Suggesting beforehand to Chris Cain, the mustachioed, motormouthed bassist of the New York trio We Are Scientists, that this evening’s show could well be the hottest ticket anywhere in the country might have been a mistake. About three songs into their set on this year’s NME tour, he passes on the news to a packed hall in Sheffield waiting expectantly to see their home-town heroes Arctic Monkeys.

“This could be the hottest ticket in the Milky Way!” he announces. “Though I admit that we are something of a tepid prelude.” In front of me, a bald man laughs and declares that Cain is a “funny fellow”.

He’s right. We Are Scientists are genuinely amusing men, with a reputation as nerdish pranksters that occasionally overshadows their increasingly popular New Wave tunes. Cain and his bandmates, the singer and guitarist Keith Murray and the drummer Mike Tapper, probably need a sense of humour to cope with their workload.

This is their sixth tour of duty in Britain since April, yet none of them had previously visited these shores. So what do you like and dislike about Britain? The kids seem to have taken to you. “We don’t have any strong dislikes. Nothing really needles us,” Cain says.

“The main thing we don’t like is it’s not New York. That’s our main complaint about most of America, too,” says Murray. “I dislike the availability of fried foods late at night, which I am powerless not to eat,” the singer reveals. “When you’re on the road and getting drunk every day you have to make sure you get your deep-fried vegetables and your deep-fried fruit so your health doesn’t fall apart,” Cain explains.

Even the quiet Tapper has succumbed. “The other morning I woke up and found a veggie burger and fries next to my bunk. I hadn’t eaten them, but I’d been drinking, so I must have had to get them anyway.”

Unusually for Americans, they don’t even complain about British food. “I love the curry,” says Tapper.

“It sustains us,” adds Cain. “It’s good even when you’re sober.”

Meanwhile, the rent must be paid back in Brooklyn. “We’re not really living in New York, we’re storing things in New York,” says Murray. “It’s our contribution to a city that we believe in,” adds a deadpan Cain.

They might even be telling the truth, but like many bright sparks forced into a routine, they are terrific liars. The untangled truth is that they formed at college in Pomona, California, in 2000. After graduating they made the big move to New York, released a series of EPs and were signed by Virgin, who forced them to tour the UK again and again to promote their debut album, In Love and Squalor, a collection of fidgety tunes with irresistibly anthemic choruses.

“We don’t think of our stuff as difficult to get, but we’re not trying to encrypt our intentions,” says Cain. The literary allusion of the title, borrowed from J. D. Salinger, is deliberate. When I removed the new collection of essays by the famously erudite writer David Foster Wallace from my bag to get at a tape-recorder, both Murray and Cain were dismayed to realise that the British edition comes in lighter paperback form. “We have two hardback copies on our tour bus,” moans Cain, an unusual complaint for a rock musician.

Despite their band’s name, the pair must have arts degrees. When reminded that they were predated by a grimy set of Aussie garage rockers called the Scientists, Murray says: “We’ve rendered them a distant footnote.” Cain goes one better. “We’ve obviated the Scientists,” he says, most unexpectedly.

There is, though, a fine line between clever and stupid that We Are Scientists like to explore. The pose that they adopt for our photo (right) references the films Pulp Fiction, Repo Man and Kiss Me Deadly. Their absurd videos have caught the eye, too — in the clip for their first British single, The Great Escape, the three of them, in matching clothes, woo the same girl. It’s like the Blue Man Group, but funny. For Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt, they filmed a re-enactment of The Blair Witch Project, with the danger provided by a man in a bearsuit. The new single It’s a Hit is accompanied by a spoof of every boxing movie ever made, though MTV won’t show the version where the inevitable sick child is spattered with the blood of his favourite pugilist, played by Murray.

“They’re showing the lame version,” he explains. “In it the boy just looks sort of upset.” He can’t see what the fuss is about. “It’s a tasteful quantity of blood.” Cain interjects with a fib. “Now have you seen the blood and semen version? Again it’s just the smallest amount.” Enough. We can stop right there.

Cain wonders how the headliners will be received before going to watch them from the side of the stage. “I want to see if their crowd likes them less now they have to share them with everyone,” he jokes. Everyone seems to be getting along very well. As he walks past the Monkeys, who are waiting to go on, they pat him (and me) on the back and sarcastically wish us luck. Now that is youthful confidence.

“We’ve been getting along best with the youngest kids on the tour,” says the 28-year-old Murray, referring to the Monkeys and Mystery Jets. “I guess it’s possible they could be experiencing us Americans as ‘alien’, but it doesn’t seem like it. We’ve been in the UK so long that’s not a factor for us anymore. We’re close friends with so many British bands.”

“It still throws me for a loop when one of those guys pulls out a tape-recorder and asks you to repeat something, though,” lies Cain. Somehow you suspect that We Are Scientists’ raison d’être is to enjoy as many experiences as possible before they get rumbled. “There are many productive things we could be doing. We just gravitate to the things that waste our time,” says Murray, and that sounds like a credo.

It’s a Hit is out on Monday. We Are Scientists begin their UK tour in Portsmouth on April 5

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