Out of Edinburgh

While waiting for the girls from Sighthill, I listen to a deconstructed dub version of The Girl from Ipanema in a studio in a disused Edinburgh bus depot. The voice that half speaks, half sings the lyrics is unmistakably Scottish, and slurred by drink and dope. It represents the moment seven years ago when the Lanterns were conceived by writer-producer Jim Sutherland and young jazz singer Sylvia Rae.

"We were on Emmerdale last night," declares Gina Rae brightly to sister Sylvia as they appear in the black-parachute-shrouded room. Gina is cropped and exuberant beside Sylvia's long-haired, deadpan beauty. What Sutherland calls his "kinky studio" is the Lanterns' exotic hideaway and music workshop. It is hung with furred and feathered padded-bra lampshades designed by the artistic community who have taken over the huge brick warrens of the New Street bus station. "Cool as fuck," says Sylvia, the words dropping deadpan from unimpressed lips. "We were on Corrie, mind, in the hairdresser's," continues Gina. "Well, that's cool," says Sylvia, and they laugh like drains.

The sibling singers' self-mocking reaction to the sound of their first single as a soap backdrop says a lot. But that single, High Rise Town, span giddily into constant rotation on every radio play-list at the start of the year - brightly dance-oriented, yet gloomy, with fed-up lyrics about living on drugs and dreams in the tower blocks that encircle postcard-pretty Edinburgh. The chorus line, "The lift's no' workin' and the stairs are getting me down", stuck out sharply amid the morass of breathy girl groups on the airwaves. Even the title of their forthcoming debut album, Luminate Yer Heid, tells you that their deeply accented pop is funny, bleak and obtusely romantic. Don't be fooled by the sisterly vocals: this is not your usual Tartan Celtic girl band. Compared to the Corrs they are Captain Beefheart.

The songs are written by Sutherland, a jazz, folk and film composer originally from Caithness. After completing his first film soundtrack, for John Berger's Play Me Something in 1992, he began looking for a voice for songs he hadn't written yet. During that year's Edinburgh Jazz Festival he walked into Leith's Shore Bar to hear resident singer Sylvia Rae. He had found the voice.

"I'm not sure what I was looking for, but I heard Sylvia and was knocked out," says Sutherland. "She had this big, grainy sound that I wanted and I invited her back to the studio. We had a bottle of tequila and recorded a track overnight. I started to write songs after that. The voice came first."

Sighthill, where The Rae sisters were raised, is part of Edinburgh's Trainspotting country: crumbling estates composed of concrete slums and "shooting galleries" - underpasses where, before Edinburgh became the Aids capital of Britain, heroin users constantly shared needles. The sisters' father, Ronnie, was a double-bass player and one of the founders of a vibrant Scottish jazz scene, and the sisters were weaned on Charles Mingus and John Coltrane in their cramped council flat.

"We had three rooms for our parents and six bairns, the usual," says Sylvia. "Our bedroom was four bunk beds, a drum kit and piano. We were pretty skint but it wassna that rough. I remember loads of concrete and dog shite, basically. But there was always music in the house. My dad would bring the band back for sessions after the gigs and I remember being woken gently by jazz music, quite often live. Sometimes we'd get up and sing for them. In the morning the place smelled of smoke and whisky and there were all these bodies sleeping it off. But they were lovely people. It was great."

Along with the Edinburgh jazz clan of the Bancroft family, the Raes became a musical dynasty when sons John and Ronnie junior successfully followed their father into jazz. But the sisters - Gina is now 30 and Sylvia 29 - took some time to find their musical voice. Both were mothers before they started singing seriously.

"On my 18th birthday I was out to here," says Sylvia, describing a circle in front of her stomach with her arms. "I had my son 10 days later. But I had a lot of time to myself with the bairn, and I started to practise singing, then Sophie Bancroft began teaching me. So I got into the jazz scene, pub gigs mainly." Meanwhile, Gina was drifting into folk, playing penny whistle with the experimental combo, The Stepping Stones. For a short while the sisters stayed together in Leith and went to music college. "It was really shite," says Sylvia. "It was like getting a grant to smoke hash and go to the beach. The guy who ran it was an arse. He told me to take up an instrument because I couldn't sing. But I started singing jazz after that."

The Lanterns evolved gradually after a number of false starts, distilled from an 11-piece punk-jazz outfit that followed the Ipanema session and collapsed after "a million rehearsals and three gigs". Sutherland only fully realised the band's sound when Gina joined, "a depressed single mother", after the birth of her daughter, Sophie. The trio's influences somehow gelled into pop songs that Sutherland wrote in early-morning frenzies and phoned down the line to the sisters.

None of them had a background in pop and none of them cared. Neither did Kenny MacDonald - manager of The Proclaimers - who has a habit of picking up artists who take the Scottish musical identity into new realms. With his help, The Lanterns did an acoustic showcase for Columbia/Sony A&R man, Dave Balf, in Sutherland's living room. The sisters sang on the settee, assisted by numerous bottles of wine. They were signed on the strength of their performance.

Hibernian, urban pop out of a trio of jazz and folk-steeped single parents? The media, especially the Scottish press, keep hammering on about those accents. It was Sutherland, the relaxed Highland foil to the spiky Rae sisters, who asked Sylvia to ditch her jazz-singer's American accent and work her vocals back to her own dialect.

"What seems strange is that people are asking why they're singing in their own accents. Nobody asks why every other British band is singing in American accents. We're not extolling the virtues of Scottish brogue, we're just not ashamed of it, that's all."

There has already been a lot of straw-grasping in trying to describe the Lanterns, mainly centring on the accents and the sisters. Comparisons range from Alisha's Attic, and, their personal favourite, The Corrs. "It's just ignorance," says Gina.

"People try to put us in a box because we're sisters and we're" - she bats her eyes sarcastically - "Celtic. As far as siblings in a band go, we're more like the Gallaghers. There's no sweetness and light here. We never had arguments, just punched each other, a different form of communication."

"But we got over kicking the shit out of each other early on," interrupts Sylvia. "It's still volatile, though. When we first went down to London they had us sharing a room and it was mental. We're never doing that again. I said, do you want us to kill each other? Do you want to break up the band? Then just keep on doing that."

The Lanterns' debut album, Luminate Yer Heid, is released on August 16th by Columbia.