The most interesting UK band to be washed in with the post-Franz Ferdinand tide, Editors are acquiring a big band attitude to go with their stadium sound. As he prepares to go on stage at Dublin's Olympia Theatre, lead singer Tom Smith talks to Brian Boydabout death, disease and deadly guitar hooks

STOP me if you've heard this one before. When Coldplay released their gargantuan Fix Yousingle, Chris Martin readily admitted that the song's anthemic end part was copied from Elbow's 2003 song Grace Under Pressure.

Birmingham-based four-piece, Editors - the most interesting UK band to be washed in with the post-Franz Ferdinand tide - release the first single off their second album next week. Going under the beautiful title Smokers Outside The Hospital Door, it too features an anthemic end part that is from the same lineage as Grace Under Pressure.

"Hmm, that's interesting," muses Editors frontman Tom Smith as he sits backstage at Dublin's Olympia in advance of that night's blistering performance. "I don't know what to say in reply to that, to be honest with you".

It later transpires that Elbow's Guy Garvey was Tom Smith's childhood hero and the two have now gone on to become firm friends. This is despite the fact that, according to tabloid tittle-tattle, Smith "stole" Guy Garvey's girlfriend, Radio 1 DJ Edith Bowman.

It gets a bit more Coldplay/Elbow entangled when you consider that Editors' new album, An End Has A Start, already has some snarly indie types decreeing that the band is going after the bespoke angst stadium rock market as first patented by Chris Martin and co.

"Oh god, not that again," says an exasperated Smith. "It's either 'the new Coldplay' or 'the new U2'. And then the NME calls us 'Britain's gloomiest band'. We also get compared to Interpol - but I think that's only because their singer and me both have a similar vocal range. Oh, and we get Joy Division as well (see panel).

"We don't know who or what we're supposed to be these days. The only thing we can do is to express ourselves musically and lyrically in a way that is honest to us. We certainly don't write out-and-out happy songs and we could be considered gloomy in comparison to Take That, but all I think we do is reflect a certain mood. I'm the lyricist, so obviously the songs reflect what's happening in my life. 'Dark lyricism' someone once called it and that wouldn't necessarily offend me."

Only signed three years ago to the venerable indie label Kitchenware (home to Prefab Sprout in the early 1980s), Editors are by no means a critically-endorsed band, relying more on word-of-mouth appeal. There were only 1,000 copies made of their first single, Bullets, but they all sold out within 24 hours. A second single, Munich, sold far more copies; when the debut album The Back Roomwas released in 2005, it went to sell half-a-million copies in the UK alone and earned them a Mercury Music Prize nomination.

Of all the contenders for that year's Mercury Prize, only eventual winners Arctic Monkeys had sold more records than them.

"I think there have been two key moments in our appeal spreading," says Smith. "The first was when we played Munich on Top Of The Pops in January 2006 there was just something about that performance that really helped the song. It went into the top 10 and then Bulletswent back into the top 30. It really did seem that things changed almost overnight. The other key moment was when we did Later With Jools Holland. Again, I thought we acquitted ourselves well and it showed in how much new interest was generated by the album."

Of all the post-Franz Ferdinand bands, Editors have thankfully eschewed the pompous and dour art-rock leanings of their peers and instead specialise in lean and sleek indie rock/pop music that bypasses the usual Oasis-influenced stodge and, if anything, harks back to the glory days of Echo and the Bunnymen.

The new album doesn't attempt to shake off the "gloomiest band in Britain" tag; instead it wallows in it. "There is a lot of death on this record," says Smith. "It's about things that have happened to people I know - disease and illness. A lot of these thoughts and ideas just filtered into the songs. They aren't specific stories as such, just impressions on what has happened around me. We didn't want to come back after touring the first album around the world with on-the-road type songs. If the mood of the new album is dictated by anything, it's by the fact that I had some really difficult moments in the last six months. The touring was intense - the US, Japan - all over. There was a lot of fatigue and I found myself in my worst headspace ever."

An End Has A Startis a very ambitious-sounding record. A calculated move? "It's certainly a lot fuller and has a lot more textures," Smith says. "I find the sound of big guitar bands to be something amazing. I love big choruses and big guitar hooks and I hope this is heard by millions of people. There is a lot of snobbery out there about bands who want to be bigger, but we've no problems with it."

Editors picked up two big-name (and most unlikely) celebrity fans while in the US - Kanye West and Michael Jackson. "It's something that you can't take really seriously," says Smith. "But it's a nice compliment. Maybe we should try and get both of them onto the next album."

For now, though, Smith is considerably buoyed up by the fact that the new single, Smokers Outside The Hospital Door, has just been added to afternoon radio playlists.

"We thought we might run into problems getting daytime play with it simply because of the song's title and that it's over five minutes long, but people seem to be going for it. We've already had people singing along to it at live gigs and that's always a big breakthrough moment. We do have big band leanings, and now I think we have the big songs to match."

Model behaviour

When Marks and Spencer decided to get some music stars to act as poster boys for their new "Autograph" designer range, their first port of call was Tom Smith.

"I was offered the job but I turned it down," he says. "It just wasn't something I wanted to do and I try to keep my private life to myself. Even the argument that the campaign would have raised the band's profile couldn't persuade me to do it. It's just something I don't think I'll ever see myself doing".

Following Smith's refusal, the shopping chain went with Bryan Ferry and Dan Gillespie Sells from The Feeling. It has been reported that Bryan Ferry has been dropped from the campaign due to his recent controversial comments about the Nazi regime.

Boy Division?

One particular criticism that used to really sting Editors when they started was being labelled "Boy Division" - a reference to the fact that on stage Tom Smith seemed to be aping the movements of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis.

"I found that very frustrating," says Smith. "The truth is that I'm much too young to remember Joy Division and I have never, ever seen live footage of Ian Curtis performing. The only thing I've ever known about him is that his performance was governed by the illness he had [epilepsy].

"The worst part about it is that people might think I'm some sort of fake, which I'm not. We take our music very seriously."