After much practising and touring of schools and underage discos, they finally released C'est La Vie this month and they became the first Irish band ever to go to Number One in the British charts with a debut single.

They're also the first girl band ever to have a blood (rather than on-and-off snog) relationship with a limb of Boyzone (Shane Lynch is brother to twins Keavy and Edele). With their pure, unsullied pop, they are the true successors to the Spice Girls, All Saints notwithstanding.

However, while they clearly know pop backwards and have made full use of Hedges's production handiwork, theirs is fluff with a difference. It has a fresh-faced, peaty wholesomeness that even Baby Spice couldn't pull off. C'est La Vie may be a standard issue boy-girl song, but its lyrics are loaded with the naive innuendo of the nursery (I'll show you mine if you show me yours) and the intermittent "Oohs" and "Aaahs" lack even the rudimentary raunchiness of a "Zigazigaaaa".

But then, the tide has been turning against the worldly for some time in girl band land. The Spice Girls milked white trash to death - they flashed their pants, they frolicked raucously with our future monarch, they numbered one ex-porn star among them and, in fact, all looked like the kind of female specimens an alien who'd been given only Mayfair and a Bunty annual to go on might come up with. The All Saints couldn't have followed them down that path, and didn't.

They forsook the showing of underwear for matching combats which revealed only a quartet of perfect tummies. However, the Saints aren't trying to play down their sexuality, they're just giving it a more credible, street-smart tilt. B*Witched are different - they don't really do girl at all, they do tomboy. Keavey, who was a tyre-fitter before the band took off, says straightforwardly: "We don't see ourselves as sex objects because we're not. We'd just look like four idjuts."

In short, they are a 12-year-old's version of what girlhood is about. It's finally happened - the real singles-buying public, pre-teen girls, has found an outfit it can identify with and aspire to at the same time. There can't have been a closer marriage of audience and artist since students discovered Teletubbies.

Musically, the future for B*Witched is unclear. They describe their album as a bit of everything - pop, hip-hop, R'n'B, indie, balladeering, the works - and, while they all have a writing credit on the album (alongside the producer), they don't seem committed to making (or even liking) anything but the most mainstream music. They all play instruments, but don't have the confidence to perform live with them. Their scheduled date with Hanson at Wembley was cancelled because even those notoriously fluffy American teens wanted a band who at least made a nod towards the old-fashioned business of playing music. The appeal of B*Witched resides wholly in their image.

It's like the Fifties all over again, when late-teens stopped trying to ape their mothers and established their own style entity. Early-teens clearly think it's time to stage a breakaway from their senior siblings. Since, as the charts consistently prove, they have the pocket-money power to do so, this could be the beginning of a whole new yoof culture.