Yeah, baby! The sixties superspy who was unfrozen in the nineties is back, in a groovy spoof called Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. And with a song specially written for him by Madonna. Far out!

Mike Myers didn't quite realize what he had got himself into until the night he walked into a bar in Toronto and found himself confronted with multiple copies of himself. "There were six Austin Powers in there!" he chuckles. "They all freaked out. But I was freaked out, too: six other people in my body!"

It all started, of course, when Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery was let loose on an unsuspecting world in 1997, bringing back swinging London with its bobbies and its bell-bottoms and its bright-red phone boxes 30 years after it all fizzled out, and creating a superspy whose staggering energy - helped on by his all-important mojo - masked his equally staggering ineptness.

"He is a guy who has managed to maintain tremendous incompetence in the face of having attained legendary superspy status," says Jay Roach, who made his feature debut directing the first movie and without whom Myers says he would never even have thought about doing a second. "No matter how much he bungles the mission up, he's still the best man for the job. Who else is there like that? Who else has his style? I defy anybody to find a movie that is exactly like Austin Powers. When you're flipping through the cable channels and you hit all these normal looking nineties films and then all the sixties films and then you hit Austin Powers, it's neither. It's something unusual and weird and different but connected to them both."

By the time Myers walked into the bar in Toronto, of course, plans for a sequel were already underway. "About three-quarters of the way through making the first one," recalls Myers, "we thought, 'Wouldn't it be fun if there was a second one?' And, if there was a mandate for the second one, we would have him going back to the sixties. If the first one was Demolition Man, this one's more Back to the Future.

"The main reason for doing a sequel, though, is that I was desperate to have more fun," he adds. "When we last left Austin, he had managed to find true love with Vanessa Kensington. But now we find that all is not well. You can take the boy out of the sixties, but you can't take the sixties out of the boy. Having spent so much time in the nineties, it turns out he may have lost a bit of his confidence with the ladies. That's dangerously close to being square."

And being square is the nearest thing to original sin in the groovy world of Austin Powers. But, whereas the first film had most of its fun at the expense of the language, clothes and sex-obsessed behaviour of the sixties, the new film sets its sights more closely on one of the decade's more enduring legacies: the spy movie, and particularly the James Bond cycle.

Of course, the references were there in the first film, particularly in the character of Dr Evil, Austin's nemesis, also played by Myers in a body suit and shaved head that inevitably recalls Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who made his first on-screen appearance (played by Donald Pleasance) in You Only Live Twice.

"I grew up with all things English," explains Myers, who may have only been six years old when the sixties swung to a halt, but whose parents had emigrated to Canada from Liverpool, bringing Britain - and sixties Britain in particular - with them.

"There's nobody more English than somebody who no longer lives in England," he says, "so I grew up with a sort of pride in British pop culture like the Bond movies and Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther. My parents used to make fun of our [Canadian] accents. They would tell me, 'God, I can't stand how you talk!' And I'd go, 'I tell you what: why don't you move back to England, you limey freaks! It's my accent!'"