As the sweat drips seemingly between every pore, the Zutons guitarist Bhodan Chowdury is looking out the sea over Dover, where the whole venue that the band just stormed looks over the sea, with windows where walls might otherwise be.

He’s glowing with fatherly pride, with the crowd lapping up the songs from the band’s sophomore set, Tired of Hanging Around. It’s an album that feels like it’s been intentionally made with the intent to play it live, and play it loud. “That’s what it was,” Bhodan gasps. The band’s debut, Who Killed the Zutons?, found many fans but one of the good pointers that everyone said to the band was that it sounded a bit different to when they played live.

“I think we get into the songs a bit more, whereas [on the debut] we sounded a bit timid,” he states. “But I think that’s one of the good things about the first album with it sounding like that and then people coming to see us – it was more in-your-face. That’s one of the things that we wanted to do when we went into the studio, to record the songs live, which we managed to do, with lots of help from Stephen Street.”

One of the major changes for Tired of Hanging Around was that it found the band working with a big name producer, something which Bhodan admits was initially a nerve-inducing thought. “You’re in there with a big name producer who’s done everyone like the Smiths and blur,” he stammers. “And then it’s not just him – he works in a partnership with an engineer that he uses called Vincenzo Townsend, and he’s this amazing engineer who works with loads of other bands who knows how to get good sounds, which helps us a lot.”

Prior to making it, the Zutons decamped from England, working on promoting their debut around the world. “The focus was there to promote that album, and it sort of helped us doing that – we weren’t constantly in everyone’s faces back home,” he outlines. “It was a good thing, but sort of a hindrance to us as well; will people remember who we are? It may be only a year and a half, two years, but you know what the music industry is like – people can be fickle, can’t they?”

Just a touch. So where does the band fit in in the music industry?

“We’ve never deliberately decided to ‘fit in’ anywhere because then you’ll just get this name tag and people will be expecting the same thing,” Bhodan proffers. “If you just get your own thing going on then you can surprise people, and that’s what we’ve done with this album – we’ve surprised a lot of people.”

Including themselves, it would seem. One thing that Bhodan is clear to point out is that where with their first album he believes they worried too much about who they were, but with Tired of Hanging Around they let it go, having already worked out what sets them apart: the band are prepared to keep changing. “When you start listening to a new band or whatever you blather it – you overkill it for a while and then you blather another genre and move on. We don’t blather things. I think because we listen to a lot of music and we’ve taken in a certain amount of genres that helps us because we’ve always got a back catalogue to fall back onto of different musical styles.”

It must be a Liverpool thing – a whole generation of Scouser bands seem to share that aesthetic. “It’s a mad thing,” he says, “but when you start doing ‘bad things’ you’ll be given a Pink Floyd record, and they’re the first mad band you’ll listen to.”

Not the Beatles?

Having grown up listening to Floyd, Captain Beefheart, and a heap of Frank Zappa, Bhodan was – like many other Scousers – ecstatic with the reformation of Pink Floyd for Live 8, when Roger Waters rejoined Pink Floyd. People were standing on the tables in pubs screaming for the band, and Bhodan was in the thick of the midst.

“Everybody knows the Beatles,” he scoffs, “but when you get into ‘certain things’, Pink Floyd helps you with it. Then you start getting other records to listen to, and it’s never a new band – there’s so much to listen to from the past and you find out so many different things. Liverpool is just a bit weird; it’s its own little country, because we’re not that affected by what goes on outside.”

Not beholden to fads, it’s something that’s never happened in Liverpool. “If anyone walks in with spiky hair or mullets it’s like ‘what the fook’s going on there?’ and they’re like ‘this is what’s happening in London’ and it’s like ‘this is Liverpool’.”

Bhodan reckons that not being effected by what goes on outside is a good thing, and what sets bands like the Zutons apart. “People are too worried about what’s cool and what’s happening now, when there’s no substance in it,” he claims. “There’s songs and bands that have been able to last generations. People still talk about that, and there’s so many bands that came through that mid-90s Britpop era that are completely forgotten about. So many people are looking back at that era and it’s a bad thing – listen back to what those people were listening to and realise what good songs are and what songs stand the test of time.”

The Zutons play Splendour in the Gras on Sunday in the Supertop, from 2-2.45pm.