The geek shall inherit the earth. They may look like an after school chess club, but The Spinto Band move as one, breathe as one and play as one twelve elbowed, check shirted rock & roll beast. Crashing into each other and trading instruments they are indivisible. It’s not just a bunch of people playing, it’s a band.

They leap on the songs like excitable children on a puppy, tugging at them, stroking them and lavishing them with their unbridled attention. ‘Oh Mandy’, all sweet restraint on record, is tickled and mauled to within an inch of its life, but it only adds to its ramshackle beauty.

There’s so much energy to play. When the guitarists tune up between songs, drummer Jeffery Hobson just keeps playing to himself. Half slick groove machine, half clumsy but well-intentioned amateur, it’s the perfect pulse to hold this band together.

For an encore they play The Motors’ ‘Airport’. It allows them to indulge in their favourite pursuits – leaping about, playing sweaty killer power pop and doing Beatles style falsetto backing vocals. And with that, the Spinto Band virus is successfully spread around The Windmill.

The Spinto Band started in the late 90s when singer Nick Krill discovered a stack of songs that had been written by his grandfather Roy Spinto. At the same time guitarist Jon Eaton inherited a four track from his studio owner uncle. They set about recording this antique treasure trove with the two pairs of brothers that make up the rest of the band and armed with music in the blood and a ready-made legend.

“They were our guinea pigs,” guitarist Joe Hobson says. “His songs were kind of weird, he’d been writing them since the 20s. For the first few sessions it was like a vaudeville band, ” adds Krill before bass player and co-frontman Thom Hughes finishes the anecdote seamlessly, “but the tuba player didn’t show up because he changed high schools.”

We should breathe a sigh of relief. Mercifully without tuba, “this organism The Spinto Band” makes music that comes straight from their peculiar shared psyche. It comes from years of “recording out of curiosity” in their home studio amid cardboard cut outs of Mel Gibson and constant interruptions from pizza deliveries – a curious diet for the skinniest band on earth. Like their enviable metabolisms, being this band is in their genes.

In this insular bubble, their combination of Flaming Lips style ethereal whimsy, noisy lo-fi guitar and crunching power pop evolved. Putting their songs on mp3.com Krill explains, “We put out about four or five Spinto Band albums and side projects – imagining bands that we gave different names to. One time we pretended we’d found this brother/sister band from Maine and we’d signed them, but it was just us.” Fantasy bands and made up stories are a slight obsession for them then, “When we were kids we would draw album covers of our band for the future and what it would be like. We would write song titles but didn’t write the songs.”

“We didn’t play live for like four or five years but then playing became incredibly important.” Initially they performed in cut out masks of Will Smith and Matt Damon (the video shop seemingly an endless source of artefacts to play with) and any other props that came to hand. Now they leave the scissors and Pritt Stick alone and just appear as themselves: “It’s less of a theatrical thing, but it’s still about putting on a good show.” It’s certainly about putting on a sweaty show.

Theirs is a strange world. When Thom Hughes says that, “the best thing about touring now is it’s like you’re pushing your celery tonic live a travelling salesman,” you can almost imagine them in loud suits setting up their nineteenth century stalls. Let’s hope the salesman act has worked and that their prodigious debut album proper gets a proper release over here. They may not come with an agenda, they may be very far from cover star cool, but The Spinto Band is the sound of six people living out a musical fantasy, and that’s worth far more than a decent haircut and the right shoes.