THE HORRORS began their live career with some notoriety – regularly dousing the front row with black paint.

But now frontman Faris Badwan says the Southend five-piece employ more subtle means to ensure attention is still fully focused on what’s happening on stage.

“Quite a few people have been coming to me saying our light show makes them feel sick,” he says ahead of a show in Newcastle’s West Denton.

“I quite enjoy that – we have managed to retain that intensity. Our live show shouldn’t be something that people can leave for a cigarette, then come back in for a chat.”

The band is back on the road to promote their latest album, Luminous, which with its electronic swirls and big stadium sound feels built for the live stage.

It’s something Badwan admits is key to the way The Horrors write their songs.

“We write all the songs to be played live,” he says. “It’s a big part in the sense that a song is never finished until the band reimagine it – they are like sketches that only ever get finished and fully realised when everyone is playing them. We have tried different song writing methods but it always ends up being that way.”

On the outside some of those ways of finding inspiration can sound quite unusual.

“All you have to do is change the writing process. It makes it so hard to get stuck,” he says. “You can play lots of songs backwards and listen to them that way for a while – you get lots of ideas. Or something as simple as putting lyrics into Google’s word translator, into Chinese and back again. It’s stuff that trips your mind – anything to disturb the thought process is inspiring.”

That said he admits to a fear of losing the gift should he ever stop writing – something he augments with side project Cat’s Eyes with Canadian soprano and multi-instrumentalist Rachel Zeffira.

“For me I have to get obsessed with something to continue to do it successfully,” he says. “It’s the reason why I keep doing other projects. It stops me feeling like I can relax. I never want the feeling of being able to rest on something that has been done before – it scares me a bit. I don’t want time to think or stop.”

Luminous took 15 months to come together, following on from The Horrors’ 2011 album Skying and its accompanying 2012 remix collection Higher.

“A lot of the people we asked to be part of the remix album were people we respect,” says Badwan. “They make music which is quite different from us. I think it did inform the record a little bit – it’s something else we appreciated.”

He sees the creation of The Horrors’ music as very much a group affair – with the total being greater than the sum of its parts.

“We are not really good at planning things,” he says. “If someone said to us we had got to make a punk record I don’t think we could do it. We have to let things grow in their own direction organically – if we try to do it any other way it doesn’t happen. We’re not really individual songwriters. As a band we are a group songwriter. Definitely one person will bring something that other people wouldn’t ever think of doing.

“I’m really against anything digital – I only really like tape and analogue synths – but without some of the stuff Tom [Cowan, bassist and keyboard player] knows we wouldn’t be able to make some of the sounds on the album.”

The same is true of the recording sessions, with Badwan admitting part of the reason why they haven’t worked with an outside producer over the last couple of records is the idiosyncratic system guitarist Joshua Hayward has in their home studio. “No one else would know how to work it – we didn’t have any other option,” he says.

“It’s a confusing mass of wires and broken equipment. I wouldn’t rule out working with a producer again – Primary Colours [the band’s 2009 Mercury Music Prize-nominated breakthrough] was recorded by Geoff Barrow from Portishead. Whenever you haven’t done something for a while it can often become useful in making things exciting and new. Everything gets stale, and being comfortable is the worst thing that can happen.”

That’s reflected in the length of performance the band is planning to put on too.

They may have released four albums over the last nine years, but fans shouldn’t expect an epic set. “I never want to watch a band for more than an hour and a quarter,” says Badwan. “I love The Cure – I remember playing a festival in Belgium where we watched them for a bit before we went to play a show.

“After our show we came back on to the site, had something to eat and went back out there – and they were still playing. It’s cool, but not really for me...”