"I recently wrote a song about New Church Road," says Helen McCookerybook.

"The only time I ever took LSD was walking along that road. I walked from Brighton to Portslade while a friend walked from Portslade to Brighton, and we had utterly opposite experiences. My song's called Heaven Avenue."

These days she's better known as Dr Helen Rimmington and visits Brighton largely "at moments of extreme stress - I sit on the beach all day with a cup of coffee".

But for a time in the late Seventies and early Eighties this safety-pinned academic was at the centre of the Brighton punk movement, a sub-scene she describes as having "a very particular flavour, a real range of ages and genders and a more lighthearted feel".

And now she's set to rekindle old ties as, to celebrate the release of a careerspanning compilation, she reforms the band John Peel once blessed with the adjective "perky".

Now revered as the woman behind cult bands The Chefs and Helen And The Horns, McCookerybook arrived in Brighton just as punk was taking off and made her musical debut (with Joby And The Hooligans, once described as "the worst band in Brighton") entirely by accident.

"I was living in a squat in Lansdowne Place," she recalls, "and there was a band who would rehearse in our basement from morning 'til night.

"We ended up organising them a gig just to get them out of the house but they chickened out, so we had to form a band to play it for them. That was the thing about punk - you didn't have to be a good musician."

McCookerybook had caught the bug, however, and, after two years with The Chefs, in 1981 she formed Helen And The Horns, transforming herself from "charity shop androgyny" to "a kind of psychedelic Doris Day".

With a sound influenced by the American west, the band were championed by both Peel and Terry Wogan, signed to RCA and chased by Pete Waterman, who "had lots of odd strategies for making us a success, like sending me to have singing lessons with Westminster Choir". Yet their genesis was just as haphazard as that of her first band.

"I was absolutely skint and couldn't afford to get the drum kit around town," she explains, "so we just started rehearsing with a sax, trombone and trumpet. Not having a drum kit to soundcheck meant we ended up on everyone's bill - even Gary Glitter. There was no other band like us - and still isn't."

Having dissolved the group in the mid-Eighties, McCookerybook returned to the old material when a poetry publisher tracked her down and offered to fund the album. But she never lost interest in Brighton punk - she has spent the last six years tracking down old scenesters for her PHD on the role of female musicians in the era.

"Seeing women getting hands-on in bands was one of the really exciting things about that time," she says.

"After that I think Thatcher put people off powerful women - instead you had a lot of intense young men slaving away at keyboards.

"But some people are still going," she says. "One of the greatest Brighton punks was a woman called Vi Subversa who played guitar in Poison Girl. She was about 40 at the time and a real inspiration. Now she's living in Spain and playing the blues."

Starts at 8pm, tickets £7.50, call 01273 647100.

Helen And The Horns ETC is out now on Near Shore Records.