge, the singer says, Bell busied himself arranging the rich horn and string orchestrations that crop up on several of the songs on “Construction for the Modern Idiot.”

Hunt also rearranged some of his personal habits, first giving up marijuana and then, about a year ago, booze. Although it is his policy not to write confessional songs, the new album alludes several times to his own bouts of excess.

At a time when singing the praises of weed has become high fashion in pop, as practiced by megaselling rappers (Cypress Hill, Dr. Dre) and rockers (the Black Crowes), the Wonder Stuff takes a contrarian stance. One new song, “Storm Drain,” depicts pot as a sense-dulling, life-stalling escape.

Going against the flow is no problem for Hunt, a brash fellow who seems to relish a good verbal tussle and pulls no punches.

“Dope smokers bore the (expletive) out of me,” he said. “I know what a boring (expletive, expletive) I was when I used to smoke it. The song is a celebration of clearing my mind.”

Hunt says he gave up marijuana several years ago at the behest of his wife but maintained his liberal intake of alcohol.

“I spent the majority of the last three or four years” inebriated, he said, until “I gave myself a little test” last year and gave up drinking. “Now I get up earlier, I do much more, I’m a lot more sociable, and I think things through more clearly.”

Hunt says that some of his band-mates wondered whether he had thought things through clearly enough in his lyrics to “I Wish Them All Dead.” The track from “Construction” excoriates the Man-Boy Love Association, a fringe San Francisco group that cites the ancient Greeks in advocating mentor-lover unions between men and boys.

There is nothing controversial about condemning child abuse, but Hunt takes his condemnation to extremes with lyrics that urge vigilante justice against abusers: “It’s time to pick up a knife, or any weapon you like, to see an end to their lives,” he spits.

Hunt, who had just alighted in the United States, was momentarily taken aback when told of recent California cases in which his wish came true: the Menendez case, in which, if one believes the defense, past sexual abuse justified a double parricide, and the Ellie Nesler case, in which a woman stepped up in a Sonora courtroom and left her son’s alleged molester riddled with bullets.

“She killed him in the courtroom? (Expletive) me!” Hunt said in astonishment.

His first impulse was to weasel. He began to suggest that “I Wish Them All Dead,” which was inspired by a Geraldo Rivera expose on the MBLA, didn’t actually advocate lynching child abusers. Then he caught himself. “It doesn’t. . . . Well, it does, actually,” he admitted with a laugh.

The song simply captures his “knee-jerk reaction” to its loathsome subject, Hunt said. “Certain members of the band were saying, ‘It’s dodgy territory. Do you have to name who you’re after?’ They wanted to make it more general.”

The song remained quite specific, and Hunt takes no responsibility for any listener who might act on its very specific suggestions.

“People do whatever they do,” he said. “You’re pretty much responsible for your own actions.” The Menendez and Nesler shootings both predated the September release of the “Construction” album.

Although the Wonder Stuff has yet to move beyond cult status in America, it has had a healthy run in its homeland: Hunt said that “Construction for the Modern Idiot,” the band’s fourth album, went Top 5 in England and has produced two hit singles, “On the Ropes” and “Full of Life (Happy Now).”

Touring opportunities abound: After its American tour, the Wonder Stuff will stay on the road until June with tours of England, Australia and Japan. “Then we might do another tour of North America, if there appears to be a hungry audience that wants to see us again.”

All in all, Hunt said, life these days among the Wonder Stuff is fairly wonderful.

The band that almost self-destructed is still on the road, singing, in “On the Ropes,” a battle cry for intelligent rock: “Do you want to know what this fight’s about? / Commerciality over art can’t win out.” After that near-Waterloo in ‘91, the battle is going well again.

“We’re in a very lucky position, basically,” Hunt said. “We’re getting away with it is the way we look at it.”

* The Wonder Stuff, Chapterhouse and Primitive Painters play Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $13.50. (714) 496-8930.