The Subways live up to their debut's promise of Young For Eternity as they head to The Pyramids Centre, Southsea

But they’ve not been idle – frontman Billy Lunn went to Cambridge University and got himself an English degree.

Bassist Charlotte Cooper has become a mum, and drummer Josh – Billy’s brother has moved to France and started a family too.

And they’ve also been working on new music, with Billy hoping for a new album later this year.

However, before that, there’s the tour to mark the 15th anniversary of their gold-selling debut Young For Eternity, which bristled with the energy of youth – most songs come in at under three minutes. It yielded hit singles like Oh Yeah, At 1am, With You and Rock & Roll Queen. The latter track became their calling card, featuring in numerous TV shows, films and advertising campaigns.

The band will be playing the album in full.

‘It’s really strange, some of the songs, like She Sun, we’ve never played live. Even when we were touring that first record, and you'd have to eke out the songs because you've only got one album, you've got an hour and 10 minute set to fill.

‘We never really found places for that, or Lines of Light. There were some acoustic numbers like No Goodbyes, which made it in and, we acoustified the first half of With You. But it's going be so interesting because even now Charlotte’s asking: “For She Sun, do I play the bass like I normally would on stage, or do I bring the keyboard along?”’

‘It's like starting all over again.’

The single At 1am was a ‘hidden’ track, in that most ’90s/00s of ways – coming on only after several minutes of silence at the end of the last listed song.

So will they keep the several minutes of dead air for the absolutely authentic album experience?

Billy gives a big laugh: ‘I never even considered that, that would be so funny! But I am legitimately considering it now.

‘We’ll just stand there looking at the audience, going: “You’ll have to wait…”

‘I think on the reissue, I’ve said to our manager to to skip that gap.

‘It is annoying, but at the time we thought it was so cool.’

The tour is also accompanied by deluxe releases of their debut and second album All Or Nothing, featuring all manner of rarities, demos and live tracks. It was a task Billy revelled in.

‘I’m an inveterate archivist. When I got into books, I got so ridiculously into books I would look for insane editions of really obscure texts, and I think that’s why Cambridge was a good fit for me.

‘So when it comes to music I store everything we have. So when our manager said, Okay, what do we have in terms of B-sides and rare material?

‘I was like: “How much time have you got, I’ve got everything”.

‘During last summer, I came into the studio for a good month, and I just went through all of our hard drives, I pulled them up in Pro Tools, and sometimes I'd have to look at the backup sessions because the Pro Tools files were so old and the software was so out of date. I'll be honest, I'm a total nerd for this.

‘I loved every second of it, going: “Oh, that's interesting”, “Oh, I’d forgotten about that.” But there was tons of it because we would be writing all the way through tours.

‘Archiving was a really fun process,

‘You get to a point where you think, God, we were so naive and everything was so simple. But I listen back to Young For Eternity and we were so precocious, we were coming up with some really interesting ideas in some of the songs, and in some of the stuff that never made it on the album or never got reused in later records.

‘Some of the B-sides and rarities, I found there were some really fascinating ideas in there.’

It sounds a bit like you were almost having a conversation with your late-teenage self?

‘Absolutely,’ he agrees. ‘Actually, when you rock up to the conversation and you just think, God, this is going to be a really conceited young, naive little person isn't it? And actually you find your younger self quite compelling.

‘I haven’t really been able to listen to Young For Eternity for such long time because I had that sense of myself – we made that when we were 18/19.

‘I’ve been sitting there and living with my younger self and thinking: “You did alright, kid”.’ he laughs.

‘It’s been quite a nice therapy of coming to terms with my youth.’

A pivotal moment for The Subways was winning an unsigned band competition to play at Glastonbury 2004. They only sent the demo off after a friend in another band mentioned they were going for it.

‘I think we’ve gone through our career just stumbling into things, that's genuinely how I feel.

‘We've sort of gone through our lives, we've just been really avid and passionate and we care and now and then a door will open and we'll stumble through it and go: “Well, cool. Okay, let's try this…”

In their early days the trio would even rehearse at the boys’ parents’ house.

‘It was in my parents’ council house too - we had the best neighbours - I don’t know how we got away with it. Josh would be smashing away at his kit, and they’d just be: “It’s fine, we’ll turn Jeremy Kyle up”.’ He giggles.

‘We went from, at that point, we were selling out London venues of 100/150. And then we jumped from that to playing 10,000 people on the Other Stage on Saturday at Glastonbury Festival.

‘After that, we thought, that's it – we’ve got to quit our jobs. I can’t go back to work now. It's in me, I have to do this.

‘So we quit our jobs, and we got hold of an agent and we booked our first tour.

'Our dad drove us around the country, our mum sold merch. We couldn't afford hotels, so one night we would sleep in the van, the next night we would pile out of us into one hotel room.

‘It was the best. And by the end of the tour, we were signed to Warners, and Young For Eternity was released a couple months after that.

‘Ever since then, up until I started my degree, it's just been, you know,’ he makes a whooshing sound, ‘all over the world. Just every day has been absolutely incredible.

‘Now that we’ve had these three years and Charlotte has had her baby – just the most beautiful kid – and Josh has been in France for three years.

‘Now we’ve come back together and we’re absolutely itching to get back on stage.’

It was while touring their fourth, self-titled album that Billy studied for his A-levels.

‘Everyone else would be drinking and having larks backstage, but I was reading and distance learning.’

He did well, so decided from there to take his studies further. He applied to several universities, and was accepted by them all – with his wife’s encouragement he plumped for Cambridge.

‘So the last three years I've been over at Cambridge reading English, but I've also been writing the band’s fifth album,

’It’s been nice to take a step back out of the whirlwind of rock and roll and just live kind of like I did when I was writing our first record: waking up, having breakfast at a reasonable time, and doing reading, then spending time with my wife and my dogs and all that stuff.

‘And honestly, it's been the most creative time of my entire life as well.

‘I managed to write a good wealth of material and now we're just sitting down and consolidating it. There are all these notepads and Dropbox folders with tons of ideas in them.

‘Seeing what we like, what we don't like, what we can sort of piece together and it's been incredible.

‘We’ve got a nice system of recording now because Josh is in France and Charlotte lives up north in Sheffield. So we send each other ideas and then I compile them in the studio.

‘I'm so used to this coming in and bringing things together and then jostling them about, and it's a really fun way of working.

‘We should have it finished by the end of summer.

‘I'm going through this weird process at the moment of rehearsing the first album material - the first stuff we ever wrote and ever recorded, while also going through the process now of writing completely new material that’s so different but at the same time, still has that fundamental aspect to it that makes it our music.’

But with the Pyramids date coming up, Billy promises it will be a special night – not only is it Charlotte’s birthday, but he hopes they will be joined by a special guest, which makes him ‘very excited.’

More than that though, he will not say…

THE SUBWAYSPyramids Centre, SouthseaSaturday, March 21pyramids-live.co.uk