In the crushingly mediocre 2006 romantic comedy, Just Friends, actress Anna Faris (a graduate of the Scary Movie School of Drama) plays a Britney Spears-inspired, up-and-coming pop princess with misguided pretensions of her own artistic importance. Longing to be taken seriously, she gets something of a rude awakening when invited to perform in front of rowdy head-bangers in small-town New Jersey.

Looking almost her spitting image, Ladyhawke (neé Phillipa Brown) is the living incarnation of Faris’s fictional endeavour to be taken seriously: a pop star who demonstrates her artistic merit through a perfectly stylised combination of heavy eye-shadow, baggy black T-shirt and skinny jeans. If this look doesn’t scream integrity, nothing does. 80s-revivalism appears to have finally found its Avril Lavigne.

As it happens, Cabaret Voltaire offers a far more receptive audience than met Faris in New Jersey. However, Brown herself is a nervous, reclusive on-stage presence and doesn’t raise her game to match the enthusiasm in front of her. By the set’s mid-point, any dancing is restricted to the very front row.

What saves this performance is a modest handful of quite excellent pop tunes that are given a much rockier edge live than the clinical, synthetic sound to be found on Ladyhawke's self-titled album. 'Magic' is the song that, with appropriate mysticism, reinvigorates the set; its catchy hook and the dichotomy between driving electro riffs and a melancholic vocal melody is close to realising the “happy sad” feeling of 80s pop that Brown celebrates. Although set against a little too much filler material, it is the perfect lead-in for latest single, 'Paris is Burning,' and from there Edinburgh is won over. As cries of encore follow her off into the night, we can only speculate that it is her visible shyness that prevents her returning.