'Can I have A Shag of Your Wife by Lamplight?'

For about two years, Lauren Laverne says, "we were going to call the band Lamplight. And our singles and albums were to be called A Shag of Your Wife, A Sip of Your Pint, A Bite of Your Sandwich and The Use of Your Toilet. So when people wanted to buy our records, they'd have to say to the shop assistant: 'Can I have A Shag of Your Wife by Lamplight?' "

"But we decided to go for a more artistically empowering name," Emmy-Kate Montrose chips in. "One that meant our fans didn't get punched in the mouth."

And so Lamplight died, and it is as Kenickie, named for the Grease character, that Laverne, Montrose, Marie DuSantiago and Johnny X release their second album on Monday. Since their inception in Sunderland three years ago, Kenickie have had their every move chronicled by the music press. Their educational achievements, their move down to London, their first flat (their landlord, in a bizarre twist, was Shakin' Stevens), Laverne's depression and return to Sunderland . . . their life has been serialised like the latest Tom Wolfe novel, unusually so for a band whose biggest hit went in at number 24.

"Aye, we're a critic's band," Laverne admits, ruefully.

"If there were 17,000 music journalists in Britain we'd be all right,"

DuSantiago points out. "But there aren't, so our press mouth has been bigger than our sales trousers, unfortunately."

Laverne leans over the Dictaphone. "Our album is called Get In. It is out on Monday on EMI. Please buy it," she whispers.

"It really is very good," DuSantiago adds, beaming. "There's something for everyone - slow ones for the mams, fast ones for the bairns, sexy ones for the dads."

A series of brisk harmonic pop blasts shot through with 2am melancholy, Get In is like the Shangri-Las hitting the gin. Laverne's voice is also a more expressive instrument these days. It still has that patented just-finished-weeping, kitten-fluff ache to it, but there's a new crispness in her phrasing. On 60s Bitch, her voice goes whiplash as she dismisses some mod boy's longing for "some Sixties bitch in a twinset".

"If there were 17,000 music journalists in Britain we'd be all right."

It has changed for Kenickie more than most - Laverne's gone from studying in Sunderland to appearing on Never Mind the Buzzcocks and writing pieces for The New Statesman. Despite their media ubiquity, however, Kenickie have still failed to make a big impact on the national psyche. A current music industry rumour suggests that if this album fails to do well, Kenickie are considering their retirement from the pop arena at the gnarly old age of 20. When asked about this rumour, they fall silent and glum for the first time in living memory.

The album entered the charts at #32, with an anvil. The band went their seperate ways after a shambolic gig in late October.

"We'll see how this album does," Montrose says doughtily. "There's no long-term plan. We've always just made it up as we go along." The band gives a group shrug and turns to a weighter topic - whether to marry Macaulay Culkin.

"I mean, for the money: would you?" DuSantiago asks.

"I would," Montrose says. "You could just take all his money and send him to bed if he tried to get it back."

"I'd just be worried if I was the vicar that was conducting the ceremony," DuSantiago frets. "We'd be coming down the aisle and whoops! There's the marbles. Clonk! There's the brick on a string. It would be carnage."