KING Pleasure and the Biscuit Boys' Mark Skirving does a good line in Italian mobster impressions.

Current favourites are Marlon Brando's Don Corleone, but go back to the mid-1930s and the era of gangsters like Al Capone and suddenly you're in deep swing territory Skirving's lifeblood.

His eight-strong band are a highly talented, brash, zoot-suited homage to one of music's most exciting periods which gave a similar kind of liberation as rock 'n' roll 20 years later.

Fast and energetic, King Pleasure have given swing a Midlands flavour to what has long been seen as an exclusively American genre, with songs like Fat Sam From Birmingham.

But with their sharply-cut tailoring and two-tone correspondence shoes, King Pleasure are regarded as one of the country's top swing acts on the strength of six well-received albums.

The band began as Skirving King Pleasure himself and Bullmoose K Shirley busking around the streets of Walsall in 1986, as Some Like It Hot, in tribute to the Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis film.

The duo equated pennies with pints in those days, but became a serious band after Director of Birmingham International Jazz Festival Jim Simpson recognised their talent.

They quickly matured into the kind of swing act of Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman's era, complete with a full horns section and double bass.

Their career has seen them play alongside BB King and Cab Calloway in the midst of constant tours of Europe and the USA.

Some members have left, but the core has remained the same and currently features King Pleasure on vocals and tenor sax, P Popps Martin on alto and baritone sax, Bullmoose K Shirley on guitar, Slap Happy on double bass, Big Mally Baxter on trumpet, John Battrum on tenor sax, Ivory Dan McCormack on piano and Bam-Bam Beresford on drums.

Like the others, Mark has a hopeless fascination with the swing era and was hooked on it when peers were thinking about where to put their eyeliner in the New Romantic era.

Noddy Holder was my hero and still is, he said.

But Fats Domino and Little Richard were the people I listened to and it was through rock 'n' roll that I got into jazz through going to clubs.

To be honest, I still don't know how I went from being into Slade to suddenly being into swing. But I do remember thinking at the time I had no interest whatsoever in New Romantic music. It's nostalgic for me.

And it's nostalgia that has stoked the revival in swing, which petered out after the Second World War having been helped liberate women and go some way to bridging the racial gulf between black and white people. King Pleasure plan to tour the States again next year.

They play the Marr's Bar, in Pierpoint Street, tomorrow.