Liverpool band Sound of Guns tell TIM HUGHES why setbacks including a fire at their studio failed to stop them going from strength to strength.

PENNY Lane. Can you really think of a better place for a Liverpool band to start off?

Okay, I suppose there’s always Mathew Street… or, err.. Strawberry Fields, but few other places are so evocative of the past glories of the Mersey sound than that busy street, “there beneath the blue suburban skies” as immortalised by the city’s most famous sons.

Unfortunately for local lads Sound of Guns, it wasn’t to be quite so idyllic.

Moving into a disused social club, frontman Andy Metcalfe and long-time friend Simon Finley converted it into a rehearsal space and recording studio. Recruiting their guitarist friends – Scouse Nathan Crowley and Australian Lee Glynn, they cut a tune, then another. Then they gig, sign up bassist John Coley, and discover they are a proper band. Which is great.

They even score hits with an acclaimed debut EP Elementary of Youth, and single Architects – which is declared Record of the Week on Radio 1.

And it would have been a fairly unremarkable story, had the band not been struck by a double whammy of setbacks.

Firstly, their beloved Penny Lane base was broken into, and most of their instruments stolen. Then, shortly after, the place was torched by arsonists and burned to the ground, destroying everything that was left.

Fortunately, it was not only the building which was fired-up.

The band refused to let it get to them – and, rose phoenix-like from the set-back. Heck, they even got an album out of it. They called it, appropriately, What Came From Fire, and used a picture of the remains of their studio on its sleeve.

“The fire was a nightmare,” says Andy. “And even more would have been destroyed if it hadn’t already been stolen. Thankfully we weren’t in there at the time.

“So I then went back a couple of days later to rake through all the ashes. I was in there looking for my piano!

“I was pretty upset. I also lost a lot of songs. I could remember most, but there was still a lot of work in there.”

Life is nothing if not eventful for Sound of Guns. What happened to them on one night out in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, last year, is typical of the situations this endearing, if unlucky, band find themselves in.

“We’d been to a see an England match before a gig, and were in a pub talking about the band,” he says. “Unfortunately, a barmaid heard us – a bunch of Scousers - talking about ‘the sound of guns’ and called the police. When we left, our van was surrounded by armed police.

“It was quite traumatic. She was a complete wally! I suppose it is funny looking back at it though.”

Andy is talking to me while having a beer outside a venue in a chilly Leicester. They are just three days into a tour supporting Dundee hellraisers The View, in a tour, which tomorrow rolls into Oxford.

And he is sore already. “I almost fell off the lighting rig last night,” he laughs, recalling some typically raucous antics onstage in Preston.

“I have fallen in the past, but I keep doing it.”

He mumbles something about insurance, and reels off a series of eye-watering estimates for repair bills. But he takes it all in his swaggering stride.

“We did a show in London recently playing a bill with lots of other bands and all the fans came into our dressing room after,” he recalls. “It was completely destroyed. We were told that we’d drunk more than all the other bands put together.”

I remark that such behaviour is in danger of even upstaging the View – a band with an outrageous reputation, and who are still remembered in Oxford for breaking a stage door at the old Zodiac after barging off after a gig.

“They are all great lads,” says Andy. “They’ve been banned from a few places, but they seem nice quiet lads.”

Proud Merseysiders they may be, but Sound of Guns are not a Liverpool band in the classic sense. They may love The Coral, Zutons and La’s but their music is coming from an altogether different place. Epic but less melodic, if it has anything in common with any Liverpool band it is Echo & the Bunnymen.

“There is a Liverpool sound – a Merseybeat – but we are not really part of that,” he says. “There are lots of different scenes and we do all different styles. We are a rock band and believe in what we are doing.

“We are a great band with good songs.”

* Sound of Guns play the Oxford O2 Academy on Friday, supporting The View.

Tickets are £10 from ticketweb.co.uk