Jamie Hince and his musical partner Alison Mosshart believe that your art is something you live, rather than something you merely do. Therefore, the conventional approach to recording an album – write some songs a bit like your last songs, book flashy studio and ear candy-providing producer, be professional and get home in time for tea – is not an option for them. The Kills make music that sounds like the stripped-to-the-bone nub of the crux of the sex and death and madness at the heart of the very best rock – œn’ roll. And the only way to pull that off is to put themselves through the creative, physical, financial and emotional mangle. “It was definitely a journey,” confirms Alison, with the sanguine air of one who believes that anything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. “We wrote so many records before we got to this one. It took a few failed attempts and different situations and going to different places and running out of money in order for us to get it together and write the right record.”

The Kills formed in 2000 when a boy from Andover, England and a girl from Florida, USA met in a South London hotel. “It was like we’d lived parallel lives”, Jamie recalls. Both had been to art college, the boy had just left a punk-pop band called Scarfo and the girl wanted to leave a punk-pop band called Discount, and both were disillusioned with the musical scenes they were part of. “We had these bedrooms on different sides of the Atlantic which were full of artworks and films and music that we’d made for no-one to listen to. We had so many things in common. It was at a time that if you spent a lot of time making art and dressing up you got beaten down for being pretentious. Everything was about being down to earth. And we both just felt this relief when we met each other.”

Alison was so convinced that this was the creative partner she’d always been searching for that she decamped from Florida to Jamie’s flat in South London. Inspired by a mutual obsession with The Velvet Underground, – œ70s London and New York punk, they formed a duo called The Kills, rejected everything they’d begun to hate about being in a rock band, got themselves signed to Domino and made a spectacularly sexy garage-punk album called Keep On Your Mean Side in 2003. Buoyed by the deserved critical acclaim for this and their incendiary early live shows, but also nonplussed by the fact that they were, once again, in a proper band with a record deal, they made a completely different, yet equally spectacular second album in 2005 called No Wow. A minimalist pop masterpiece, it was one of those records that made some into Kills fans for life, but most utterly confused. “No Wow’s really special to me,” reckons a defiant Jamie. “I was listening to lots of Cabaret Voltaire and Suicide, and wanted to make something stripped-down, and was determined not to make another garage-rock record like the first album. We were trying to make a Suicide record. More like a commercial suicide record…”