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On the eve of their return to Hong Kong, Young Knives frontman Harry Dartnall speaks to Hamish McKenzie about working with a guitar god and being ridiculous

The last time the Young Knives brought their jerky, art rock to town, few people knew who they were. The Mercury Prize- nominated trio of Englishmen based in Oxford were headlining Clockenflap at Cyberport in January 2008, and brought to the festival an electric performance that saw guitarist Thomas ‘House of Lords’ Hartnall and his singing brother Harry jumping, crawling, and sprawling all over the stage. Drummer Oliver Askew’s high-energy drumming was barely contained behind his kit.

“It worked out great, and no one had a clue who we were – or only because we were on and they had looked us up,” recalls singer-guitarist Harry, whose name is about as English as the tweed-inspired aristocratic aesthetic the band evinces (the look, says Dartnall, is a conceit necessitated by the fact that all his clothes are from charity shops, and he refuses to spend more than a few dollars on a pair of trousers.) “It was such a weird sort of situation to be in. I was a bit drunk when we went on stage, and it was still exciting. It probably wasn’t our best performance in the world. But to be honest, it was so exciting to be in front of a bunch of people who were… sort of rooting for us.”

Thanks to that performance, when the guys hit Grappa’s Cellar on Sunday 8 there’ll be a good deal more people who’ll know exactly who they are. As well they ought to. As the purveyors of two highly regarded albums, Voices of Animals and Men (2006; number 21 on the UK charts) and 2008’s Superabundance (28 on the charts), the Knives have built a cult following that bridges the indie and mainstream music worlds, earning the respect of some music heavyweights along the way. Notably, Gang of Four’s Andy Gill produced Voices.

“He was brilliant, and he taught us so much about writing songs,” Dartnall says of Gill. “I kind of expected to go in and make a kind of Gang of Four-sounding record. Stupidly enough, naively enough. And of course he was really into a lot of our quieter stuff. He was just a great songwriter… he taught us a lot about how to write songs, basically, because before we just stuck all of those bits together, patched them in. He said, ‘Some of these bits – what’s that for, that bit there? What do these do?’”

Dartnall – who made his first call to Gill from his car during a lunch break at his old job selling software to schools – was also just a little bit star-struck. “He didn’t show me how to play guitar – that was the brilliant thing. I was getting nervous about playing guitar in front of him, because he’s such a guitar god. And then he was, like, ‘You’re a pretty accurate guitarist, aren’t you?’ And I was like, ‘YES! Andy Gill from Gang of Four said something nice about what I was playing!’”

That auspicious debut garnered favourable reviews everywhere, and the music press fawned over Superabundance, for which Time Out London praised the Knives in a five-star review for their “singular eccentricity”. It’s a streak they’re eager to maintain. Now working on their third album, the Knives are turning up the volume on the ‘weird’ amp.

“We’ve tried to be more experimental, because that’s the kind of thing I like. There’s a lot of people writing very serious music, and most credible music you get these days is quite serious,” says Dartnall. “So we just thought we’d write a more ridiculous album, something that will stand out against the backdrop of quite serious music.”

Certainly, with sometimes witty, sometimes dark lyrics and a playful image, the Knives are credibly ridiculous. We’re reckoning it won’t take them long at Grappa’s to prove that they’re also ridiculously credible.

Young Knives play Grappa’s Cellar on Sunday 8.