For Dublin group Pugwash, the chance to record in Abbey Road is a dream come true, front man Thomas Walsh tells Kevin Courtney

Thomas Walsh is a big fan of Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson, Jeff Lynne and Andy Partridge. In fact, he's probably one of their biggest fans. When I ask him where we should meet, he replies, "somewhere I can fit into the seats".

Sitting in a Dublin pub, dressed in black trousers, shirt and tie, Walsh could easily be mistaken for the bouncer. He certainly doesn't look like Ireland's finest purveyor of poppy, psychedelic indie tunes, each one crafted from raw musical materials gathered from the Beatles, Beach Boys, XTC, Squeeze, Jellyfish and any other jangly songwriters you'd care to mention. In person, Walsh makes the Magic Numbers look anorexic; on record, he makes them sound like amateurs.

Thomas Walsh is Captain Pugwash, but he's not sailing this good ship alone. Over three albums - Almond Tea, Almanac and the new one, Jollity - he has managed to pick up some very able crewmen. Walsh drops names like dandruff, few of which would be familiar to anyone but the most dedicated pop anthologist, but all these people have added hugely to the Pugwash sound. Jason Falkner, for instance, formerly of west coast US psychedelic popsters Jellyfish and more recently a collaborator with French band Air; or American pop maestro Eric Matthews; or Dave Gregory, former guitarist with XTC; or the Section Quartet, featured on the new Kanye West and James Blunt albums, who play strings on two tracks - A Rose in a Garden of Weeds and I Want You Back in My Life (For Mam).

"Pugwash have always been a core of me and Keith Farrell," says Walsh. "The reason Pugwash exists is me and Keith getting together. I write all the stuff and arrange all the stuff, and Keith is the engineer and co-producer. He has a great ear for Pugwash sound, but it has to get out of my head first and onto the tape."

And then it has to get out to the public. From the start, Pugwash has been a cottage industry, Walsh writing the music at home in Dublin's Crumlin and recording on ProTools software. He has had to drum up the finance himself, and negotiate management and distribution deals in other countries.

All the hard work is starting to pay off, and the music of Pugwash is finally beginning to seep into the collective consciousness. The new single, It's Nice to Be Nice, blasted out of radio sets during the summer; it sounds like a great lost Beach Boys tune, and is a perfect anthem for modern Ireland, where manners have been abandoned in the rush to acquire the trappings of prosperity. It's hard to believe that these warm, Beatles-like sounds were recorded using digital techniques.

"ProTools is one of the greatest inventions in music," asserts Walsh. "If you want to make an album that sounds like a classic 1960s record, ProTools is there if you want it. It doesn't have to sound synthetic - it's whatever you put into it. If you want to sound really slick, like Britney, you can do it, but you can also get a warm, natural sound with it."

Walsh does, however, like to use vintage guitars, amps and pedals, and he wouldn't say no to a couple of days' recording time in Abbey Road studios. In fact, he did get to record the string segments of the new album there, where his avowed heroes, the Beatles, created most of their classic output.

"We'd been trying to get the Section Quartet to Dublin to do the strings, and they rang me up and said, 'Look, we can get Studio Two at a pretty great rate'. People think Abbey Road is out of reach, and you'll never get near it, but it was cheaper than if we'd brought them over here. So we all went over. When something like that falls into place, you don't deny it.

"We never went out of our way to go, 'Oh, we're a Beatley band, let's go to Abbey Road'. I mean, I dreamed of going to Abbey Road, but I always said I'd never go in unless I was recording there. I didn't want to just visit as a fan. So when I walked in there, and went into Studio Two, and I looked out through that window on that studio which hasn't changed in 60 years - I nearly pissed meself. Just knowing that the Beatles had created 95 per cent of the greatest music ever recorded right where you're standing. And you're there on merit, you're there as an artist."

For Walsh, it was the fulfilment of just one of many childhood rock 'n' roll dreams. Growing up in a working-class family in Crumlin, Walsh was fascinated with pop music myths and legends. His comic books were NME and Melody Maker, and his superheroes were Lennon, Brian Wilson, ELO and XTC. While other kids bought sweets with their confirmation money, he spent his on a Roy Wood album. His dad was a shoemaker, but Walsh's craft was singing and playing guitar, and he set out to recreate the sounds that lit up his life as a young pop disciple.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Pugwash's first two albums are heartfelt tributes to the Fab Four, the Wilson brothers, Jeff Lynne and Andy Partridge. On Jollity, however, Walsh has established his own jangly pop style. But he has never stopped being a fan, and he never ceases to be awed at the chance of collaborating with his heroes. So when Andy Partridge from XTC rang him up to tell him his songs were some of the best he'd heard since the Beatles, Walsh had to pinch himself to check he wasn't dreaming.

"He started hearing the Pugwash stuff through Dave Gregory, and he just started ringing me up. Andy is kind of slightly bipolar in a way, he can be very up and very down. In a good way, not in a manic way. I was a huge XTC fan - I went to XTC conventions in the early 1990s. When there was no one else, XTC were there. When everything was drying up, and there was only Stock, Aitken and Waterman, XTC were recording Skylarking and releasing albums under their Dukes of Stratosphear pseudonym. So they were a huge influence on my writing, and for Andy Partridge to start ringing me up and tell me that one of my songs is making him cry . . . "

The song was I Want You Back in My Life, which Walsh had written for his mother, who had passed away a couple of years earlier. Thus began a long-distance friendship between Dublin and Swindon, which resulted in the pair writing songs over the phone.

One of those songs, Anchor, is the closing track on the album. "It's a great way to work with him, cos you're not face-to-face," says Walsh. "I'd say I'd find it a little more intimidating if I was face-to-face with him."

• Jollity is out now on 1969 Records