"I DON'T get bothered in the street anymore," says the shaven-headed singer with VENT 414, seated at a table in a King's Cross pub, just a fag butt's distance away from Shaun Ryder. "It's a fickle old buisness, innit, when you only get recognised for your barnet?"

A fickle buisness indeed. One minute vou could be leaping around to your favourite band, The Wonder Stuff at Phoenix'94. The next they've split up and the singer, one Miles Hunt, has been reduced to introducing Stone Temple Pilot videos on 120 Minutes.

But... but... how??

"We lost any verve for it," Miles says, unrepentant. "It wasn't so much the music that turned me away, it was more what your life becomes when your band becomes that much of an organisation. It was a relief to be treated differently at MTV, to be treated with complete disdain by most people. That was quite interesting."

But Miles Hunt needed more in his life than trying to tweak a coherent sentence out of J Mascis. Between shoots in April last year, he began swapping tapes with his bassist mate Morgan Nicholls from Senseless Things before roping in ex-Eat drummer Pete Howard and, before he knew it, Vent 414 were born out of a desire to RAWK their colective histories out of the question.

The band had one rehearsal, had the police called on them by the neighbours, decided that they must have stumbled upon something great, packed in their media whore day jobs (in Miles' case) and went drinking for five months. Surprisingly, the album that emerged was an aggressive, funky, hardcore beast with the melodic suss of The Stuffies slithering in the background rather than waltzing about in comedy trousers at the forefront.

Yet, as you might expect, heady chart success is the last thing on Miles' mind. ("I wouldn't want to go through all that again. It was horrible.")

Vent, it seems, would be happy to be the New Bush - mega famous in the US but just another skinhead on the tube back home. Which makes their debut single 'Fixer' a masterfully plotted record - all Pumpkins-esque guitar histrionics and deep, powerful vocals. Perfect for the polished rock tastes of American radio but sounding absolutely nothing like Oasis. Clever songwriting, cheers.

"It's all about self-empowering, basically. All the lyrics on the record are basically saying, 'Yeah, I'm right! I'm right in what I'm doing!' Anything I chose to do an want to do I generally end up doing. It's the 'that can be arranged' thing."

But you don't want to be part of a huge organisation, so isn't that a bad thing?

"No, I don't think I'm a cunt. I don't do things at other people's cost. I don't fuck people over. I think I do have a kind of concerned nature."

Indeed, he'll talk at length about his feelings of responbility towards the rest of The Wonder Stuff, as well as his liking for the working methods of his album producer Steve Albini. Jeepers! Is the insult-spouting motormouth of legend gone forever?

"I'm a much steadier person now," he says, calmly. "I don't blow up as much as I used to. I'm still in a quandary about the whole fucking thing, though."

Frustrations? Confusion? Need for a spot of hard-rocking glory? Vent yourself here...