GUN, the long-running Glasgow rock band, are on a roll on a raft of British and Irish autumn dates, playing The Duchess in York on Tuesday, before Spain and Portugal beckon next month.

"First and foremost it's the love of the music and continuing to play live that's a big part of the buzz for us," says Dante Gizzi, who now fronts the group with brother Guliano – or Jools, as he's more informally known – alongside him on guitar. "We couldn't wait to get out on this tour to introduce our new songs from the Frantic album."

Frantic is the second Gun studio set to feature Dante on lead vocals. "I feel comfortable with it now after taking over from Toby Jepson [the Scarborough musician], who'd been singing with us for a while, maybe three years, and went off to do his own thing, which is fair enough.

"We felt we 'we don't want to give up' and we'd enjoyed going out and doing the shows with Toby, so Jools said, 'Why don't you do it? You know the songs; you've been there from the start' but there was that niggling thought of being compared with Mark [original singer Mark Rankin]. Taking up his mantle was a daunting prospect."

Presenting himself to Gun's fans as the frontman for the first time on record on 2012's Break The Silence was "a challenge", admits Dante, "but singing the songs live, that was fine". "I used to do most of the demos anyway and then give them to Mark to sing on the records, and I'd had a band with Jools, El Presidente, where I'd done the singing."

Dante has settled into his new role, taking care to look after his singing voice when on the road. "It's your instrument'," he says.

You can sense how much he is enjoying the extra responsibility. "The new album cements it even further. It was great to do the first album, with the fans saying, 'OK, here's Gun with a new singer', but the new record makes it all more stable," he says.

Dante recalls the band spending time trying to find a new identity. "But we got lost on the way, trying to experiment, so we came back to the familiar template. Jools and I were thinking, 'what are we doing?. We've got to write songs from our heart. There's no point trying to convince someone else if you can't convince yourself first'."

One unexpected track to surface from the recording sessions is a Gun shot at Hot Chocolate's Every 1's A Winner that features on this autumn's digital re-release of Frantic alongside the East End EP, previously issued as a "fan only" CD earlier this year. The cover version is available too as a fund-raising single in aid of Marie Curie care for the terminally ill.

"Jools and I were massive Hot Chocolate fans and that song in particular," says Dante. "We often jammed it in the studio and we'd played around with the idea of recording it, because we knew it would sound incredible.Then the sad death of Errol Brown made us think we should do it now.
"It was ten years last month since my dad passed away from cancer, so that's why we're releasing it for Marie Curie."

Gun's Every I's A Winner was the last song to be recorded at Trevor Horn's SARM Studios in Basing Street, London, before they closed for three years of redevelopment. "Band Aid, Les Zeppelin IV, Grace Jones's Slave To The Rhythm, Bohemian Rhapsody, they were all recorded there and we did the last recording. What an honour.".