The Sunshine Underground's singer Craig Wellington has suffered numerous onstage injuries in his short career - mostly during Commercial Breakdown, mostly in the eye, and all from glow sticks lobbed by enthusiastic fans.

This, he reckons, is the fault of the NME, who recently coined the term Nu Rave and dubbed their annual spring outing the Indie Rave Tour.

Thanks to their penchant for mixing pounding indie melodies with Happy Mondays-esque baggy and Daft Punk-esque house, the Leeds-based four-piece were invited to open the tour for Klaxons, CSS and New Young Pony Club.

But unlike their counterparts, The Sunshine Underground's take on indie dance is neither arch nor inane.

"When you do keep an eye on the news, it's quite hard to write songs about nothing," says Wellington, who grew up listening to Manic Street Preachers. "If you've got a platform to speak about stuff you might as well make it interesting.

"I've got quite a doom and gloom attitude to society in general but I don't want to force that on the music. So we make feel-good music with angry, intelligent lyrics."

Named after a Chemical Brothers track, The Sunshine Underground released their debut album Raise the Alarm last August. Full of Killers-esque choruses, boisterous bass lines and repetitive beats, it landed them support slots with LCD Soundsystem and saw them pick up the Live Band of the Year trophy at the Leeds Music Awards.

In fact, Wellington originally hails from Shrewsbury, home to, er, Cadfael the medieval monk, and, apparently, it hasn't changed much since his day.

"I come literally from the middle of nowhere," he says. "It wasn't until I went to college in Telford that I actually found other people to make music with and we formed the band.

"Then our drummer Matt decided to go to college up in Leeds and pretty much left us doing nothing back where we lived. So we thought we'd make a bit of a break for it and move to the city - get good, get signed, make a record, then set off on a world tour."

Stages one-to-four have already been accomplished, and Wellington is currently "putting my clothes on someone else's line and hoping they'll be ready in an hour's time" in preparation for stage five.

Meanwhile the band have started work on their second album, which promises to be very different from the last.

"All the bands we like are the ones that've developed and changed from album to album," says Wellington.

"Raise the Alarm was quite four to the floor and in your face, so we want more moments to breathe.

"We've got some songs that have hip-hop beats, more like Gorrilaz. We're trying to write some pop songs, too, at the moment but they're not quite turning out like that."

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