A friend of mine once saw The Editors when they were first starting out in Birmingham and could tell they were going to be big. Editors’ guitarist Chris Urbanowicz says of those days: “Actually 15 people was pretty good for us back then. But before long Radio DJ Zane Lowe got his hands on ‘Bullets’ and realised he really liked it and made it his record of the week and hottest record of the world. That was pretty amazing that someone of his stature would do that. I saw him a couple of weeks ago and he said ‘thanks for not making me look stupid.'”

How would you describe An End Has A Start compared to The Back Room? It’s like The Back Room but two years older. That’s the simple way to put it. We’ve toured all around the world and learned a lot of things, seen a lot of bands, got a lot better and it’s just about growing up and getting our own identity.

It’s a ‘bigger’ sound? It is. There are two reasons for that. One is that we wanted to push ourselves and put more stuff on the record and not just what we were used to playing live, other instruments and layering stuff up. The second is that Jackknife Lee, our producer, doesn’t make little records so the first thing he said to me was: “I love putting shitloads of guitar on a record” and I said okay, I’m not used to that. But I’m quite open-minded. I went out and bought loads of pedals and played around.

Were you aiming for the stadiums? No, I don’t think we had any pretences that we were going to make a record to sound good in a stadium. But it’s quite simple, if you want a track to sound like it should be in a stadium you just put more stuff on it. I guess the only thing we did take into consideration was that we’ve played a lot of gigs and we know what bits of different songs please people – you know “This is a clap-along bit” or “This is a sing-along bit”. We were certainly thinking about a general gig venue, not a stadium or club gig.

You guys met at music college, did you ever go for that jazz/fusion scene? Haha, No absolutely not. It was quite a geeky course so there was quite a bit of funk rock going on and the jazz fusion thing that you mentioned is linked in with that. But we were kinda listening to The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. So we weren’t really interested in the bands that wanted to be Jamiroquai. We were doing something completely different. We just wanted to be in a band, they just wanted to fuck about.

Singer, Tom Smith, has said this album is about death close to the band. It has always struck me as odd to see fans cheer for a song that’s about something very personal to the artist… Oh completely. And we have moments like that at our shows. When 40-year-old skinhead football thugs, the classic UK hooligans, are singing “People are fragile things.” It’s strange to touch people’s hearts like that.

I guess for dudes like that it’s their only means of emotional expression? Well, yeah it is. I’m not one of them, but it’s certainly an interesting concept, that you can get to people like that.

An End Has A Start is out now on Red Label through SonyBMG. See The Editors Wednesday 1 August at Sydney’s Metro http://www.moshtix.com.au, Thursday 2 at Brisbane’s Tivoli http://www.ticketek.com.au, and Friday 3 at Melbourne’s HiFi bar. http://www.hifi.com.au. Tix $56. For more visit http://www.chuggentertainment.com.au