IT’S almost half a decade since their 2010 Mercury Prize nomination propelled I Am Kloot to new heights.

Frontman Johnny Bramwell tells Andy Welch how he’s still getting used to it Johnny Bramwell has a surprise day off.

“There’s no better kind,” he says, revealing his impromptu plan for a long walk with his dog, followed by a pub lunch.

“Then I’ll have a few coffees, call my girlfriend and get her to come to the pub for a pub dinner too. What a day!” he says, cackling.

You get the impression that a day in the pub isn’t a day idled away for Bramwell.

You never know, he might even emerge with a new album under his belt; the songs he writes for his band, I Am Kloot, often feature the kinds of characters or observations he might come up with after an evening in the boozer.

It was extremely fitting when one of their songs, The Great Escape, turned up on Early Doors, a sitcom set entirely inside a pub.

The reason this day off is a surprise is because he got his calendar mixed up, and thought he was going to be rehearsing all day.

“We don’t rehearse all that much, really. I don’t like it, and you should never over-rehearse anyway,” says the Cheshire-born 50-year-old. “We might do eight or nine hours for this tour.

“I always like it when one of the others cancels rehearsing, then I don’t have to do it, but it’s not me that’s cancelled.”

They will need to put in some rehearsal time for their forthcoming shows, however, as the trio – Bramwell, bassist Pete Jobson and drummer Andy Hargreaves – have been accepting requests from fans for long-forgotten Kloot songs. There may even be some they’ve never played live before, or some they’ve only played a handful of times.

“There’s nothing we’ve recorded that we’re embarrassed by, or don’t think is good,” notes Bramwell.

“Well, I say that, but I don’t listen to the songs. When we finish an album, I think, ‘Great. We’ve done a superb job. That was all brilliant’, but who knows? In my mind they’re all great, but they might be terrible.”

With the way the music industry has shifted in the past 12 or 13 years (almost the entire life of the Manchester three-piece), these days, only a small number of bands tour to promote a new album. Musicians, by and large, record new music in order to give themselves a reason to tour. Live shows are where what’s left of the money is.

Going one step further, I Am Kloot are about to release their first live album. How very meta, releasing a live album in order to tour again. It’s a cycle that could go on forever...

“You could say we’re very clever. But you could also say, ‘Those Kloot lads have no idea what they’re doing’. I’ll leave you guessing which it is,” jokes Bramwell.

He performed around 50 solo shows last year, as ‘Johnny Dangerously’, the guise he used before forming I Am Kloot (the band is named after the left-handed card game described in Jerome K. Jerome’s novel Three Men On The Bummel).

He says he’s actually very pleased with their live album, Hold Back The Night, recorded during their year-long voyage around Europe in 2013. Their sound engineer, testing out some new equipment, recorded their gigs – without telling them.

“In many ways, it’s a record in the truest sense of the word,” says Bramwell.

 I Am Kloot will play Brudenell Social Club in Leeds on April 16 & 17, and the Picturedome in Holmfirth on April 18.