JIMI GOODWIN, one third of Doves, perhaps Manchester’s most successful current rock act, would like to clear up some misconceptions. “Rainswept, miserable, bearded Mancunians — that one’s just off the crib sheet,” he says, referring to the admittedly partly true label (the beards are real) often attached to the trio .

His fellow guitarist Jez Williams concurs. “We get the dour thing thrown at us. You learn to roll with it, get used to it and move on,” he shrugs. Fellow Mancunians the Smiths were once similarly condemned, he points out, despite the fact that “Morrissey’s lyrics were so funny. He’s a total wit and their music was uplifting and joyous.”

Doves met Morrissey himself when he came to a Doves show in his adopted hometown of Los Angeles. “He seemed very nice,” says Goodwin. “He took us to an English pub he knows on Sunset Strip. I had a pint of Tennent’s with him and he said: ‘They do great chips in here.’ But if you want chips, man, go back and live in Hale!” Goodwin’s uncanny impersonation of the great crooner involves talking through gritted teeth, ventriloquist fashion. Perhaps they shared a gottle of geer.

So Doves are anything but dour fellows, then, as easy in each other’s company as you might expect from men who have known each other for ever (the line-up is completed by Williams’s twin, Andy, on drums). But then they do have plenty to be cheerful about.

Their second album, 2002’s excellent The Last Broadcast, topped the British charts, and the new, long-awaited, follow-up, Some Cities, is on course to do the same. Black and White Town, the first single from the album, made the Top Ten, accompanied by a striking video full of haunting images of unsettled youth. Imagine the TV series Shameless made over as a gritty drama rather than a wild comedy.

The song’s relentless backbeat and musical debt to Martha Reeves’s Motown classic Heatwave has also inspired comment. “We got together and this tune started to come out and we just went with it,” says Jez Williams. “We’re always dropping a lot of northern soul.”

Although they hail from Manchester, specifically its southern suburbs, they don’t necessarily see themselves as being geographically typecast. “Could we only exist coming from the North of England?” Goodwin ponders. “That’s a very hard question to answer.”

“When you’re in the band you’re not seeing the same things that outsiders see,” concedes Jez.

“I guess something about Manchester is that all these diverse bands have always had a love of black music,” says Goodwin, an influence clearly audible in the driving basslines and guitar hooks which underpin many apparently fragile Doves tunes.

“We love the Smiths and (fellow Mancunians) New Order, but the world’s a big place and we listen to stuff from everywhere,” says Andy. “Ennio Morricone’s probably a bigger influence than New Order.”

“Manchester’s a totally different place these days. A Ferrari garage opened last year,” says Andy, half-wistfully.

“Yet you’ve still got Harpurhey, the most impoverished borough in the country. Figure that out,” says Goodwin. (Residents of the area are officially Britain’s most depressed people.) So the “black and white town” where “there’s no colour and no sound” is not the benign suburbia celebrated by the Pet Shop Boys and Bruce Springsteen. “It’s more anger than nostalgia,” says Andy. “We were pretty frustrated where we grew up.” Still, at least it wasn’t Harpurhey.

Already the song is a staple background to sports news, football results in particular. “For some reason they play us a lot,” says Jez.

“It’s paid a few gas bills over the years, footy and sport,” Goodwin says.

The suggestion that their characteristic sound, expansive yet rather vulnerable (like Arsenal) rather than crudely anthemic, captures the perpetual “will they, won’t they” dynamic of sport meets with the band’s approval. “Triumph out of adversity? You might have something there,” Goodwin says.

Famously Doves rose from the ashes of SubSub, who scored a huge one-off hit in 1993 with the club favourite Ain’t No Love, as well as the more literal ashes of their studio, which burnt down in 1997. After losing everything in the fire, they started over, re-emerging, as Doves, with the acclaimed single The Cedar Room, followed by 2000’s debut album Lost Souls.

Now, after years recording themselves, the fiercely self- reliant band have finally enlisted an outside producer, Ben Hillier. “We used to get into the nitty gritty because we can all work studios, but having Ben at the controls did speed things up. He was good at making decisions for us,” says Goodwin.

“We’re always so eager to press ‘record’ when we’re buzzing on an idea, without sometimes fully understanding what we’re recording,” he adds. “Now we could sit back and concentrate on the arrangements. And take silly Polaroids of each other and hang them on the wall.”

Even so, the album sounds like a Doves record. “We know what we don’t want, though we don’t know exactly what we do want,” concludes Jez, neatly summing up just what keeps bands, not just Doves, going and going.

• Some Cities is released by EMI

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