Just how indie you can get? You're a white four-piece guitar band, you form while at University, you release your debut single on the indie-only Fierce Panda label, you play all the toilet venues in Camden Town and you get radio play from Jo Whiley and Steve Lamacq. There's more: you only formed your band after listening to Smiths albums (you can actually specify the track that did it: William, It Was Really Nothing), you hero-worship John Squire (Stone Roses) and you play guitar, bass, drum songs that have jingly-jangly melodies and lyrics about unrequited love and bedsit miserablism. Come on down, Coldplay, you are indeed indier than thou.

Unlike, though, 85 per cent of the indie ordinaire that has blighted many a reviewer's life, Coldplay are truly, madly, deeply the great white hope in the guitar rock stakes. With Oasis fading away as opposed to burning out, Pulp going backwards (will they/won't they be dropped?), Blur embracing the avant-garde and the rest of the class of 1995 stuck in traffic somewhere between the Camden Falcon and the offices of Melody Maker, Coldplay's time has come.

There's been a lot of blather about how the "market" isn't primed for white-boy rock - it's all boy/girl bands, crap R'n'B and dull singer-songwriters - but it's more that there just hasn't been a band as good as Coldplay for the last six years. Not that they're on a "we hate technology, we prefer The Small Faces" kick. Coldplay are the real deal: right here and right now, with the sort of three-minute singles (like Yellow) that would remind you of the sort of melody-driven songwriting abilities of a Difford/Tilbrook or Morrissey/Marr - not in style, more function.

There's a catch. Since they first surfaced the band have been besieged by "they're the new Radiohead" comparisons. Superficially, yes, both bands are nice, middle-class boys, both met at university, both play the sort of music that is rooted in rock's guitar-bass-drum convention and both, lyrically, indulge in nouveau miserablist chic. "There's no way we're denying we love Radiohead," says Guy Berryman from the band, "but we didn't set out to copy anybody. What we might have in common with Radiohead and Jeff Buckley - who we're also always getting compared to - is a belief in good songs played with plenty of emotion."

Certainly on an influence level, it's no surprise to hear Guy mention The Beatles and Scott Walker, but he also throws in Kool and The Gang and James Brown. "We don't write the songs in a production-line manner," he says. "Each of the four members brings something a bit different to the situation, so the songs go through plenty of twists and turns before we rattle them off in the studio."

What about the "Great White Hope" tag? "It's not as if we have to meet targets or anything," he says, "I don't think it's affected us at all, I just think it's more the case that there's so much lousy pop music and bad techno out there at the moment, that any band which plays `real' songs is going to draw an audience. Maybe it's just that the industry is turning around again and there's a move back to the sort of music we play, but I don't think we're the saviours of anything".

Currently touring all around the world, the band say they're hoping to fit in a few Irish gigs as soon as they can. Until then, you can believe (most of) the hype: they're a great band.

The album Parachutes by Coldplay is on the Parlophone label