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At age 18, Aimee Allen climbed behind the wheel of her Pontiac Grand Am and left her home in Montana for the last time. Leaving behind a broken home, an abusive stepfather, and a spell in foster care, she trained her sights on the bright lights of Los Angeles. Parking her car in sight of the Hollywood sign, like thousands of others before her she plotted her course to the summit of the music industry.

The Interrupters are the fruits not of her success, but of her failure. Formed in 2011, the Angelino quartet came together at the point at which Allens career as a solo artist had rendered her lonely and broke. Her dream was to become the new Joan Jett, to whom she presented a bouquet of flowers at a concert in New York City my whole body was shaking, and I was sobbing, she said of the experience but after a decade spent wilting on the vine, it turned out that there was more power, and greater happiness, in a union.

I kind of feel that I was alone my whole life until I found The Interrupters, she says. But when I did, I finally felt like I was home. I was an orphan before, and now Ive got a family. And weve got each other. If a show goes badly, its on all of us; but if its great, then we all get to share that.

The Interrupters play a fluent and seamless mixture of modern ska and American punk rock. Prior to taking to the stages of increasingly large venues this month the quartet performed for 4000-people over two nights in London the band watch Dance Craze, a concert film from 1980 featuring performances from The Specials, The Beat, and The Selecter. On record and in concert, this 2-Tone template has been recalibrated by the Americans and dispatched across the Atlantic as if brand-new.

The curious thing about this is that a proportion of the groups audience is old enough to have bought singles such as Too Much Too Young and Mirror In The Bathroom on their days of release. As well as this, alongside the Fred Perry shirts and Harrington jackets are a sizeable contingent of young teenagers for whom The Specials are unknown history in the way that Van Halen are for Billie Eilish. With only three albums to their name, the range of ages on display at concerts by The Interrupters is the widest I have ever seen for an emerging act.

I take it as the highest compliment that in England we have people coming up to us after our shows saying I saw the Specials, I saw The Clash, and I love your band, says Kevin Bivona, the groups guitarist. The fact that they could even put us in the same sentence as those people is hard to wrap my head around.

On a cold and sunny February lunchtime, Kevin Bivona sits with Aimee Allen these days known as Aimee Interrupter in the downstairs lounge of The Interrupters double-decker tour bus. Parked outside the BBCs Maida Vale Studios, the band find themselves in Northwest London to record a five-song session for 6music. When the sound engineer in a soundproof booth isolates Bivonas Fender Telecaster guitar on the superior breakup song Gave You Everything I dont know why youre gone, I walk these floors like a country song its throttled precision sounds like something that could saw a car in half.

The pair are friendly, thoughtful, and, it seems to me, tight. When the singer requires new eyelash-extensions, so as to save time it is her band mate that buys them for her. Theyre also uncommonly wholesome; answers are peppered with words such as like and awesome you can take the band out of California, and all that - but are entirely free of swearing. This U-certificate approach even extends to the concert stage.

We make unity music, says the singer. We want everyone to feel like theyre part of a big family.

Its been 20-years since Aimee Allen arrived in Hollywood equipped with little more than a capacity to carry a tune. A waitress by day, each night she would stand outside clubs such as the Whisky A Go Go, The Viper Room, and the Roxy Theatre, on the Sunset Strip, and ask perfect strangers if theyd like to form a band. She survived these encounters unmolested, but admits today that I got really lucky.

She joined forces with an act called No Motiv with whom she played a concert that was seen by Randy Jackson, one of the judges on American Idol. Jackson promised to secure the group a recording contract. After a fashion, he did; Allen signed as a solo artist with Elektra Records in 2002.

It was at this point that her problems began. Despite working with producer Mark Ronson, Aimee Allen did not appear to be a high-priority for her new label. When Elektra was subsumed in a merger with Atlantic Records, her debut album, the fabulously titled Id Start A Revolution (If I Could Get Up In The Morning), was viewed by her new paymasters as surplus stock. 17-years on, it remains unreleased.

I wouldnt wish being a solo artist on anybody, she says. You have people on your payroll, and you dont know if theyre saying that youre amazing because they feel like they have to, or because its genuine Its really lonely because its just you. Theres nowhere to hide. I was just part of the major label machine [and] I felt like I was floating.

In 2008, Aimee Allen recorded the Ron Paul Revolution Theme Song we dont want big government, or the Bilderberg Group that pays for it - in support of Texan libertarian Congressman Ron Pauls independent bid for president. In the same year, she made the first of several appearances on Alex Jones deeply controversial InfoWars radio programme.

Ten years later, the show was removed from all online mainstream media platforms for, among other things, claiming that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings were fake, and that the parents of the 20-children murdered by gunman Alan Lanza were actors hired by the US government.

At the mention of Alex Jones and InfoWars, the temperature on The Interrupters tour bus seems to drop by about 15-degrees. A 10-second silence ensues, punctuated only by a gravid sigh of deep displeasure.

I just want to be very careful about how I answer [this], she says. Okay, yes, I regret it [appearing on the show]. But at the time, he [Alex Jones] wasnt what he became. Would I go on his show now? Hell no, obviously [But] I couldnt see the future. And, honestly, [at the time] he was just an underground conspiracy theorist. It was entertainment; it wasnt that big of a deal. I had no idea he was going to become a controversial hate-speaker. Do you know what I mean? I one hundred-percent disavow what he stands for.

One of the worst things as a musician is when you are just trying to get your music heard and somebody co-opts you to their agenda, says Kevin Bivona. It happens quite often and its something youve got to be careful of.

At this point, my interview with The Interrupters appears to be holed below the waterline. The singer says that she wants to set the record straight [but] in a way that isnt going to create more trouble for me, a response, surely, to an online article from 2014 that accused Aimee Allen of being a stooge of the alt-right, and of supporting racist positions such as Ron Pauls opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In a thoughtful and respectful response to the piece, Bivona wrote in reply that he failed to see how you can use a young persons [sic] 2008 political songs and a few interviews she did six years ago and apply them to a creative project they are involved with [today], when you dont even know them personally.

Its perhaps worth mentioning that other performers have also appeared on InfoWars, including Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins (more than once, as it goes). Its also worth noting that The Interrupters and I do recover the ground lost during our awkward moment. But if the band display a certain skittishness about being interviewed it is almost unheard of for the singer to be questioned alone this is probably the reason why.

In the days that follow, I receive two calls from the bands organisation, one of which asks if it might be possible for Aimee to expand on her position via email.

It was a traumatic time and I deeply regret going on that show, she writes. It became a vehicle for the type of hateful rhetoric that I stand vehemently against. I would never knowingly be associated with anyone expressing racist, homophobic or any other bigoted ideals. I spend all my energy spreading love and making unity music.

The singers 11-year career as a solo artist wasnt entirely shrouded in failure. Her debut album, A Little Happiness, released in 2009, clawed its way to the lower reaches of the US Billboard Heatseekers Chart. She also collaborated with Linda Perry on the song Save Me (Wake Up Call), recorded by the punk group Unwritten Law, and scored a top-10 hit on the alternative chart. But after a decade of struggle, these relatively modest returns were not what she envisaged when she left her Northwestern broken-home.

[When I left Montana] I was just so nave and so hopeful, she says. Where I had come from was bad; anything was better than where I was from. I had a tough upbringing [and] I never felt like I fitted in. I never felt like there was a home for me. Everything just felt so alien and I felt so unconnected to things. But when I listened to [punk rock] I realised that there were people out there who were like me. I just had to find them.

This happened when Aimee Allen met Kevin Bivona while on tour supporting Sugar Ray in 2009. A studio engineer, occasional roadie, and sideman for such acts as The Transplants and Travis Barker, the pair began writing songs together for the singers solo career. But the Montanan was tired of being out in the cold, and from this the idea of a band was born. The groups rhythm section arrived in the form of the guitarists younger twin-brothers, Jesse and Justin Bivona, on drums and bass respectively.

From the start, The Interrupters were an independent concern in the classic mode of Southern Californian punk rock. The band signed to Hellcat Records, founded by Tim Armstrong, the vocalist and guitarist with Rancid, who also serves as their producer. In turn, this imprint operates under the umbrella of Epitaph Records, the most successful and influential punk label of the past 35-years, owned by Brett Gurewitz, the guitarist with Bad Religion.

For anyone who believes that punk rock has endured beyond its initial 1970s heyday and clearly it has then, here, The Interrupters are rubbing shoulders with royalty. Both men are among the finest songwriters in the movements history I had a paperback crime running straight down my spine, wrote Gurewitz in The Devil In Stitches but, just as importantly, both are happy to let their artists run riot.

In 1994, with the genre finally part of the mainstream, Mr. Brett sided with the Epitaph band NOFX in their decision not to permit MTV access to any of their videos, at the likely cost of hundreds of thousands of album sales.

The access we have to punk legends is just crazy, says Kevin Bivona.

Along with Tim Armstrong and Brett Gurewitz, The Interrupters have also met with the approval of Green Day, who they will support on the Oakland trios forthcoming North American stadium tour.

But as with most punk rock groups of their kind, the success of The Interrupters has blossomed without anyone really noticing. Despite the groups last album being the finest ska-themed outing of its kind for more than 20-years, outside of the pages of the rock press this is the first time the band have been interviewed by a mainstream publication.

Being completely honest, where we are at right now is far beyond what I could ever have imagined when I picked up a guitar when I was a kid, Kevin Bivona has told me. I am so happy and grateful for all the success that weve had. I definitely dont want to put a ceiling on how big I want the band to get. I just want to be able to keep making the music and writing the songs, and doing exactly what we do. I want us to be as big as the universe will allow us to get.

Fight the Good Fight by The Interrupters is available now on Hellcat Records

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Pardon the Interrupters: meet the ska-punks with an InfoWars problem - Telegraph.co.uk