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Last year’s Song You Couldn’t Get Away From was Hey There Delilah by Plain White T’s. Even if you don’t think you know it, you know it. The lyrics start: “Hey there Delilah, what’s it like in New York City? I’m a thousand miles away, but girl, tonight you look so pretty.” Even if it was only the 14th bestselling single of the year, it’s still the one that nags in your brain after you catch it drifting from a car radio. Perhaps it’s because it’s the kind of tune they used to write – unrequited love from a boy to a girl across distance and time, and drenched in emotion.

Which is appropriate, given that it’s by Plain White T’s. The T’s are a melodic product of the tormented, introverted American version of indie known as “emo” – because the songs are so emotional. Last year, emo stopped sloping around outside, feeling misunderstood, and suddenly joined the rest of the kids at the party. Anthemic scene heroes Fall Out Boy sold more than 3m copies of their Infinity on High album. Hey There Delilah itself charted Top 10 globally (No 2 in the UK) and has been nominated for a Grammy. Old hands My Chemical Romance’s 106-date world tour saw them on the road almost constantly from February. They even introduced an emo character in Hollyoaks last October – Barry “Newt” Newton.

You can tell Barry is an emo kid because he is sulky and sensitive, and nobody understands him. His clothes blend goth lite with fey early1990s guitar pop, topped off with a pitch-black fringe. He is fiercely bright – most emo fans are either students or on their way to college – and painfully self-aware.

Indeed, emo is a musical form given to such acute introversion that its leading proponents write songs discussing the current state of the scene, and there is already a renegade subgenre, screamo. Inevitably, most emo acts hate being called emo.

“I don’t know if you’d call us emo,” confirms Plain White T’s singer, and the writer of Delilah, Tom Higgenson. “I think it may have helped us to begin with. A lot of kids came to us on MySpace and Pure Volume because of our emo reputation, but we just write good love songs. I’m as influenced by the Beatles as anyone else – they’re one of the greatest bands of all time because they wrote great songs. The curse of bands like Fall Out Boy is that their music doesn’t appeal to people over the age of 25. People won’t fall in love to their songs.”

Higgenson may be justified in his claim to transcend the scene. The band have been together for 10 years, forming in high school in 1997, which makes them technically older than their particular brand of music – posthardcore, third-wave emo, if you want to be precise. Although emo’s roots go as far back as the 1980s, the current crop of intense youngsters – including Panic! At the Disco and Funeral for a Friend – spring from the loins of late1990s acts such as Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional. Most have been going for five years or so, making the newcomer Higgenson actually something of a greybeard.

He formed the band in his home town, Chicago, and they learnt their craft at venues such as Metro, where they watched every band that came through. “The Chicago scene is different to LA and New York, because you have to work so hard to get noticed,” Higgenson explains. “Most LA bands have dads who work in A&R for a record label. Our parents worked hard and they passed on that attitude to us.”

The attitude helped PWT to stick it out after being dropped by two record labels while watching emo homies Fall Out Boy and the Academy Is begin charting and touring. Although Hey There Delilah was first released two years ago, its 2007 incarnation finally allowed them to break through, and they’ve just come off the über-emo Young Wild Things tour, with FOB, Cute Is What We Aim For and Gym Class Heroes.

Now they’re starting a string of UK dates that were virtually sold out by online word of mouth. Indeed, the power of the MySpace/emo fusion is so great that PWT’s first UK gig, in 2005, saw a baffled band playing Delilah to an audience who knew all the words, despite the T’s having no UK record deal.

“My songs are about my life,” Higgenson says. “I’m a romantic, so all I can sing about is the girls I want, the girls I can’t have and the girls I can’t stand. Delilah was about a girl I met who was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen – called Delilah – and I just said, ‘I wrote a song for you.’ So then I had to actually do it.”

Awkwardly, the girl in question, Delilah DiCrescenzo, already had a boyfriend. Tracked down by USA Today last year, she complained: “When I’m at the gym, it’s playing; when I’m at the pool, it’s playing. Part of me wants to scream at the top of my lungs that it’s about me. Another part of me wants to cower and say it’s not.”

In an almost perfect narrative arc, the band’s follow-up – Hate (I Really Don’t Like You) – is Higgenson’s rant of rage at a girl who rejected him. “I thought she was into me, but she slagged me off to the rest of the band when I went out of the room.” He seems down, but then lifts: “That’s what songs should be about. Heartbreak and nostalgia. Music these days is all, ‘You’re hot, I’m at the club, let’s get together, baby’, but I think the British have always loved good melodic songs about heartbreak.”

In fact, he believes that the band and the genre may be bigger in the UK than America now, with most emo acts choosing to begin their world tours over here. As if to underline this point, last year saw Britain’s first emo act, You Me at Six, release their debut single, Save It for the Bedroom. The band come from Weybridge, in Surrey, where they head up a curiously flourishing emo scene featuring unsigned acts such as Consort with Romeo and We Have a Muse, and they were nominated for the best-newcomer gong at the Kerrang! awards.

“You Me at Six might breathe an underground life back into emo,” says Kerrang!’s features editor, Nicola Brown. “If not, I’m worried that the mainstream attention might kill the scene completely. It’s got a lot in common with grunge, in that the bands and the fans are sharply critical of selling out. I mean, if you’ve got emo characters in soap operas, it’s not a good sign. That’s not the sort of thing that the people who like emo want to identify with.’”

It is something the bands themselves – as you’d expect – have already spotted. In the lyrics to their 2007 No 2 hit, Fall Out Boy sang: “This ain’t a scene, it’s a god-damn arms race. Bandwagon’s full. Please, catch another.” So soon, emo kids?

PWT’s current album, Every Second Counts, is on Hollywood Records; for tour details, visit www.weareplainwhitets.com

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