They changed their name and they changed their sound - replacing their dour experimental electronica with a bouncy pop sound that suggests Coldplay on Prozac. Ghosts reinvented themselves just as bands such as The Feeling and The Automatic had cleared some space for mainstream-friendly guitar pop. Simon Pettigrew talks to Brian Boyd

BEFORE Kaiser Chiefs were Kaiser Chiefs, they were known, at various times, as La Boueff, Runston Parva and then just Parva. Under the latter guise they actually secured a label deal and recorded an album that never saw the light of day. Mortified by the experience, the band decided that if they wanted to continue in rock they would have to erase their history and start all over again with a new name.

The new name trick is more common than you think. A lot of household-name bands have pasts dotted with failure, failure and more failure, but this history is always left off official biographies. The beauty of the name-change trick is that A&R people will come to see you play (thinking you're a brand new band) and record companies might actually listen to your demo tape instead of going "didn't we just sack them for being crap?".

The newest indie-pop kids on the block, Ghosts, are only too willing to talk about their past failures. Lead singer Simon Pettigrew jauntily lists off past incarnations.

"We started out in 1997, when we were still all at school playing cheesy Britpop cover versions. Then we decided to call ourselves Roman Polanski, but because of the possibility of legal action we changed that to just Polanski. We were much darker when we were Polanski; we used to use a lot of computer-generated sounds. Then we changed our name to Southpaw, as in a left-handed boxer, and we actually got played on the Steve Lamacq radio show. But we had to drop that name because some American band were already using it.

"I think we went back to being Polanski then, but I do know at one stage my godfather was playing golf with the manager of Maximo Park and we got some contacts out of him. The problem then was that the stuff we were writing was in the DJ Shadow/Radiohead mould and we found it really difficult to reproduce live.

"Then our original singer became the guitarist instead, and then he left, so I took over lead vocals, learning how to sing from singing along to The Verve's Urban Hymns album. Then we got management who used to work with Smashing Pumpkins, and it looked like things were taking off. But then everyone lost interest in us and we didn't know what to do."

It's a bit of a saga, so best let Simon continue: "We eventually secured a publishing deal and that gave us just enough money to give up our day jobs. We knew if we stayed in London we'd just drink the money. So we got some cheap EasyJet tickets to Sweden because our drummer is half-Swedish and one of his relatives has a summer house that we could use.

"We wrote all the songs for our debut album there, and word got around that they were quite good so record labels started to invite us out to dinner. We had organised a big showcase gig in London for all the labels to come to so they could see us play the songs live. But three days before the gig, we met with the Warner label in Claridge's Hotel for breakfast - £28 a fry-up - and Warners pulled out a record deal there and then.

"We couldn't believe it. The catch was that we had to sign it before our showcase gig. Somehow over the next few days the other labels heard about this and we started getting more and more offers, but we went with the Warner deal and actually signed the contract five minutes before we took to the stage at our showcase gig."

It's difficult to square the Ghosts sound with the Polanski sound. Out has gone the dour experimental electronica, replaced with a bouncy pop sound that suggests, at times, Coldplay on Prozac. Ghosts have arrived at a time when bands such as The Feeling and The Automatic have cleared some space for mainstream-friendly guitar pop.

Pettigrew is at pains to point out that Ghosts are not a cool band. "I don't know what the NME is going to make of us. We're not The Strokes and we're not The Libertines and we're nowhere like the typical identikit NME indie band. The reference points we have so far include Thirteen Senses, The Feeling and Supergrass."

The Coldplay mention is not welcome: "People tried to make something of the fact that the guy who produced our album has also worked with them, but that's about as far as it gets."

Ghosts came racing out of the traps earlier this year with a Top 30 single, Stay the Night, which in itself was enough to get them a slot as the guest band on Channel 4's The Friday Night Project - even if, much to their annoyance, the host that week, Steven Seagal, kept referring to them as "The Ghosts".

Their just released debut album, The World Is Outside, is bounce-along chimy pop music that sets them worlds apart from their drugged-up or angst-burdened musical contemporaries. "I think there is a better climate now for the style of music we do," says Pettigrew. "A lot of those Libertines-sounding bands just aren't lasting the course."

Despite not being archetypal rock'n'rollers, Ghosts got a few headlines out of a recent "Smashing Up Their Hotel Room" story.

"It's ridiculous really," he says. "We were on our way to Glasgow to play a gig that was to be shown on MTV. The night before we had played a gig in York and back in the hotel after they had stopped serving at the bar, one of us simply took a few bottles of beer, because there was no one around to serve us. And how rock'n'roll is this: he left the right amount of money for the beers.

"Later that night the toilet broke in our tour manager's room while he was asleep, but somehow the hotel people thought that we were destroying the place. Three riot vans arrived and we were all arrested on suspicion of theft - six bottles of beer that we paid for - and criminal damage of a toilet that had broke itself. We spent 15 hours in a police cell and ended up missing our Glasgow MTV gig.

"I wouldn't have minded if we had actually trashed the place, but we didn't. I think I might have gently bumped against a lamp at one stage, but that was about it."