The title of the new Editors single, Smokers Outside the Hospital Doors, sums up the band’s view of life. “The irony of someone having treatment for lung cancer coming outside for a cigarette stuck with me from visiting hospitals as a kid,” says Tom Smith, the band’s singer and songwriter. “It is my job as a lyricist to spark images in people’s heads.” That’s what Editors do. A broad, sweeping sound palette, evocative titles and angst-ridden subject matter has led to the inevitable comparisons with Echo and the Bunnymen and Joy Division, though the bassist, Russell Leetch, points out they were all born long after Ian Curtis committed suicide.

“We understand why people make the comparison,” concedes the almost luminously skinny Smith. “Our music is about feelings and emotions. While I see similarities, sonically, to what we do with other bands, we’ve never copied anyone. Editors music has a pulse – it makes you want to dance, but has that extra element.”

On stage, they are as tight as only a band forged in the heat of live gigs can be. Before recording their second album, An End Has a Start, they played 350 shows in 22 months, from the scuzziest pubs to headlining the Brixton Academy and Webster Hall, New York. After the success of their debut album, The Back Room, there was some pressure creating the follow-up. “The first record should be you in a room trying to get your best 10 songs out there,” says Smith. “This was more ambitious.” An End Has a Start is certainly that, with multi-tracked guitars and a drum sound that leaps out of the radio. In the mix are the sounds of clay-pigeon shooting, drumming on a leather satchel and a giant Atlas stone crushing a microphone.

The closer, Well Worn Hand, was written after Smith heard that an old schoolfriend had been beaten to death because he was homosexual. “I felt like, what’s the point, when there are people out there who can do something like that. Why don’t I shut the door, lock it and never go outside again?” The passing of Smith’s grandmother, and other inklings of mortality, mean death is a recurrent theme. “There is a sprinkling of it,” he admits. “But the record has a warmth and a hope and a love that makes it not such morbid, depressing listening. We have tried to make it uplifting.”

The band began when all four Editors fetched up at Staffordshire University to study music technology – Smith hailed from Stroud, Leetch from Solihull, the lead guitarist, Chris Urbanowicz, from Nottingham and the drummer, Ed Lay, from Ipswich. All were classically trained and united by their hatred of funk-rock bands such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers. All were captured by Radiohead’s OK Computer. “Seeing Radiohead at Glastonbury in 1997 was mind-blowing,” says Smith. “It changed the way I looked at music. Britpop was exciting, but I saw something in Radiohead that made me think a little more, touched me deeper.”

By the time they had finished university, the band had attracted management interest from Rob Whittaker and Jackie Wade, who book the Birmingham pub venue the Flapper & Firkin. Rehearsing and gigging at night, Smith and Leetch worked in a call centre for a bank – “It wasn’t hard, just mind-numbing and soul-destroying,” Leetch recalls. Urbanowicz and Lay sold shoes in the Bullring.

Editors’ first demo had 35 record companies speeding up the motorway to see them play, but the band weren’t ready. Eventually, in late 2004, they signed to Kitchenware, a small Newcastle-based indie label, and hit the road. Lay and Leetch moved in with the latter’s parents; Smith and Urbanowicz were sleeping on Whittaker and Wade’s floor.

The Back Room, recorded in three weeks, was released in July 2005 to good but not ecstatic notices. Back on the road, the venues started to get bigger, radio support grew and the record began to sell. It had hit the 100,000 mark by the end of the year and, after TV advertising, it shot up to No 2 and continued to sell, reaching more than 500,000 copies in the UK. Now they have beds of their own, and Smith has a girlfriend, the Radio 1 DJ Edith Bowman.

“There’s no big plan, but of course we want to be successful,” Leetch says. “What’s wrong with that? We’d like to headline Glastonbury. It might not happen – but the Chili Peppers can’t headline every festival for all eternity.”

An End Has a Start is released on Kitchenware tomorrow

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