McQueen, it is probably fair to say, have had better days than this. It's not so much the venue the Brighton-based quartet are booked to play, although no one is ever likely to rank the Canterbury Christchurch University College's union bar alongside the Marquee or Wembley Stadium in a list of Britain's legendary rock haunts. It's the publicity for the gig.
You can't fault the enthusiasm of whoever is responsible - they did posters and a web page replete with banner headlines and exclamation marks - but you could certainly question their knowledge of McQueen's oeuvre, which tends towards the raw-throated hard rock and features songs called Like I Care and Intercourse. Until a few hours ago, the union website featured a photograph not of McQueen but of Cheryl Tweedy smouldering in a ra-ra skirt. The accompanying text described the band both as BRITAIN'S LATEST GIRL BAND! and THE ANSWER TO GIRLS ALOUD!
Sitting in a lecture room above the bar, the members of McQueen don't look like the answer to anything much (unless the question involves a national shortage of eyeliner). They appear to be dealing with the day's events philosophically. This may have something to do with the thick skin you develop after a year struggling to build a following through the British live circuit. Alternatively, it may have something to do with the optic-sized bottle of bourbon that lead singer Leah Duors has managed to procure. A phone call from their manager, Seven Webster, has succeeded in getting both the offending text and the Cheryl Tweedy picture removed from the website, but it also seems to have brought about a swift reduction in their importance to the evening's entertainments. "TONIGHT!" reads the poster outside the venue, "SPEED DATING IN THE UNION!" Then, in much smaller type: "plus McQueen".
"Shit like this happens all the time when you're doing bottom-end gigs," says drummer Hayley Cramer, "but you've got to go out there and earn your credit." No one could accuse McQueen of not earning their credit: they play as if they're headlining the Download festival, despite the fact that the audience seems to be comprised largely of members of the college rugby club, who have understandably failed to get anywhere with the speed dating. "I've got a boner!" one of them yells between songs to chortles from his chums. "I dare you to come down the front," replies Duors. He doesn't dare. The chortling stops.
Still, you couldn't really wish for a more telling illustration of the struggle facing an all-female band with ambitions beyond miming pop hits to a backing tape. Certain areas of the music industry have decreed that 2005 will be the year that the all-girl rock band challenges the male hegemony and overcomes a history best described as chequered - one that takes in hilariously-named 1970s rockers Fanny, winningly bolshy post-punks the Raincoats and grunge band L7, the latter remembered more for throwing a used tampon into the crowd at Reading festival than their music. "The women's rock revolution is here," screeched one broadsheet last month, announcing the arrival of the Faders and Love Bites, two all-girl bands operating in roughly the same area as recently-deceased teen sensations Busted, but news of the distaff musical uprising has clearly failed to reach Canterbury.
As Paul Brannigan points out, it's tough for a band like McQueen, attempting to make headway on the rock scene covered by Kerrang!, the weekly magazine he deputy-edits. Its pages are testament to heavy metal's change in attitude towards women. Ladykillers, the weekly section featuring, as Brannigan puts it, "a female band or member of a band profiled wearing something the size of a chamois leather", has long vanished. Pandora, heroine of the magazine's long-running cartoon strip, has been quite literally downsized. Once a Zeppelin-breasted groupie, she's now a sharp-witted, tattooed girl, forever humiliating or punching any rock bands who stray in her path.
The old-fashioned sexism of Motorhead's Jailbait or AC/DC's Love At First Feel has gone forever, but, says Brannigan, it may have been replaced with something more insidious. "Girl bands are damned if they do or damned if they don't. If a female band try and exploit their sexuality - which a lot of male rock bands do - they immediately get derided for it, but if a band are in it entirely for the music, it's hard for them to get that across because everyone continually wants them to do pillow-fight photo shoots. [US all-girl punks] the Donnas have had 10 years of that and have yet to really cross over into the mainstream properly. It's an unfair double standard."
Nevertheless, there are signs that more girls are becoming involved in rock music. Kerrang's female readership is burgeoning - Brannigan estimates it at around 40%. In addition, women seem to be buying guitars in greater quantities than ever before. Manufacturer Fender claim that they now account for 50% of their sales. Last year, Mark Ellis, managing director of instrument distributors Rosetti Ltd, visited Music Live, a Birmingham "gear show". He was astonished to find that it was no longer a male preserve. "When we first attended the show, we noticed that there would be one or two girls playing guitars, and the rest would be standing around the edge looking thoroughly bored. Now there's a lot of girls playing the guitars."
Various reasons are offered for this upsurge in interest. Brannigan thinks it might have something to do both with the fact that "a lot of rock bands are getting a bit prettier than they used to be" (a swift comparison of Lost Prophets vocalist Ian Watkins with Motorhead's Lemmy or Iron Maiden's Nicko McBrain underlines his point) and with a rise in the number of rock bands fronted by women. Apparently, there is a new sub-genre, with the panic-inducing name "opera metal", entirely dominated by female vocalists.
Colin Barlow, who signed the Faders to major label Polydor, suggests that Hollywood films such as School of Rock and Freaky Friday have had a role to play, by featuring young, guitar-toting heroines. And then there is the influence of Busted and McFly. For all the mockery heaped upon them by the serious music press, you would have to be pretty churlish not to admit that their rise has altered the average pubescent girl's notion of what constitutes pop music: from antiseptic young men crooning ballads on stools to marginally less antiseptic young men playing a glossy approximation of punk and indie music.
That Busted affected a revolution in the world of manufactured pop is beyond question. Whether a teenage all-girl pop-rock band can capitalise on their success is a more moot point. James Roberts, A&R editor of trade magazine Music Week, has his doubts: "There's nothing to actually say that's what kids want, there's not been a successful act like that for ages. The last one that tried was Simon Fuller's 21st Century Girls, and that was a real disaster.
"Now kids are into bands rather than obviously manufactured artists in the Gareth Gates sense. It'll be interesting to see how these do. It's a lot harder to generate loyalty for a female pop act, because predominantly you're selling to 14-year-old girls and the biggest hook for them is that it's a male band that they fancy. It's a pretty open secret in the music industry that it's easier to launch a boy band than a girl band."
If the Faders don't succeed, it won't be for want of trying on the part of Polydor, for whom they are a priority act. The trio have some curious connections with both McQueen and the world of Kerrang! - bassist Toy "nearly formed a band" with Hayley Cramer while studying in Brighton, while Cherisse Osei was, unbelievably, drumming in a thrash metal band with the bassist from feared Geordie satanists Venom while still at school. But the scene in their London Bridge rehearsal room couldn't be further removed from Canterbury Christchurch University College student union. A crew from T4 is filming their every move. They perform their debut single No Sleep live for the cameras. It's fizzy and laden with hooks. It sounds like a hit, as befits something written and produced by Metrophonic, a management and production team who have worked with everyone from Enrique Iglesias and Rod Stewart to Daniel Bedingfield and Lemar.
The Faders were signed a month after Metrophonic took them on. "We were in the right place at the right time. We just saw ourselves as a band and they went, 'Wow, there's a big market for you!'" says Toy, lighting a cigarette once the cameras have been packed away. "The zeitgeist, I think they call it," she adds wryly.
In fact, there's something appealingly wry about all of the Faders. Singer Molly Lorenne is the daughter of Ultravox singer Midge Ure - "He'll say, 'You were so giggly on Top of the Pops Saturday', taking the piss. And I think, 'Yeah, you did much better didn't you? With your ponytail and your pointy sideburns'" - which may account for her pragmatic approach to their chances of success. "Busted splitting up has made it harder for us as girls. People are now saying, you're going to be the female Busted, whereas if they were still around, people would ... " Her voice trails off. "Actually, people would still be saying that, wouldn't they?" she sighs.
Lorenne is not the only female musician bothered by comparisons to Busted. When I travel to Crewe to meet the Tommys, an as-yet unsigned all-girl pop-punk quartet, their manager Paul meets me off the train. He looks concerned. The girls are apparently still fuming about being described as "the female Busted" in a music industry magazine. Mention of the Faders has gone down equally badly. I get the impression that Paul, a former member of chart dance act Dario G, is slightly afraid of his charges.
He talks about a gig the Tommys played before Christmas in Crewe, where the band bussed in their school friends to make up numbers. "One of the coaches got wrecked before it even got to the venue." He shakes his head. "It only had to travel eight miles." Sitting in a nearby studio, I start to feel slightly intimidated myself. The Tommys certainly radiate a very teenage kind of suspicion. When I ask how old they are - they are all between 14 and 16 - I get a lecture from singer Jessica Bell.
"It doesn't matter how old we are. If people want to make an issue about our age that's their problem." Nor are they much impressed when I mention a company called Daisy Rock, which is attempting to lure more young girls into music stores with a range of small guitars in the shape of hearts and flowers. "Patronising," sniffs bass player Tania Kawalite. Suitably chastened, I troop upstairs to a freezing and deserted nightclub where the Tommys play some of their songs. They are snappy and snotty, with choruses to die for and lyrics that could only have been written by a teenage girl. "The Day the Whole World Turned Chav is about chavs and how much we hate them," says Bell. "Boy From the Car Wash is asking why good-looking guys are always gay. Five Star's about your average slut in the street, the girl who gets around a bit."
You can't help feeling that they belong on CD:UK."No way," says drummer Francesca Robinson. "We don't want to be dolled up and miming. That's what Busted and McFly did. They've taken punk to a different level and made it too poppy. We're trying to bring it back." Instead, they want to do what McQueen are doing. The Canterbury Christchurch University College union bar beckons.
It's a tough path, but perhaps that's not such a problem. A few days later, I see Leah Duors in a Brighton rehearsal studio. McQueen, she says, have had some feedback from their last gig: "The rugby club have been on our message board." I'm about to make sympathetic noises about the sexism that seems to inhabit not just the music industry, but music fans, but I don't get a chance. "The guy says he's still got a boner," she cackles. "That can only be a good thing."