He tends to use them to add force to subjects such as corruption, poverty or prison conditions, or even just getting drunk and having a good time. An example, from the track “The Truth”, goes: “They don’t swear on TV, how nice/ How could we live without a format? We need a format/ Our politicians are great people, they never swear… “There’s no barrier between the audience and us,” Shnur says “Stage and audience, one big performance But as to who is the more drunk… I still have to think about that.”It doesn’t take a genius to work out that booze plays a big role in Leningrad’s music. It represents a language most people understand, alongside their street poetry and political criticism.

However, unlike many bands, they went out of their way to avoid sounding like just another homogenised Western act.”The same as any British band doesn’t try to sound Russian, we, existing in the context of our culture, feel like a fish in the right water, the way we are,” Shnur says. Which might explain why they have such empathy with their fans. “It meant more to sell out smaller, hotter venues than play big, cold stadiums. Leningrad tried to become, without much practising, one of the coolest bands around. That’s how our style was born.”They were, and still are, inspired by the likes of Led Zeppelin, Massive Attack, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Grazhdanskaya Oborona (a Siberian punk band).

I don’t like Chelsea that much because of their pragmatic style – although what can you expect from a team owned by such a pragmatic man?”The band’s debut album Pulya was recorded by Leonid Fyodorov (ex-leader of the famous Russian band Auktyon) in 1999. Their original vocalist was Igor Vdovin, but he quit and bassist Shnur was thrust to the front with his gravelly voice, which he says is fuelled by “vodka, cigarettes and something else”.”There were great live bands and clubs in St Petersburg then,” he says. Schnur, who has been described as reclusive, is not a man to waste too much time on long sentences.When I suggest that all his songs have stories attached, he counters that “the stories are not important at all – [what's] important is the emotional message”. Asked which are Leningrad’s favourite topics, he says simply: “Corruption, politics, religion and sex.”The only time Schnur gets fired up is when we talk about Chelsea and its Russian owner Roman Abramovich.