On the blower from his Oxford residence, tweed-clad Young Knives frontman, Henry Dartnall, is telling us of the joys of working with producer and Gang Of Four legend, Andy Gill.

Respectful and deadly serious as ever, Dartnall discusses the post-punk deity (a noted Young Knives influence) with the kind of hushed reverence that you’d expect…

“He’s completely tone deaf I think,” he muses (all deadpan and ironic). “Well, when he sings it’s just like ‘ooooh’ (seal noise) you know. It’s just one of those really shit voices. He doesn’t really put any effort in, which suits what they do I guess.”

But weren’t you inspired by him I ask, perplexed? “Yes and no,” he says. “When I first heard it I didn’t like it and then I kind of got into it over the period of a couple of years. It was about 1999/2000 that I first heard it and later - by the point where I’d got to know him - I was really into it. Not all of it though. God, they’ve done some awful shit.”

It’s fair to say, Dartnall does not take life - or our questions - too seriously. In truth, he says, Gill is “a great person to work with”.

“He’s really good fun,” he says. “He’s a good task master so he gets you to do a lot of work but will also just stop and be really funny and crude at the same time. He’s good to hang out with, but he’s also just good at writing songs.”

And how did the collaboration come about? “We kind of had a list of producers that we wanted to work with and he was one of them because obviously we knew he’d done certain things.

“And of all the people we emailed he was one of the most enthusiastic. He got back to us in an email saying ‘yeah, we need to do some stuff together’. I was like ‘fucking hell’. I had a regular job at the time and I had to go out into the car park to think for a minute.

“So we did an EP with him and I took two weeks off as holiday from work to get it done, but we didn’t quite finish it so I had to take two extra days off on the sick.
“That’s the most obvious thing. When people get back from holiday and take a couple of extra days off sick, and they’re like ringing in on Monday morning going ‘oh I got food poisoning off Singapore Airlines’, you know what I mean? I had to do that kind of thing, but you know it was worth it in the end.”

Young Knives don’t really do ‘indie’ in the contemporary sense. Notable for their choice of ill-fitting tweed suits, their openness on being “not good looking” and their scathingly cynical lyrics, The Kooks they are not. But like any respectable self-mocking, anti-pop band, they let the music do the talking.

Their first album, 2006’s Voices Of Animals And Men was nominated for the Mercury Prize; and it’s follow up, 2008’s brilliantly dark Superabundance was equally critically acclaimed. The band’s ability to laugh at themselves (and everyone else) makes them instantly more likeable than a lot of their prancing indie mates and singles like the recent release, ‘Dyed In Wool’, prove that – despite the humour – as a songwriter, Dartnall is up there with the best of ‘em.

“It’s supposed to be kind of funny,” says Dartnall, on the some of the black humour of the band’s second and most recent album. “I think there’s a bit of a worry that indie bands can start getting a bit over-bloated and start taking everything very seriously and think with every album ‘oh now yes, we must write a classic’.

“Everyone’s always searching for a classic and no one’s ever really doing the Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart kind of thing where you just try a load of stuff out - and maybe it doesn’t work but at least you’ve tried it. Everyone’s kind of stuck on doing something totally classic the whole time.”

So then, has it always been that Young Knives (now minus the ‘The’) aim to not take themselves too seriously? “We do think we’re pretty fucking brilliant actually,” says Dartnall. “We do actually stand around going ‘yeah, we’re the best band in the world actually, yeah’.

“We do take ourselves very seriously and we have to kind of pretend that we’re not because it’s too embarrassing to think you’re that good, you know what I mean? It’s just not good form.”

The fact that Young Knives kind of are that good makes Dartnall’s sarcasm even more pungent. And the bizarre outfits (rolled up suit trousers with sandals seem to be the latest attack on the skinny-jeaned monotony of their peers) are clearly some kind of physical vehicle for this irreverence.

“There’s a fair amount of tweed involved, yeah,” reflects the singer on the ‘Young Knives look’. “It is an image thing I guess. We’ve only got one tweed jacket really. It does get talked about a lot though, I don’t know why. But it’s fine. It’s pop music I guess, so people are always gonna have this hang up about image. And we’re not exactly the prettiest boys in the pack so we just did it. We were like we’ve gotta try something. And when we were trying to make an image on a budget – which we still are really – it was just like ‘let’s go down the charity shop and buy some stupid old man’s clothes’, that’ll do it.”

And did you know those Northern skanks Arctic Monkeys copied you at The Brits a couple of years ago? All done up in Edwardian tweed they were…

“Yeah, but they get theirs off some of kind of cool designer place I bet. Ours are not. Ours are actually off dead fellas. They smell of death and embalming fluid.”

Nice…