London is going K-Pop crazy

Eastern promise: girl teen band 2NE1 are part of a wave of South Korean bands to generate millions of YouTube hits

Snaking around the edge of the Korean Cultural Centre on the Strand is a queue of about 600 teenagers. Every few minutes, a video camera zooms in on the action.

"Facebook … I got invited as I go to K-Pop nights all the time," says one, when asked by the interviewer how she found out about it. "We've been here about an hour now so we're quite excited," cries a young male voice through the noise. "Big Bang, yeaaah. 2NE1, ahhh," two girls then shriek at the camera, each hoping to get a place inside the tiny venue.

This was the scene from one of the many new nights being held in London, marking the city's newest fixation with K-Pop. Not pop as we know it, this is a fresh brand of commercial contemporary music from South Korea and, because of sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, thousands of teens in Asia, America and now Europe are buying into it.

K-Pop's three biggest groups - Big Bang, boy group Super Junior and girl pop rappers 2NE1 - have generated more than 45 million YouTube hits between them for their recent singles.

The latest one, by nine-piece electropop group Girls Generation, entitled Gee, has been viewed by more than 53 million, despite being sung in Korean and dotted with exclamations in English.

Since June, London fans have organised monthly flash mobs, re-enacting moves by their K-Pop idols in Trafalgar Square, while at an event held during the Mayor's Thames Festival last month, 100,000 teens turned up to take part in K-Pop competitions ..