Spotlight: Kaiser Chiefs

It's easy to forgive Kaiser Chiefs frontman Ricky Wilson the name-drop. Few of us have traded one-liners with Paul McCartney recently.

"He walks up to me and says, 'I like what you're doing. You have a great little band there.' I was shocked," recounts Wilson of the backstage meeting at last month's NME Awards. "Then he says, 'You remind me a bit of Fred Astaire.' I told him, 'I'm not just a dancer.' And McCartney says, 'The singing is all right too I guess.'"

Sir Paul is actually a little late to the party: Kaiser Chiefs are already chart-topping, SRO phenoms in their native UK. Here in the U.S., L.A.'s Ÿber-influential KROQ added them to their playlist even before the band signed to Universal. The lion's share of the Leeds-based outfit's hype has been generated by their anthemic introductory single, "I Predict a Riot." With splashes of the Clash and Blur, if the track isn't the year's best single so far, it's certainly the catchiest.

"It's not rocket science," admits Wilson. "The trick is getting to the chorus as fast as you can and repeating the same line four times. It's the Beyoncé Principle."

Employment, the band's full-length debut, hit stores this week and features plenty of equally straightforward pop, as well as its share of post-punk edginess. Wilson seems excited to hit SXSW alongside his friends in the similarly influenced Bloc Party and the Futureheads, but he's wary of being grouped into "British Invasion" stories and/or looking too desperate to break in America.

"We're a British band, but location isn't a genre of music," points out Wilson. "The fact of the matter is that we'd like to get the records in as many hands as possible, and in the UK there's a finite amount of homes to break into. America has a lot more houses."