Most of them still live with their parents and they prefer their dads' record collections to chart music.

But Brighton band The Kooks have just gone straight into the top ten with their debut album and are revelling in the praise for their gloriously mixed-up sound.

The four-piece band, all under 21, are graduates of the Brighton Institute of Modern Music where they formed the band in 2003.

They were signed to Virgin after a few well-received concerts, including a particularly pithy gig at The Freebutt, Phoenix Place, Brighton.

Lead guitarist Hugh Harris, 18, from Lewes, said: "We hadn't really rehearsed much for that gig and we only had four songs to play."

Those four songs knocked the audience's socks off and helped convince Virgin. The band then took their wide-ranging and apparently conflicting musical influences into the studio for a couple of years and came up with that chart-busting album Inside In/Inside Out.

The band consists of Hugh, Brighton-based singer Luke Pritchard, 20, - who used to go out with singer Katie Melua - bassist Matt Rafferty, from Birmingham, and drummer Paul Garred, from Seaford.

The four spend hours in the studio arguing the relative merits of role models such as Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Stevie Wonder and Lou Reed.

NME has called them a band to watch and they have already appeared on Top Of The Pops and shows including comedy chat show the Friday Night Project, on which they were band of the week. On that show they also watched Hollywood star Christian Slater do his thing.

Hugh said: "Christian Slater was a very funny guy. We just got to sit up on the platform with beers and chill out, which was great.

"Top Of The Pops was amazing, although we had to mime which we didn't really like doing."

The band are scathing about the current state of the music industry and have not yet been carried away by their success. Hugh said: "We listen to our parents' records and I'm quite jealous in a way. Music this days just isn't what you want, especially chart music.

"Good people get shoved aside by some artist with £2 million behind them. I think what's happened to the Arctic Monkeys is cool because they deserved that success.

"I can't wait to see what happens to them in a year's time, though."

The Kooks own climb into the charts has been more of a slow burn. But with a dedicated fan base they look set to keep heading up the ladder.