"The first day we put on our white suits we were round at Luke's house," says Ross Sutherland.

"We came out of his bedroom one by one, looked in the mirror and said, 'What are we doing to our integrity here?' "

Like his three Aisle 16 brethren, Sutherland is serious about his poetry.

He has toured with everyone from John Cooper Clarke to Linton Kwesi Johnson, hosts a spoken word club in Liverpool and is just putting the final touches to a research MA in which he feeds poems into automated translation programmes and relates the outcomes to the theories of Chomsky and Derrida.

He has, it's probably safe to wager, a few more brain cells than Bryan McFadden.

But tonight Sutherland and his fellow poets Luke Wright, Joel Stickley and Chris Hicks will don matching white linen suits (Hennes circa 2003), smother their hair with product and perform their works within the artistically bankrupt frame of a boyband concert, complete with ballad stools and dance routines. Why?

"We'd been doing poetry gigs as ourselves for a while and then one review described us as a poetry boyband," Sutherland explains. "We were four young men performing poetry and the tag just stuck. We cussed about it for a while but then we decided we'd better reclaim this thing."

So the three 20-something men started to collaborate on each others' poems and perform them together on stage.

They had fun devising their own boyband personas (Ross 16, Sutherland informs me, is a "cool, sultry profundoid" who came to fame when his poem Gallons Of Fixate Negative Blood was bought and adapted for a Birds Eye potato waffle advert) and even called in a choreographer to help them develop some moves.

"It was one of the most surreal experiences I've ever had," Sutherland laughs. "To say we're not athletic is an understatement. Luke was actually eating a Snickers while warming up. But then, rising from the stool in the final moment is about as athletic as most boybands get."

Now holding Kevin Spacey among their many fans, Aisle 16 began in 2000 when the four East Anglia undergrads set up a monthly poetry night above a communist theme pub.

"There was nowhere else we could perform," explains Sutherland. "We would go down to band nights and get bottles thrown at us, go to comedy nights and not be funny enough, go to poetry nights and everyone would think we were just clowns."

Later giving rise to this touring show, the club was named Aisle 16 after Sutherland's habit, back in his days as a Sainsbury's shelf stacker, of directing anyone who enquired after a product to aisle 16.

"It became a byword for miscellaneousness," he says, "somewhere you put stuff that no one else wanted."

Fully embracing the boyband conceit, the lads can now regularly be heard backstage asking each other, "Is my hair boyband enough?" But while they send themselves up on stage with spoof, slide-assisted lectures, Aisle 16 remain driven by a genuine love of verse and write in a hard-edged, contemporary style which makes poetry out of urban decay and the spoutings of spin-doctors.

If you can't make tonight, I Wish I Was A Gun, a new EP of poems from the show, is now available and includes the tracks Embrace The W**k, Essex 94, Britain's First Paedophile Prime Minister and Silent Pylons.

Starts at 8pm. Tickets cost £7.50 and £5, call 01273 709709.