BEGUN with pluck, sealed with pragmatism, Noisettes have gone from winning hearts to topping charts with a raw energy that belies the tactician’s masterstroke.

The band have been riding the perfect break right now – March 2009′s number two single, Don’t Upset The Rhythm (Go Baby Go) has made them spring’s favourite flavour, as they pinball from Jools Holland to E4 to the Guardian cover. Jamie Morrison, the band’s intensely hirsute drummer, seems infused with same enthusiasm as he speaks to me from Paris.

“We’re a better band than Maximo Park,” he offers baldly, when I ask whether as chart heroes they are happy warming up for them. He lacks the guardedness that incessant interviews can bring, speaking in rambling dozy tones after his prolonged sound check.

Noisettes owe a lot of their standing to the demolishing charisma of vocalist Shingai Shoniwa, who onstage jumps cat-like from drum kit to amp, before assuming her stance, lithe-limbed, stocking clad, one bare foot propped on speaker, making the pit submit to her peerless voice.

Back to Noisettes’ change of direction. In their previous album What’s The Time Mr Wolf, despite their media-friendly aesthetic, the band had dedicated its sound to punky, gypsy-sounding rock music – aeons away from the slick electro-pop of their Don’t Upset The Rhythm single.

The single got major airplay in Britain on the back of featuring in a Mazda advert around Christmas 2009. Morrison shrinks from calling the single slick, adding candidly: “After you’ve been touring for two and a half years and you see a lot of bands coming up and you think, ‘Wow, I wish that was happening to us’.

“We weren’t playing on one of our biggest assets – we’ve got one of the most amazing singers in the world. And just simply doing punk music doesn’t show off that voice. We opened it up. We weren’t afraid of having ballads, soul music, acoustic music.”

In previous interviews, the band has said that they admire people like Britney Spears, for her craftsmanship. – a misquote surely? When quizzed Morrison confirms, deepening sell-out suspicions.“What’s The Time Mr Wolf is a group of people who had never really met thrown together in a situation where they were allowed to make a record.

“We didn’t have any direction as such. The main inspiration behind that was just being a band. The inspiration for this record was going on tour for two and a half years. We decided not to do it this way again. We thought, ‘Whatever we do let’s just try different things, let’s try different instruments’. There’s no song in this record that’s like the first record. The first record we wrote all the songs in a rehearsal room. Performances came first on the first record – live energy –showing how much of a ferocious live band we were.”

The kind of fame that the band now has is altogether new to Morrison, who is bemused by how he now gets recognized everywhere. “I go jogging in my local park in north London and there’s people coming up to me pointing and asking if it’s me!”

Admittedly, Morrison out on a jog would be a fairly eye-catching sight in a Forrest-Gump-running across-America-kind-of-a-way. Morrison adds: “The other day, I was alone in my room and I could hear Don’t Upset The Rhythm playing and I thought, ‘God it must have come up on my iPod shuffle.’ So I turned it down and there, outside in a traffic jam someone was playing it in their car. It’s things like that.

“Being booked for TV shows– that’s stuff happens when you’ve got a single doing well. But hearing people listen to it or having people stop you in the street – that’s a different thing. The hype is here one day, gone the next. But the actual connection counts.” So how does the band aesthetic work? Are they getting on?

“You know, we’re a band,” says Morrison soppily. “We respect each other.” Industry insiders tell me that Shingai is a wild child to be reckoned with backstage – and Noisettes have more than their share of mad gig tales. Morrison remembers their times buskingon the street in Brighton when promoters double-booked them, or playing on the roof of an art gallery in Brick Lane with Drew McConnell from the Babyshambles holding onto Shingai’s waist so she didn’t fall off.

“When we came back to the building after playing another gig, it was all locked up. We had to break in to get it back. We ended up throwing our stuff down from the roof.”

Rock ‘n roll. Hardly the right word, actually, given Don’t Upset The Rhythm. So let me just get this straight: they saw other bands succeeding, and so they thought they’d adapt their style accordingly?

By hook or by crook, , Noisettes are here to stay – Jamie’s got a thing for Lily Allen and ‘can’t wait to meet her’ – get your tickets while you can.

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