HOW many reasons do you need to love a band? With The Hot Puppies there are dozens, as Kat Dibbits found out when she chatted to guitarist and lyricist Luke Taylor.

LUKE Taylor may be a male songwriter who writes for a female singer, but the dichotomy is not one that causes him problems.

Well, not many.

"I don't really differentiate between women and men enough for it to be a problem," he says, before starting to laugh at what that actually sounds like.

"That doesn't mean I'm bisexual that sounded really weird. I can't really ask you to retract that I mean, purely in the lyrical sense, not in the physical sense.

"I just see it as, if someone writes a screenplay or a book or a story, if it's a man then they write women into those stories, and they don't have to be women to do that.

"And also, I think some men, when they write for themselves, try and make themselves seem more intelligent or sometimes sexy.

"I listen to a lot of bands of men of my age, and a lot of the time there's this sort of feel my pain, I'm sort of rugged and a rough diamond but I'm also really sensitive'. But you just don't ever have to worry about doing that if you're writing for someone else, especially for a woman. It's just a lot more fun."

The woman Luke writes for is Becki Newman, Hot Puppies' singer and vamp extraordinaire.

Currently they are the darlings of the indie scene, but Luke insists that their second album which they have already begun work on will prove that they are much more than five-minute darlings. "We're going to try and get away from the guitar side of things," he says. "The more sort of orchestral side of things is what we're more interested in. Which makes it sound very arch, but it's really not. We're thinking more along the lines of the really great show tunes and musicals. We just tried our first one recently, a song called After The Beheading, which is a sort of Motown song, about well, about being beheaded, I suppose."

The beheading is actually a reference to the story of Salome the Biblical character who caused John the Baptist to be executed which Luke admits to being obsessed with. So much so that the band recently wrote to filmmaker Ken Russell who dramatised the story in 1988 to ask if he would be interested in making a film with them.

"I wrote him a letter about how good Becky would be as Salome and how I'd be perfect as John the Baptist," says Luke. "I just really like the story. There's just something about a girl loving a beautiful man so much that she feels the need to cut his head off and kiss it that just really tickles me. It's best not to ask why you like things like that so much."

The band hails from Aberystwyth in west Wales.

Luke says: "It was frustrating from the point of view that you just don't get any bands of any note coming through there. I certainly thought it was frustrating when I was about 15 or 16, but now that I've ventured out into the big wide world I think it was actually a good thing. We're not particularly driven by fashions or trends. I think at the core of our songs, as well, they're country songs. They deal with the stuff that all the great country songs do."

Like boozing and breaking up?

"Exactly," says Luke. "And that's a good thing."

Under The Crooked Moon is out now