The first thing you see as you enter the Twickenham studios, where Bush is shooting a new video, is a heavily pregnant woman who is collapsing against the side of a kitchen counter. She is wearing loose, stomach-revealing pajamas and she is falling in what looks like slow motion. She reaches the floor, then the director calls cut and the makeup person runs in and powders the baby bulge, and the pregnant actress gets up and collapses again at normal speed.

The set shows the interior of a house decorated in terminally bad taste. There's flock wallpaper and a neon cross on the wall, an illuminated plastic choirboy standing by the fireplace, a pineapple ice bucket, a pair of white high heels on the mantlepiece. There is also a bathroom which looks as though it has a decade's grime on it, but in fact it was built from scratch by set constructors just a few hours ago. The bathroom filth came in a spray can.

Jamie Morgan is directing the video for "Swallowed," probably the most melodic and commercial of the songs on the new Bush album, Razorblade Suitcase (Trauma/ Interscope). The song itself mixes slow moody sections with a hard, thrashy chorus, and in order to represent this, the video is one of those that mixes slo-mo and normal speed action within the same frame. This means that every action has to be filmed at least twice, and then at a later date these separate actions will magically, digitally, be put together via a process that nobody on the shoot is quite able to explain.

If nothing else, the process means that Bush drummer Robin Goodridge is given the tricky direction to play at twice the normal speed with his hands but to keep his body still, and also above all "not to look like Animal from the Muppets." He tries hard, but he obeys the first instruction considerably better than the second.

Of course, the video focuses on Gavin Rossdale, lead singer, guitarist, songwriter, sometime pin-up and, if you believe what you read in the papers, occasional consort of Courtney Love. If you read certain other papers you'll also believe he once stepped out with Boy George's chum Marilyn, although Rossdale denies it.

The camera loves him and he loves it right back. He tried straightening his hair for the video but he decided it made him look too slick; so he's gone back to the more familiar combination of crinkles and streaks.

Despite being 30 or so, Rossdale has an unmuscular, adolescent leanness about him, and if there is something androgynous about the pout and the cheekbones, well when did that ever harm a rock'n'roll career? These were the looks that got him a Rolling Stone cover, although the magazine felt it necessary to run the shoutline, "Why won't anyone take Gavin Rossdale seriously?" Of course, if he'd been pug-ugly he might have been taken seriously, but would that have got him the cover of the magazine?

Well, one person who takes Gavin Rossdale very seriously indeed is Gavin Rossdale. Off stage and off screen he looks far less of a pin-up than he does on, but whereas the other members of the band are chatty, workmanlike, defiantly ordinary boys-next-door, Rossdale doesn't quite lose the rock star aura, and probably doesn't want to.

He's not keen on the business of making diplomatic small talk. When asked what bands he was in before Bush, he says, "I can't remember now," and after he's provided his list of Desert Island Discs he pointedly adds, "It's just a list." Well, it's good to know he doesn't think it's holy writ.

On the other hand, he knows that Bush has come in for all sorts of flack and he's quite prepared to meet it head-on. First, the fact that everyone says his band sounds too much like Nirvana.

"Obviously we get compared to Nirvana," he says, "but it's so ridiculous because first off there's plenty of stuff that doesn't sound like Nirvana on our records, and I think we could sound a lot more like Nirvana. And what can I say? I find them really inspiring and if Kurt was still alive it would be a lot easier. Because Nirvana had disintegrated, or ended, for some reason people saw it as more viable to try and copy the Kinks. I'm more current than that, you know."

Current? What we're talking about here, of course, is Britpop: a form of tuneful, highly commercial music that consciously harks back to the English sounds of the '60s, but with updated drug references. Rossdale makes an exception for Oasis, but says, "I find Britpop really dull, lacking in passion and lacking in commitment, a triumph of style over content and I don't even find it that stylish. Damon [Albarn, of the band Blur] of course now wants to be in an American 'alternative' band ... Pavement or something."

The members of Bush are hardly newcomers. With the exception of guitarist Nigel Pulsford, who had a peripatetic childhood, they're all native Londoners. They've been in a lot of bands, some successful, some not. Rossdale says he was signed by a record company only a few months after he started playing music, far too early, he now admits. The band was Midnight. Bass player Dave Parsons was in Transvision Vamp and says he's still waiting for the official word that the band's broken up. Goodridge was involved in the If '60s Were '90s album by Beautiful People--a great techno album with live drums and Hendrix samples. Pulsford was in a band called Kings Blank.

There is a reasonable theory that the English are good at taking basic American music, putting it through the grinder and selling it back to the Americans at a premium. This might describe anyone from John Mayall to the Sex Pistols. The Bush equation is different. Bush doesn't belong to any current English trend. It's not part of any movement or shared ideology. It's making music inspired by grunge at a time when homegrown English music is largely inspired by nostalgia. Bush's music has a rawness and a passion that is currently very unfashionable in England, somehow uncool and a little embarrassing. Gavin Rossdale is not that easily embarrassed.

"I didn't ever want to be a mod," he says. "I hate mods. I don't know much about the Small Faces. And I wasn't really into that whole scene. I like much more kind of dark, broody, guitar-oriented stuff. That's what I like, you know. I can make no apologies for following my heart."

Rossdale's heart has helped Bush to sell 7 million copies of its first album, Sixteen Stone, but very few of those sales were in England. The British press has largely ignored Bush, but there have been a few sniping articles about that relative failure, and it obviously still rankles.

Rossdale continues: "We can't help it if we can't get on Radio 1. Radio 1 is just a travesty; there's no new music on there. Eric Clapton and all that, it's really terrible. They don't help rock bands.

"We sold 50,000 records here [in England], so it's not like, 'Oh, no. What a disaster. Why did you bother getting up?' It's just that we're not mainstream but I never thought we'd be mainstream. We're not even mainstream in America." Well, it all depends what you call mainstream. Bush may not be mainstream compared to Mariah Carey, but try comparing the quartet with Half Japanese.

Parsons is even more bitter about the general neglect and occasional abuse by the English music press. "I grew up with those music papers," he says, "and I always assumed they told the truth. But then one day you get old and you realize they just make up what they like. It's a bit sad, that realization."

So despite international sales, it appears that the members of Bush are feeling anything but bulletproof. Prophets do want to be honored in their own country and nobody wants to be thought of as a one-album wonder. There's a feeling around the Bush camp that there's even more than usual riding on the notoriously difficult second album. They've had the sales, and they'd like them again please, but this time round they'd like some credibility. This being the case they called in Steve Albini to produce the new record, a considerable contrast to the producers of Sixteen Stone, who were Clive Langer and Eric Winstanley, best known for their work with Madness and Elvis Costello.

Rossdale says, "I think Steve Albini was the best person to record our record, bar none. He was my first choice and I was lucky enough to get him."

Albini brings with him a reputation as the ornery king of hardcore, an uncompromising Mr. Integrity who gives record-company executives nightmares. This reputation is, if you believe the members of Bush, somewhat exaggerated. Even so, it's a given in the rock business that Albini doesn't work with losers or triflers: If Bush is good enough for Albini it should be good enough for you.

Rossdale again: "He's very supportive. Contrary to popular belief he's very interested in how you want your record to sound. He's inspirational because the whole history of Steve is so scary that you've just got to be on your best fucking mettle--you've got to be able to deliver.

"He can't construct an album for you. It's not like you put the drum track down, then the bass. It's everything together so you spend all day getting the sounds up so you'd be ready. He's much more of a purist than anyone else I've ever worked with. He sees the studio as a way to capture the combination of four people, whereas other record producers see making records as a chance to push the limits of technology, or just to create illusions and he's not into illusions. Me, I'm into somewhere in the middle."

All the band are aware that something different is going on with the new album, though none of them is quite sure what. Nigel Pulsford says, "It's more stripped-down, which is pretty classic for a second album." And Dave Parsons says, "It's mature, more free. Everyone knows each other's playing better. It's a more grown-up album than the last one."

The presence of Albini seems at best, however, a mixed blessing. He is, after all, the man who recorded Nirvana, not an obvious choice if you're trying to answer the critics who dismiss you as Nirvana soundalikes. Furthermore, such is the slippery nature of credibility, Albini is now accused of being mercenary for the very reason that he's worked with Bush.

Albini's take on the band is satisfyingly contrary. He says, "The first I knew of them was that I knew there was a general resentment about a band called Bush on the grapevine of the underground music scene. I knew there was some distaste for the band long before I heard them. Then I met Dave Dorrell, their manager and fifth member, and he gave me a copy of Sixteen Stone and said they were interested in doing some work. So I listened to their record and at that point I guess everybody else in America had heard them so I was having the unique experience of listening to Bush for the first time and I really didn't understand what all this stink was about. I didn't understand why anybody would be offended by this band and their popularity. They seemed at least as good and probably better than a lot of other bands who were popular at the time."

Albini has given the band space. The new album has much more air and light than Sixteen Stone. There's a simultaneous stretching and yet a concentration. Bush has been given a chance to find its essence. We're not talking about complete reinvention here; fans of a good thrash and a doomy guitar part will still find plenty to enjoy, but both singing and playing are reaching into areas that were only previously hinted at.

Albini denies being responsible for the change in sound. He says, "I think they had their direction pretty well in hand before they ever met me, and they've been playing as a band so continuously for the last couple of years that I think it would be hubris for anyone to think they could have an influence on the way they've developed. Whatever aesthetic decisions they made were made within the band during that two years."

This may be true. Nevertheless, there are some pure Albini moments on the new album--moments in the spirit of his own bands, Big Black, Rapeman and, of late, Shellac, and of his renowned work producing the late Pixies--such as on "Mouth" after the first chorus where the crashing chords and the vocals end, and the song seems to hesitate for a moment before a long, low squeal of controlled feedback leads back into the next verse.

Rossdale says, perhaps a little confusingly, of the songs on the new album, "Thematically I think it's slightly wider, different things I was writing about: teenage pregnancies, bit of suicide, and a couple of songs about regret. So yeah, pretty much the same."

Although a lot of people couldn't see it, there was always something quite English about the first album; perhaps it had something to do with a certain way with melody, a certain choice of words, leaving aside the "Fly to Los Angeles, find my asshole brother" lines.

The opening track on Razorblade Suitcase is called "Personal Holloway," which can be taken as a spin on "Own Private Idaho"--a geographical definition of Hell. Holloway is both an area of London and a women's prison.

Even Gavin Rossdale's most ardent supporters wouldn't proclaim him as one of the world's great songwriters, but what he does best and very effectively is link together a churning guitar part and a strong if obscure hook. On the first album he made the repeated phrase, "Breathe in, breathe out," sound positively eloquent and profound.

It would be hard to say precisely what most of the songs on the new album are about. More often than not they seem to be loose collections of clever wordplay or images. Some of these are surprisingly literary. He writes, "We are servants of our formulaic ways" on "Greedy Fly" and "I gave my love a thousand yesterdays" on "History," while "Distant Voices" reworks parts of the Icarus myth.

But Rossdale's at his best when he takes some ambiguous, not to say impenetrable, phrase and just belts it out until it makes some sort of sense. The words, "History moans, mouth of my father," don't look particularly effective on the page, but when sung repeatedly with urgency and conviction they sound like pretty good rock lyrics.

But let's face it, these are not exactly sing-along tunes. They're songs to practice grimacing to, songs to pose in front of the mirror to, songs to play air guitar to.

Gavin Rossdale has always had a voice that didn't quite suit him. Whereas his voice was big, hairy, imprecise, the man himself is quite fine, delicate and clean-cut. His was never a pretty boy's voice. On Razorblade Suitcase, however, it's become so raw, so distressed and antiqued that it sometimes hurts to listen to it. He croaks and he roars, reaches for distant high notes, and generally gives his vocal cords the equivalent of a rubbing down with an electric sander. There are also times when he sounds extremely English.

There's still the rasp that makes people think of Cobain, but there are some very weird and wonderful vowel sounds, a tour around the English regions that at times invokes Bowie or Peter Perrett of the Only Ones or Richard Butler of the Psychedelic Furs.

He continues: "Albini loves guitar sounds and he loves the more extreme sounds. He encourages and gets very animated about all the fucked-up sounds. Some of them are reproducible on stage, some aren't. I've got some new fuzz boxes which produce particularly horrible sounds."

Pulsford seems the most serious muso of the group. He's the one who does the string arrangements for the band (and very good they are, too--more Bartok than George Martin), a man who knows his rock history and isn't entirely averse to repeating it. He claims affinity with all sorts of guitarists who are just on the edge of the mainstream, the likes of Alex Chilton from Big Star, Joey Santiago of the Pixies, Blixa Bargeld and, amazingly enough, Robbie Robertson of the Band. On the night that Pulsford and Rossdale first met backstage at the gig of a mutual friend, they bonded by going home and playing Neil Young and My Bloody Valentine albums.

Steve Albini is full of compliments and admiration. He says, "Nigel and I are pretty well matched. He's been playing guitar for so long in so many different ways that he's found a palette of ridiculous sounds that he and only he can make use of. I appreciate that specification. Most people, when they specialize in something, they're just trying to do the same sorts of things as other people, only better, like they're trying to be a better wicked soloist than Eddie Van Halen or have a more killer thrash sound than James Hetfield or something like that. That's the standard route for a guitar player to improve his technique or craft, and I think Nigel's perspective was that he wanted to have more unique and more weird sounds than anybody else, and he didn't do it in cavalier fashion. He sculpted these individual sounds for specific uses, which I appreciated."

The album sounds very live and free of overdubs, and why not? Bush is nothing if not a live band. Its members differ on exactly how many gigs they have played together, but it's generally agreed to be something like 250 in about 16 months. Improvisation "in the manner of the Doors," according to Pulsford, has always been a part of the band's act, not least because in the beginning they were having to play 90-minute sets based on a 60-minute album. There's always been room for jamming, for covering each other's mistakes.

Goodridge says, "It was never contrived. In the early days we didn't have enough roadies, and three of us would have to keep playing and one of us would be fucking about with guitar leads. The good bits got carried on. You have a trigger that triggers you into some weird area; you just do it. If you thought about it, it'd be awful; 240 shows doing the same arrangements would be a nightmare. It would be a Michael Jackson tour."

This shared experience has fed very directly into the new album. Goodridge says, "There was only one way to make the album. You do a studio album that takes six months if you've been sitting around on beaches, taking it easy. But we haven't. We came off the tour, took a week off, and straight into the studio. We didn't want to grind it out in the 'that's a good bit of bass playing' way. That didn't make much sense to us. The instruments were done live as a unit of four. There was very little to repair because having played together that amount of time, if we couldn't play it then, when were we ever going to be able to play together?"

The members of Bush take it all in their stride, bit players in their own video. None of them seems to be enjoying it, but they recognize it's all part of the industrial process. Robin Goodridge says he knows that the footage of drummers always ends up on the cutting-room floor anyway. This band is nothing if not sussed out.

And maybe that's the problem. All the members of Bush say that they see a long and profitable future for themselves. Goodridge adds, "I hope we'll be together for a long time, because I've finally found a band I want to play in. If we can all stay moving in the same vehicle, I can see no reason why not. There's money to be made and world domination to be had."

There was a savage review of Bush in The Los Angeles Times that described the live act as "a lot of strategic gestures that titillate ... but without an emotional focus." They are being accused of fakery and this is unjust. Like it or not, the passion is for real. Gavin Rossdale believes in his own passion, even if he doesn't always make his audience believe in it. This was obviously not a problem Kurt Cobain ever had.

Rossdale may sound like Cobain at times, but somehow you know he's not going to implode like that. His songs may have their fair share of angst, but when the cards are on the table, he doesn't hate himself and he doesn't want to die. He's a well-brought-up, nicely spoken English lad. He looks like a survivor. He looks like a winner.

Sounding somewhat like Nirvana does not seem like the world's greatest sin. And if Bush also sometimes sounds like U2 and R.E.M., well, who exactly would their critics have them sound like? Jonathan Richman? Admittedly, they are not brilliant innovators, nor are they redefining rock'n'roll, but then who is? And if they were, would they have sold 7 million records? Bush belongs to a long tradition of loud guitar rock that didn't begin with Nirvana and certainly won't end with Bush. First and foremost, they're entertainers; and there are days when it seems we're wrong to demand any more than that.