In spring 2004 The Ordinary Boys released their debut single Maybe Someday, a two-and-a-half-minute call to turn off our tellies.

This secured the "must-have single of 2004" accolade from NME and, in doing so, announced the return of British indie.

A year on and the Worthing band have sold out the Dome Concert Hall, confirming one of the fastest ascents in recent history.

But The Ordinary Boys, centred around the outspoken and steadfastly first name-less singer Preston, are also unusually capable of dividing opinion.

While preserving a space in their record collections for Sixties soul and two-tone, the fourpiece have made themselves inheritors of that idiosyncratic Englishness mined by The Kinks, The Jam and The Smiths. Musically, this means urgently catchy tunes piqued by the odd funny chord change and jangly arpeggio.

But when debut album Over The Counter Culture emerged last August, what really caught listeners' imaginations was its lyrical manifesto.

Rejecting the usual boy/girl preoccupations, the record posed as a Polaroid snapshot of Britain today, a world drowning in "throwaway" radio music, "static shopping lines" and mindless small talk gleaned from glossy magazines.

Keen to disassociate his band from what he saw as an "opinion-free, controversy-free" music scene (and happy to be hailed as a satirist descended from Wilde, Wodehouse and Will Self), Preston declared it "a social commentary on how mundane people have let their lives become".

But, unlike his beloved Morrissey, Preston rarely rails in the first person, so what tended to be taken as youthful passion could also sound like adolescent arrogance.

And this wasn't helped when they described their hometown of Worthing as "one of those seaside towns where the kids are addicted to arcade machines and they need to kick someone's head in to nick their wallet to feed their addiction", then dismissed the neighbouring Brighton music scene as "playground rubbish".

If The Ordinary Boys have become known for their sneering social critiques, however, they're the sweetest band around when it comes to dealing with their fans. Not ones to gig and run, they often man their own merchandise stalls in a gesture of approachability and, tonight, Preston and guitarist William J Brown will DJ at an aftershow party at Above Audio, open to anyone who arrives bearing a ticket stub from the gig.

"We're not one of those bands who got signed because we had a big army of mates who came to see us at all our gigs so the label would think we were cool," says Preston. "Everywhere we go, we make that our home town.

"I don't understand these bands who just stay backstage for the whole night then come on, play their set and walk off again. You've got this opportunity to meet people - you should grab it."

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