Charlie Simpson is breaking free of his pop shackles with the back to basics rock of Fightstar. And he's ready to take 2005 by the neck.

It's fair to say that Charlie Simpson isn't a huge fan of photo sessions. He still shudders at the memory of one shoot, for a Christmas issue of a pre-teen magazine It's Hot in which he was forced to participate in a festive 'three kings' picture. Standing there holding frankincense with a crown pushed uncomfortably onto his head. Charlie was pushed so close to breaking point that he wanted to quit Busted all together. He hates dressing up, then - but most of all, he hates smiling on demand, because he considers this to be fake. So it's strange when he spots Attitude at this particular shoot, on a chilly December afternoon in Peckham, he;s grinning from ear to ear. He bounds over to announce, unprompted, how much he's enjoying the shoot.

Something is clearly quite different. especially as Charlie is joined this afternoon not by two bandmates but three, including - sound the controversy siren - a drummer. Say hello to Fightstar,, the, and wave good-bye to Busted; and don't feel bad about it because, as Attitude will learn four day after the shoot, that's just what Charlie himself will be doing in 2005.

Although only 19 years old, Charlie is one of pops greatest eccentrics. Haribo sweets are demanded on the band rider at every venue, anything unexpected or out of the ordinary is "a shocker", and he habitually smells paper items, like new CD sleeves. He's also endearingly clumsy, perpetually dropping food down his clothes, knocking things over, breaking things or losing them. This demeanor can be quite alarming when combined with either booze or Charlie's phenomenal height or, as tends to happen quite often, both at once. (Although to be fair on one drunken night out last year during which we somehow managed to persuade Charlie to dance with us to Madonna, it was Attitude who ended up going arse over tit on the dancefloor.)

But the most remarkable thing about Charlie is his implausibly intense passion for music: he lives it, and devours it, and becomes visibly distressed when his iPod battery runs flats. This afternoon he says that the worst thing he could imagine, short of dying, would be to go deaf, though he does concede that "Beethoven got away with it. So big up respect to Beethoven". It's this passion that has led to Fightstar occupying at least the first third of Charlie's 2005, but in spite of Charlie's enthusiasm he knows there are risks involved. The side project has already prompted some cynical murmuring comparing Charlie with former popstars like Paul Cattermole. Paul left S Club 7 in 2001 to work on his nu-mental project Skua. Three years later with Skua consigned to the bin and Cattermole's profile at an all time low, his most recent public appearance was last November, heading a funk rock band at the bottom of the bill at rock night at London's not-exactly-wembley-sized indie venue The Garage. The odds against a musician making it big in one pop group are steep enough, but for that same musician to make it in two groups, the chance are incredibly slim. In potentially turning his back on Britain's biggest pop group, could Charlie be throwing everything away?

"Busted's a thing with two really great guys," he begins, by way of context "We write in the pop-punk vein. But that's not where I sit musically. There are times when I've lost sense of what I am and it's been really confusing. Before Busted I was in bands with my mates back home, then the next thing I knew I was coming to live in London and dressing up like a king. It's not that I haven't enjoyed being in Busted, but Busted is a piss-around and the aim of being in bands, ultimately, is to be in your favorite band. That's the idea with Fightstar. Not too sell records."

But record sales aside, some other problems are already looming. Though the lads are being interviewed by Kerrang magazine later today, another rock mag has refused to feature Fightstar because of Charlie's background. It's strange, not least because the magazine in question had already been enthusiastic about the music before they knew of Charlie's involvement, and as Charlie points out it makes you wonder how much some members of the "all about the music" brigade really are all about the music.

"I've grown up knowing that you should be into values of the music itself, rather than allowing yourself to be sidetracked by the scene something's in, or even sometimes who's actually making the music. The music should just be there as its own entity. Unfortunately a lot of other people concentrate on what's cool to like, what's in the scene. But that's not me. Everyone should form their own opinions - if someone tells me that Busted are shit, I'm just like (shrugs), 'Fine mate. I don't expect you to like it."

Most people would at least try to defend their band.

"It would be a waste of breath. But what I will say in defense of Busted, to anyone who criticizes the band, is that at the end of the day, although it's not my ideal band, Busted has put guitar's into kids hands. Job done. It's a stepping stone. They might get a Blink record, then they might get a NOFX record, or a Clash record. And that's brilliant. Rather than buying manufactured rubbish."

He's seems worn down by what he describes as "the constant battle to justify myself", but how he can talk excitedly about the guys who come up to him after gigs, who say that they used to hate him but have changed their minds. He got an email email yesterday from someone who wrote "I'm a massive fan of Toll and I think Busted are fucking shit, but I've just heard one of your MP3's and it's wicked." This one person's seal of approval, you can't help but feel, is worth as much to Charlie as the support of 11,000 screaming girls in flashing Bunny ears. Perhaps that's why the Charlie we see today is as excited as the Charlie we first met two and a half years ago for Busted's first ever interview. It's refreshing to see him so invigorated, when so often in the last year he's seemed bored, frustrated, distracted and unmotivated. And while Fightstar is hardly a grand folly in the vein of Paul Cattermole or Brian McFadden's ced-chasing attempts to rock, Charlie does still hope that Fightstar's music will perhaps undo some of the cheesier moments of Busted's career. Certainly the standard motivations for getting into a band can be crossed off Charlie's agenda - he can't be doing for the money, because after millions of records, concert tickets and spurious items of fan fleecing pop merchandise sold as one third of Busted he's already loaded. He can't be doing it for the girls, because he already looks like a male model and, anyway, is happy with Camilla, his girlfriend of four years. More importantly, he can't be doing it for the fame, because he's already had that and it freaks him out.

"I don't like talking about what pants I wear, or what's in my fridge" he shrugs, "and I wonder why on earth people would be interested in that." The answer of course, is that while Busted have undoubtedly been responsible for re-educating and raising the expectations of a generation of pop fan weaned on Westlife and Blue, a huge number of Busted fans simply don't care about the bands music. And some of those fans, Charlie admits, have already been showing up at Fightstar gigs.

"I do sometimes look out at the audience and I see the teenage girls at the front, and I do think, 'Do you really like this band?'. In fact I have a total paranoia about it. I know that I shouldn't even think about it, but I'm doing this because of the music and I want fans to be into it because of the music too. This isn't about me trying to please people."

Are you bored of trying to please people?

"Sometimes. Sometimes with Busted it will just occur to me that what I'm doing has nothing to do with music. In no sense at all. Stuff that you'd expect to see some idiot from Big Brother doing. And I never wanted to be a celebrity like that - I just wanted to be in a band. With Fightstar I'll never be asked what my favorite color is."

But what is your favorite colour?

Charlie "Midnight Blue."

The next day we meet Fightstar again at bassist Dan Haigh's flat in Kilburn, north London, where one bedroom has been converted into Fightstar's nerve center. On a computer Charlie is slowly prodding out Thank You's to go on the sleeve of the band's first EP, with the two fingered prowess of someone who's never seen a computer keyboard before, while on another PC Dan makes some last-minute changes to the sleeve artwork. In the corner, Dan's flatmate is rendering some special effects for the groups first video - one on which a major record label might have happily spent £60,000. Fightstar on the other hand have managed to get it done for £7,000.

Indeed, while Busted exploded out of the blocks because a major record label threw hundreds of thousands of pounds at the project, Fightstar are happier working to a rather more tight budget - most of which comes from £10,000 of his own money that Charlie has invested. With this cash he's hired a new, independent rock PR agency to look after the band, and he's paying a radio plugger, and he's paying for live ads in the rock press. The EP's out at the end of February, he admits, and there's "not much left" of his ten grand.

And if it seems that Fightstar have sprung from nowhere, the bands formation ha actually been reassuringly unextraordinary. And while they'll inevitable be known as "Charlie's band" - and might have been considered as such even without the Busted factor, because as well as co-writing the songs Charlie is also one of the bands two frontmen - in reality the band's other singer/guitarist, Alex Westaway, is responsible for bringing them together, the missing link between Charlie, Dan and drummer Omar Abidi.

The group first hooked up in October 2003, and by December they were already playing their first gig. "we set ourselves a goal to move quickly" Omar recalls, "because we'd all been in bands before and we knew that if you don't have goals you just go around in circles, annihilating the music rather than making it better." On 10 January they played their first date together in London. Second on the bill at a rock night hosted by Camden's Underworld, the show was unpublicized and, miraculously somehow escaped the attention of Busted's sometimes freakishly clingy fanbase. Attitude watched the London gig with Charlie's Busted bandmate Matt Willis, also losing his Fightstar virginity that night and by the end of the first song beaming like a chuffed dad at a school nativity. The show was rough-and-ready, with Charlie apologising at one point for the tuning being "fucking shit", but tunes like Amethyst, which has made it onto Fightstar's EP, were undeniably solid rock songs, although unlikely to provoke many stage invasions down at G.A.Y. Nor will their first commercial release be troubling the Top 10 - being an EP, it's deliberately chart ineligible. (The EP is supposed to contain 5 tracks, as per and agreement with Busted's label Universal, who've allowed Charlie fro their grasp for a specified number of tracks - but as the band explain they're also adding a hidden sixth track to the CD, planning to face the consequences as and when they arise.)

The Ep's release certainly won't come a moment too soon for Alex, Dan and Omar who've been surviving for the last year, as they explain, "by the skin of our teeth". Alex has been working on building sites, Omar's been delivering flowers (and actually rather enjoying it), and Dan's been putting together short films. The idea has been to remain independent and self-sufficient.

"This is something we desperately needed to do" Charlie explains. "I wanted us to keep control of this band. Now people answer to me about what we should and shouldn't do, rather than having a record label telling us 'we shouldn't do this', or 'we should do that."

The more he talks about Fightstar, the less likely it seems that he will want to return to Busted after the spring. After all, by that point, Fightstar could be flying. It seems that, during the summer, Charlie will not want to go back to the studio to make a third Busted album universal island will undoubtedly require for the autumn; he'll want to be in the studio with Fightstar. But there will not be the time for both. And so Charlie will have to make a very important decision.

"To be honest, I don't know what I'm going to do. If it came down to the choice of one or the other? I don't know how I could make that decision. As far as I'm concerned I'm going away at Christmas and I'm coming back with my new band. That's what I what to concentrate on. I'm not thinking beyond those few months."

The following night we see Charlie again, onstage at Wembley arena for the final date of Busted's second arena tour of 2004. We've been warned in advance, by several people who've seen the tour around the country not to expect much; that the band are at a stage where they are going through the motions. Charlie's presence on stage has been a particular point of debate. "Most of the time," one fan warned us, "he's just stood their rolling his eyes." And yet even when Busted aren't quite firing on all cylinders, this Saturday night show is a timely reminded that in spite of everything Charlie's tired of - the photo shoots, the strange fans, the ins and outs of the pop machine - Busted are a great pop group.

Or, Perhaps, were. Two days later, The sun's showbiz hack Vistoria Newton runs a story headlined "I wanna Bust out", in which Charlie's "divided loyalties" are claimed to have come to a head prior to Saturday night's Wembley gig, with Charlie wanting to announce his departure live on stage.

Newton's piece claims that Matt and James talked him out of it, but that a decision on Busted's future is due in the new year.

We phone Charlie, who's in a dentist's waiting room. "I've been brushing my teeth," he assures us, "so it'll be fine." (what a relief!) We explain that it'll be over month before this issue of Attitude hits the streets, so we ask if at that point he'll still be a member of Busted. This prompts a response of "who knows?". On the record he will only say that if and when Busted release a third studio album he's unlikely to be on it, but that nothing has been agreed with Matt or James, or will be decided until the new year. He talks about "a new door opening", but won't go on record saying that the other door has closed.

Finally, he checks that we'll be coming along to see what he describes as Fightstar's "toilet tour" - of clubs and universities - in the spring. The venues won't be even one tenth of the size of the arenas that Busted have just finished playing. "It's a strange way of going bout things," he admits, "but I'm loving every minute of it, It's as if I've done everything backwards"