The Yellow Magic Orchestra have landed in London town for Massive Attack's Meltdownat the Royal Festival Hall. Three days before their first show in England since 1980, I meet up with them to discuss their new EP and the forthcoming gig. They are assembled on the sofa, looking like a future snap of one of their old album covers. Musically, YMO are one of these bands whose tentacles reach across popular culture. The first time you hear their electronica, it's instantly familiar, much like the music of Kraftwerk. In fact, YMO started off as fans of Kraftwerk, and were the innovators of the technopop scene in their native Japan. They disbanded or, in a play on Japanese words, "spread out" in 1984, but they have been working together on projects with comically apt names like Human Audio Sponge.

Ryuichi Sakamoto, now well known as a classical and film composer, says that the band members got along despite mutual suspicion over each other's subcultural stylings. Yukihiro Takahashi, aged 16, was considered "too fashionable" by keyboardist and bassist Hariumo Hosono  and Ryuichi was dismissed as a "hippy". Overcoming this conflict through makeovers, the band formed and went on to do three albums of strange computer-like music. Though the later BGM is probably the most accessible, the influence of the self-titled debut Yellow Magic Orchestra from 1978 is apparent in recent acts like Dan Deacon and Agaskodo Teliverek. The melodic mix of robot like vocals, synthesisers, and samples has never sounded warmer.

Their reunion album Technodon, released in 1993, saw them collaborating with William Gibson and William Burroughs who read from their work with YMO backing. The writer Bruce Sterling is also a huge fan of the band. YMO's music captures a kind of sci-fi aesthetic that ironically can only be imitated by their successors.

The Meltdown show on Sunday saw them playing some of their old music live for the first time in 30 years, with Christian Fennesz appearing alongside the band. In August, they will be releasing a yet-untitled EP that saw them going into the studio together. The music was recorded in a record two hours and 40 minutes. So what music are the band members themselves listening to now? For Sakamoto, it's "Medieval and baroque music" and Norwegian electronica, while Hosono is playing country music with a band cutely titled World of Shyness.  So if you get a chance to catch them live, take it, before they materialise into one of their many other guises.