Editors at large: a chart-topping British indie band trades in Mum's tea for a Stateside tour. Sally Singer bunks with the boys.(ROAD SHOW)

Editors--there is no article arc sitting in the front lounge of a tour bus driving between Seattle and San Francisco. The approach to El Cerrito, California, is spent watching a live satellite broadcast of a British Premier League soccer match between also-rans Portsmouth and Wigan. The band's four members come from unremarkable places like Ipswich and suburban Nottingham, and they feel a certain affinity for the provincial strugglers who are in effect served up as a curtain-raiser to a Chelsea-Manchester United game later in the day. For two years, Editors were themselves a supporting act for the likes of Franz Ferdinand and played constantly throughout the U.K. Now, with their debut album, The Back Room. they are England's second-biggest-selling indie band, non-pareil purveyors of darkly romantic, guitar-driven pop: Think of what might have happened if Ian Curtis had been around to hook up with the Edge.

Being this successful means paperwork--or, rather, E-work. Chris Urbanowicz, the lead guitarist and most rocker-centric Editor, is dutifully tapping answers into his iBook to inquiries from journalists around the world. "'Tell one story that disproves your "gloomy" label,'" he reads out. As this is a band of few words, nobody responds. "Come on, help me out," Urbanowicz pleads. "Columbus," somebody says. A flutter of alarm and shhs runs through the bus, because Columbus was where "lots of sex" happened. (Though not for Tom Smith, the lead singer, who is in constant phone contact with his girlfriend, a famous Radio 1 deejay back in England. "I don't believe that what happens on the road stays on the road," he says.) The bassist, Russell Leetch, a sensitive, novel-reading fellow, admits to "a lady friend" in Ohio, but the others are mum about the whole thing. And as Ed Lay, the drummer, rightly points out, "Lots of sex doesn't mean that you're not gloomy."

Like many famous gloomsters, Editors are in fact rather chipper. Their parents, who arc teachers, home decorators, administrators, and the like, turn up at their gigs in Europe (and, in Ed's case, New York). The band met at Staffordshire University, in England's Midlands, where they all graduated with degrees in music technology. They established themselves in nearby Birmingham, a city whose charm is famously inextricable from its dismalness, and then they worked as hard as rock musicians could reasonably be expected to work. ...