Oli Bayston - Vocals, Keys,

John Waddington - Bass

Johnny Winbolt-Lewis - Drums

Mark Nicholls - Guitar

Vice and Virtue: two sides of a coin, two approaches to life, and the inspiration behind the latest album by Manchester's best-kept secret, Keith.

The follow-up to the band's 2006 debut Red Thread, Vice & Virtue finds Keith creating a vast sonic playground. But for all the experimental and cerebral moments, there's no slacking off in their commitment to melody and groove. It's an album for both sides of the brain - the intellectual and visceral, the artistic and the mathematic. It's eclectic but reigned in, and it's the album that Keith have long had the potential to deliver.

"The beauty and the curse of this band is that it is so schizophrenic in its tastes, but we've managed to form a recipe that really works musically," says singer Oli Bayston.

"We've never followed a trend," deadpans bassist John Waddington. "We can't agree on one to follow."

Bayston is Keith's ringleader, never willing to let a keyboard stop him from roaming around the stage, or bashing out a beat on his bongos. To his right, Mark Nicholls is a guitarist who feels what he's playing, head swaying side to side as he curls out atmospheric riffs. Waddington's elastic basslines underpin it all, and Johnny Winbolt-Lewis's drums, though loaded with polyrhythms and technical trickery, are never less than groove-driven. Each comes from a strong musical background; Oli's parents are classical musicians, Mark was in a string of bands at school, John was a teenage house DJ and Johnny has been bashing things with sticks for as long as he can remember.

The four met as music production students at university in Warrington, a satellite campus of The University Of Manchester. Keith's origins are in informal jam sessions involving up to ten classmates. Over time, the numbers dwindled to four unique players with a palpable chemistry.

               "I don't know if we ever sat down and said, Right, we're a band," says Oli, "but it was clear we had something."

Songs came from long jams, which would last for anything from minutes to hours. The resulting tracks, by contrast, were tight and immediate; perfectly edited blasts of intelligent pop.

At the end of their studies in Warrington, the four decamped to Manchester and found themselves welcomed into a party scene centring on the south Manchester suburbs of Chorlton and Withington. Though the one unifying element in their sound was the lack of easily identifiable styles, they seemed to touch effortlessly on Mancunian reference points without being backwards-looking or reverential; it's there in the Morrissey-esque twang in Oli's vocals, the echoes of Joy Division-era Hooky in John's insistent bass, and the references to A Certain Ratio's proto-house drumming in Johnny's intricate beats. But there's more there too: Krautrock, Afrobeat, jazz and electronica all bubble up in Keith's mix.

It's this eclecticism that led the band to call their 2006 debut Red Thread. Industry types talk of finding the 'red thread' that links each song in a band's cannon. Not sure if they'd found one, Keith instead used the term as the name of their album. This time around, the approach was different: Vice & Virtue is Keith as a unified force, still as varied and experimental but with direction, determination and drive.

On its release, Red Thread became a cult hit, never quite reaching its full potential but scoring big with tastemakers. In support of it, the band toured with like-minded souls Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly, The Sunshine Underground and Metronomy. More recently, they've shared stages with scene-mates The Courteeners, who frequently tip Keith as their favourite Manchester band. In Japan, Keith were embraced as one of the UK's new treasures, and found rapturous audiences wherever they played.

                "All the clichés about being 'big in Japan' proved true," says Mark. "Fans followed us from venues and waited outside hotels. A lot of them even turn up to tiny gigs over here."

Though the album didn't quite make the leap to the mainstream, Keith's consummate musicianship saw them dip a toe in those murky waters. They can be heard on Lily Allen's Alright, Still, as the producers were looking for a "Manchester groove" and looked to Keith to supply it. They appeared uncredited, for fear of being named "Lily Allen's backing band" for eternity.

Various members have worked with some personal heroes too. Can's Damo Suzuki invited Johnny to play an improvised set with him in Liverpool, thereby granting him membership of Damo Suzuki's Network ("An ambition ticked off the list," says Johnny, who spent hours watching Can DVDs at university). Later, Johnny and John backed label-mate Sebastien Tellier at a number of UK live shows, performing his classic La Ritournelle. In each case, music was the only common language - neither Suzuki nor Tellier speak functional English. "Every collaboration is lost in translation," says Oli, poetically.

Outside of the band, each member of the band has their own projects. Mark's writing a novel with a loosely theological plot and John works as a graphic designer, strengthening the Keith package with his own sleeve and T-shirt artwork. Oli, most peculiarly, voiced the theme for Power Rangers Mystic Force, the latest incarnation of the bonkers, live-action superhero series. Brilliant as it is, it's not likely to make it into Keith's setlist any time soon. Meanwhile, songs from Red Thread found a new lease of life as background music for TV shows ranging from Dragon's Den to World Cup goals coverage.

                "I heard the intro to Faces on a program about bowels last week," says Mark. "The next line was, Bubbling vat of stinking liquid excrement."

The band conceived Vice & Virtue soon after completing Red Thread, and worked on a taut group of ten songs that would propel them in their intended direction: darker, more psychedelic and more unified in their message. Wunderkind producer Dan Carey, who worked simultaneously on the latest Franz Ferdinand album, brought whipsmart editing, electronic flourishes and a newly invigorated sound.

"Dan really added a lot to the band, taking the tunes into some quite effected, mashed-up places," says Johnny. "He's done some extreme things to the music, and the results are great."

Now, the stage is set for Keith to take their rightful place in the nation's record collection, striking a victory for intransient music, musicianship and, most of all, the power of a solid groove.

"We've seen a lot of bands come out of Manchester recently playing anthemic, singalong songs that are easily to grab a hold of lyrically," says Bayston. "I want our stuff to be recognised for the opposite of that."

Currently, the foursome are recording in a Salford church, with an aim to produce a series of extra tracks with a warm, organic feel that's at odds with the electronic album. Like Vice & Virtue's songs and message, it's all about contrasts.

"Music itself can be a vice or a virtue - it can be an addiction, the same as any relationship," says Bayston.

And as frontman of the most furiously creative band in Manchester, he, of all people, should know.