Scouting For Girls

I saw him! I saw him!” yelps a 14-year-old boy to his friend, standing in the drizzling rain by the door to the Bournemouth International Centre, where, inside, Scouting For Girls are conducting a sound check. “I couldn’t see nothing,” scowls his mate. “You were in the bloody way.”

It’s only 4pm, and already queues are forming in the freezing wind outside the venue for tonight’s show. Following extravaganzas from Oasis, Girls Aloud and Jay-Z, Scouting For Girls are kicking off their national tour here, in a week in which they have been crowned bestselling UK band of 2008. Teenage girls in fluorescent legwarmers have turned up, along with mums and dads in sensible fleeces and lads with artfully dishevelled hair.

Two days earlier, the three members of Scouting For Girls are huddled around a fire in a West London pub, looking impressively nondescript. “We’re just painfully normal people,” says the singer Roy Stride. “There’s a guy down my road who reckons I look like the guy who sings in Scouting For Girls.” He laughs. “And now I can’t go into the shop any more, ’cos every time I go in, he starts singing She’s So Lovely, thinking I’m the guy who looks like the guy who sings She’s So Lovely. . .”

To the 100,000 or so fans who have bought tickets for the Scouting For Girls tour, the group’s normality and cheery familiarity is part of their charm. Their piano pop songs (It’s Not About You, Elvis Ain’t Dead) feature choruses so catchy that not singing along is as easy as eating a doughnut and not licking your lips.