In a sunny backroom of a restaurant in Notting Hill, around a table cluttered with newspapers and tea cups, three young Brits wait calmly for yet another interview in a day of many. A boy with shaggy hair reads a newspaper, a girl sips tea and looks up as I walk in, and the third member is busy on his mobile. In a few months, The Subways will greet the summer with the release of their second album, All Or Nothing. It is being produced by Butch Vig, the same guy who worked with Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins. The band go on tour end of March, with many of the shows sold out. In past years they played at Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds and the massive millennium dome in Cardiff. Their first two singles, Oh Yeah and Rock & Roll Queen, appeared in blockbuster films and TV shows. They opened for bands called the Foo Fighters and Oasis. It'd be easy to assume that Billy Lunn, 23, Charlotte Cooper, 21, and Josh Morgan, 21 (with the shaggy mane) have some airs of grandeur. The trio from Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire, however, remains as hard-working, unfazed, and focused (albeit cool) as ever.

"We like a sense of purpose. When we play Brixton, if we do, we want to know we f*cking earned it. I think it's really important to know that you've worked for something," said Lunn, lead singer, guitarist, and, as if by default, the most outspoken of the band. "It's like a band playing Wembley after their first album, bullshit!"

Dressed casually and practicing all means of politeness, Lunn talks about working with legendary producer Vig.
"I played an idea to him, called Strawberry Blonde, and it was a 30-second interlude I wanted to do to split the record up. And he goes 'That's not an interlude, that's a song. Go home, write a chorus, write a bridge, bring it back to me tomorrow'." He explains all this with a fast display of body language as Cooper and Morgan nod along.
"We had a key change in there which I really wanted to work on after listening to Biffy Clyro's Living Is A Problem Because Everything Dies. The key change in the chorus just springs the hairs up in my arms! So we played it to Butch, and he was like 'That's the best song you've ever made.' Only took a day! But Butch knew that we had it in us, and he brought it all out."

Vig is also behind the final versions of the first two singles of the album, Girls And Boys and Alright, the former being available March 25 to download for free from their website, and a song Morgan dubbed as "stupidly loud."

"We were playing around with it in sound check and decided to run through it fully at Atlanta Arena," said Lunn. "We finished playing the song and all the guys shuffled out and were clapping and going, 'What the f*ck is that?' And we thought, 'Okay, that's the new single!'"

A track that Lunn said Vig called "a f*cking statement of intent," Girls And Boys has been probably heard live before. In fact, many of the songs on the upcoming All Or Nothing are not necessarily new in the band's repertoire.

"We've had a lot of tracks for a while and people know them because we've been playing them live, but no one's heard anything that's been recorded," said Cooper, who shared Lunn's energy on a quieter level.

Surprisingly at a loss for words to explain how the second single, Alright, came about, Lunn just stutters Vig's name and explains how the producer's guidance with the song ended up as one of the best harmonies they've come up with, with a "Beach Boys intertwining thing going on," according to him.

The band also plans to release videos for both singles. One has already been recorded for Girls And Boys at the Stoke Sugarmill. The one for Alright, was, at the time we met, still somewhat of an incognito, and would probably be, as Lunn put it, a "Lynchian affair" (the three are fans of the quirky film director, David Lynch). Something about the brief words they spoke regarding videos indicated that it is not their favourite part of the ride.

Touring, however, is the life and soul of it. Cooper said their soon-to-start tour will hopefully be the beginning of a couple of years of constant touring. Lunn put it more bluntly:
"I just want to tour, tour, tour, tour, that's all I want to do!", he said.

Indeed, with three solid years of touring for their first album and some major festivals in their pockets, playing live has become a staple in The Subways' work and they are no strangers to astronomical crowds. They spend several minutes discussing what their biggest audience has been, throwing around numbers ranging from 10,000 to 70,000, with Cooper nicely summing up shows like that as "quite mental."

Lunn is unable to contain his excitement as he recalls the experience at the massive Leeds and Reading festivals (including buying hot dogs five years before from a cart he could now see from the stage):
"When we played the main stage [August 2006], I had this sense of doom, I don't know why, that everyone was going to burst!," he says in a bombastic voice.

Lunn is even more enthusiastic when he explains their first encounter with Liam Gallagher. In a mocking heavy accent, Lunn says Gallagher told him, "Oh, that f*cking Oh Yeah tune man, it's my no. 1 tune, I f*cking love it." Lunn then gets wide eyed as if he's hearing Gallagher's words for the first time, words that weigh heavy with him considering Oasis' Supersonic made him want to play guitar, he says.
"And then Dave Grohl I actually thought was going to beat me up," he continues.

The Subways opened for the Foo Fighters in 2006 and there was one show, at Lancashire Cricket Ground, where Lunn went down Grohl's "ego ramp," a ramp that goes from the stage into the audience that the band had been instructed to not dare approach.

"It was one of our first shows after quite a while, and three songs in, I started shaking a bit [he actually shakes violently as he says it], I throw down my guitar and I made it down the ramp and dove off the end! We finished the set and I thought, 'Grohl, he's going to kill me, man.' So I snuck into the dressing room and was sitting there when I heard, 'Subway motherf*cker!!!!'"

Morgan and Cooper laughed but something told me this wasn't the first time Lunn told this story. They then get into a discussion about Grohl's physique, with Cooper saying he is really tall and her band mates saying she is just really small. Needless to say, they conclude he's a cool guy, and he didn't kill Lunn.

"He just gave me a big hug and said, 'That was f*cking awesome man! But don't ever go on my f*cking ramp again!'"

Lunn also said Grohl swears a lot.

As much as the three get excited when talking about what they've lived through in the past years, it's the near future that really fires them up. The approaching weeks and months will see The Subways' two single releases, a tour, and their second album. The three agree that they have all their energies focused on the upcoming tour and just want to get on their bus and play and "get everyone really sweaty and smiley and happy," says Lunn.

And if possible, they would also like endorsement from Fosters and Lunn would like a date with Ellen Page. But besides that, The Subways say they will take things as they come, like starting their tour on the same day Girls And Boys is released.

"We will probably do a victory lap around the bus that day," smiles Lunn.

Christina Cromeyer Dieke