They're named after a cheese and they have a history of opera and death metal. El Presidente: how can they fail?

Step forward El Presidente. According to the NME, Vogue and even Harper's & Queen, they're going to be the next big thing. Their record company, Sony BMG, is certainly hoping so, buoyed presumably by fanciful if thrilling press hype describing the five-piece as "the new Franz Ferdinand" and "the Scottish Scissor Sisters". But in the clear light of day - a day that will later see them step out in front of an SECC crowd in support of Jamiroquai - how do they measure up?

Well, although they arrive for their interview dressed in as near as they get to civvies, there's no doubt they know their way around a wardrobe. And none of them could be described as difficult to look at. As for the tunes - well, you'll have to wait for their soonto-come debut album to get a proper idea (expect a lot of choppy white-boy funk), but their last single, Without You, was hookier than a pirate convention. Whichever way you look at it, El Presidente have got the makings of a half-decent pop band.

"A pop band?" drummer Dawn Zhu shrieks in her best Lady Bracknell voice - or as much like Lady Bracknell as a 20-year-old Singaporean art student can manage. Zhu (20; loves "meat, myself and my shoes"; hates "vegetables, rude people and flat shoes") has already played in a few too many punk bands to be totally at home with the word "pop". But Dante Gizzi (El Presidente's frontman, singer, songwriter and originator; not too fond of "pretentious wankers") isn't scared of the P-word.

"Not at all, " he says. "I think Franz Ferdinand are pop. It's pop-funk, I would say, with a bit of rock. With a bit of everything, really."

As well as Zhu and Gizzi there's bass-player Thomas McNeice (first pop pin-up: Paula Abdul), who's 25 and comes from Airdrie.

Then there's Laura Marks, 19, on keyboards and vocals (she has a scar on her chin and another above her left eye: "I got a nail through my eyebrow when I was five"), and Irish guitarist Johnny McGlynn, 29 (first record bought: Queen's Sheer Heart Attack).

They've been together for the best part of a year, have already played T in the Park and Glastonbury, and are soon off to Japan. Nearly all have a past of playing in bands that never made it or were never going to (McNeice's spell as the drummer in a death-metal outfit springs to mind). Only Marks hasn't earned her stripes playing in no-mark venues to audiences that struggle to reach single figures. Her background is acting - she's made fleeting appearances in Chewin' the Fat, Velvet Soup and Still Game. She also trained as an opera singer from the age of nine: "I sing nothing like an opera singer now, but it built up my strength and now I never really hurt my voice when I sing."

The rest of them, with one exception - which we'll get to later - have tried and failed to make it in the world of music before. "I've never really hit on a job in my life, " says McGlynn. In his home town of Boyle, in County Roscommon, he formed a band called the Marbles with his best mate. They got signed to Trevor Horn's label ZTT, but it never panned out. He moved to Glasgow five years ago and played with various bands in the city before finally being persuaded by Gizzi to join El Presidente. "They were hounding me for a couple of months before Christmas, " he says. "I think it was around January when I said, 'Let's give it a go.'" El Presidente's dayglo pop thrills are a far cry from his most recent band, a blues-rock trio. "It was kind of spacey, out-there stuff at times, depending on what drugs we were doing, " he says. But now he gets to indulge his childhood love of peacock rock.

"This reminds me why I liked music: simple and fun. Playing in a band was never about getting laid and being cool - it was about having the party atmosphere. You can get laid without using music to do it."

El Presidente have a mongrel mix of backgrounds. There's Scottish, with a bit of Italian and even Trinidadian blood in the mix (courtesy of McNeice's mum) as well as Irish and Singaporean, plus a blend of ages and personalities. But Marks reckons they all have something in common. "When we all got together, we were so weird-looking, " he says. "We were all from different backgrounds and were totally different ages. How was it going to work? And it shouldn't work, but it does."

It must feel strange, though, for Zhu and Marks to be in a band where the male members are so much older than they are. Zhu begs to differ. "I think actually it's true what they say. You never grow up when you're in a band. So I don't think the guys have grown up at all." They're not like older brothers, then? She thinks about this for a moment. "Kick-ass cousins, maybe."

One filial relationship is absolutely central to El Presidente, though. Take a look at the credits and you'll see the songs are written by both Dante and Joolz Gizzi, Dante's older brother. Joolz isn't in the band, though: he's put those days behind him.

It's at this point that anyone with a subscription to Record Collector and a suspicious knowledge of record serial numbers might be feeling a twitch in the memory banks. Gizzi?

Why does that name ring a bell? Well, it might be because the brothers have had their moment in the sun before. Back in the nineties they were in one of Glasgow's most successful bands - top-ten hits, stadium tours, the whole bhoona - albeit a band that couldn't be more different than El Presidente. Anyone out there remember Gun?

For those too young (that'll be Zhu and Marks, then), Gun were a straight-down-theline rock band, more Bon Jovi than Roxy Music. It is just possible, though, that the line between Gun and El Presidente might not be quite as crooked as it might first appear. For all their meat-and-potatoes rockisms, the former, it should be recalled, did have the good taste to cover Cameo's cyber-funk classic Word Up (if not quite enough taste to leave it well alone).

And those with a sketchy knowledge of their oeuvre might be surprised to learn that they even had a go at rap at one point. That was Gizzi's idea. "I was listening to Dr Dre when I was 15, " he says. "I was right into my rap."

Can we hold a man's past against him, especially given he was just 16 when he joined Gun, and only then after some prompting? "I didn't want to join, " he says. "I had a great job.I was working at Fazzi's, the delicatessen in Glasgow. I came straight out of school and I was earning good money - in fact, they'd just given me a wage rise because I'd worked so hard. I remember the band's management company coming up to my mum's house to persuade me to do it."

His reluctance, he says, was a result of his shyness. He didn't think he could cut it on stage. (How times have changed. ) That said, he loved watching his brother rehearse with the band, and even told his careers officer that he wanted to be a musician - a career not covered in any of the YTS leaflets the teacher had on the desk in front of him. "I looked at him, searching for words, " Gizzi recalls. "And I said, 'You know what? I'd like to stock shelves, actually.' And he goes, 'Seriously?' 'Yeah, yeah.' He was so chuffed."

Certainly, Gizzi was never going to be an A-grade student. He was never there enough. "I played truant a lot, " he says. "I spent most of the time at home." In his second year he missed three months of classes. He'd just tell his mother he wasn't going, and that was it. "Each day it went on, I realised how difficult it was for her to deal with." And the more difficult it would be to go back, presumably? "There's no excuse you could come up with." The school board finally intervened, "and I had to go up to the courts".

Gun was a whole new life, though. Before long Gizzi found himself on the road supporting the Rolling Stones and living the rock 'n' roll dream. He lived it for seven years, until the band split in 1997 (with no great enmity). He and his brother retreated from pop's front line, and began working on some songs. They also looked around for something in which they could invest their earnings.

"There was money there. We could have blown it, taken a gamble, tried to work on raw material and lived off that money. But becausewe had family in the restaurant trade, we thought it might be a good idea to have a wee restaurant."

And so they opened the Bistro du Sud in Cambridge Street, Glasgow, pitching in to help run the place. "That was great because it totally brought me out of my shell, " says Gizzi.

Surely being front of house in a restaurant is, in a way, a kind of performance too? "F-ing right, man. I shat myself the first time I made a cup of coffee. Absolutely shat myself. Should I go and speak to that customer? Should I go and see how that coffee is? I was panicking."

The idea for El Presidente can be traced back to 1997 and a service station in the south of France, when Gizzi says he saw the name on a cheese (or maybe a portion of butter). "I just hoped to God that nobody else came up with this name, " he says. "I loved it. I loved the sound of it." The first songs came quickly.

Without You and another single, 100 MPH, were born in those post-Gun bedroom sessions. "Yeah, I've not even told the record company that, " says Gizzi. "They think I've just written them two years ago. But that's what's brilliant about it - these songs have stood the test of time."

In the midst of all this he had a little rock 'n' roll moment - a year and a half when he started flirting with cocaine. "I did do drugs, but it wasn't when I was in the band, " he says.

"That shocks people. God help me if I'd done that when I was in Gun, because I would have had every opportunity, especially in places like Spain where we were really successful and it was there on tap, so to speak. I never touched it. It was only when I'd come out of the band, which was bizarre. Why did I have this fascination for this drug now?"

It's an interesting question, especially since he says that when he was growing up, in Calton in the east end of Glasgow, he was surrounded by the needle and the damage done. He knew the cost. "From a very early age I've seen friends - beautiful young people - resorting to taking heroin and just wasting their lives away, you know? Some of them died. As a teenager I was well aware of it. And my mum and dad weren't the most strict at all, and I didn't want to end up that way. So to come out of that unscathed when I could easily . . ." He tails off. "Because it was all around me, it was totally all around me."

He can't say for sure why he emerged unscathed. "Maybe it was because I honestly believed my parents were so lenient that if I got myself into that situation, there was no way I was getting out of it because they wouldn't help me, couldn't help me. If my mum couldn't stop me from dogging school for three months, what chance did she have if I started taking smack or getting involved in something that was going to spiral downwards?"

But why did it happen when he left Gun?

Had he maybe felt he'd missed out in some way? "Maybe that's what it might have been. I wanted to see what the crack was." Well, obviously. "It was just to see what it was like. And that lasted over a period of a year, a year and a half. I found myself getting worked up constantly - not depressed, but angry at things for no reason. A lot of it was lack of sleep.

When you get that, everything's a negative."

It was the birth of his daughter Olivia, now five, that sobered him up. "Wanting to have a family was more important to me, " he says.

"The day she was born surpasses anything.

Anything. There's nothing that can match it. It changes your life."

Once he had the songs in place, Gizzi went about putting the band together, visions of Prince in his Purple Rain era dancing in his head.

Zhu came first. He saw her playing in a Glasgow band called Ludovico and thought she could be his Sheila E. "I went along and saw her playing and thought, 'God, she's amazing.' Couldn't take my eyes off her.

She just acts so aloof when she's behind the drum kit. It's like nothing fazes her."

McNeice he knew through studio work. The band went through a mess of guitarists before he managed to persuade McGlynn to join.

"The moment I met him, I thought: if he can play as good as he looks . . . I mean, I thought he was pure Jimmy Page."

It sounds like he was casting roles. Did everyone have to measure up in looks? "I think that's important - to have a band that look really good, but who can also play. And by God, can Thomas and Johnny play. And Laura - what a range she's got. She can sing."

Of course, the fact the result is a cosmopolitan, photogenic line-up is, for some critics, suspicious. "It would be so easy to see us as a manufactured band, " admits Zhu, "because let's be honest, we're all pretty good-looking.

I mean: great clothes, good style, the music's all right with catchy hooks - must be a manufactured pop band. But I think we bring our own style in the music."

"People do think it's manufactured, " adds Gizzi, "but it's totally not. We love dressing up.

You want to see us backstage. It's all about putting on a show. I get bored with bands just gazing at their shoes. I grew up listening to Prince: what a look, what a presentation. I always wished I was in a band like his."

This has been a rollercoaster year for Dante Gizzi. He's seen his dream of a new band take off, he's due to become a dad again in January - and he lost both his parents within the space of a few weeks. His mother died of a heart attack; ten weeks later, his father died after a long battle with cancer. It was two days before Gizzi was due to shoot a video. In the end he went ahead: "I thought he would have wanted me to do it." Still, it's been hard, especially to lose his parents just as it looks like he's going to get a second chance.

So far, nobody seems to be holding his rock past against him. "I assumed that might be something that could happen, but no. And look at Fatboy Slim. He was in the Housemartins.

That gives me a sense of belief that you can move on." There you have it, from the horse's mouth. Forget about Franz Ferdinand and the Scissor Sisters. El Presidente: why, they're the new Norman Cook.

euro El Presidente's eponymous debut album is out on October 24 on One Records/Sony. They play the Garage, Glasgow, on October 7.