The Fighting Cock turned out to be the ideal place to meet Bradford musician Chantel McGregor.

At the corner of Preston Street and, appropriately, Handel Street, the brown-and-cream interior of this real-ale pub can’t have changed much since the late 1960s when the members of the band Free might have popped in for a pint after playing Queen’s Hall.

A man in red basketball boots, denims, threequarter-length leather coat, long hair and moustache came in and ordered a “double Jack”.

He sat hunched over his whiskey throughout the interview, as though in mourning for the authenticity of a time when rock stars knew how to play their own instruments and the public knew how to listen.

His spirits may not have been lifted when he heard Chantel say: “We know a lot of bands who play the rock’n’roll star, get really drunk and then five years later they are working a normal nine-to-five job and they aren’t playing. I think the reputation of rock’n’roll does that.

“For me it’s a career, not about partying. I don’t want to be dead at 28. We know people who got too big for their boots. I think it’s good to keep grounded. I live at home with mum and dad. I have never lived away, I don’t want to.”

Was this 24-year-old stay-at-home, accompanied by her mum and dad, Janet and Alan, really the same Wyke lass who in May this year played blistering electric guitar in a 15-minue rendition of the Robin Trower song Daydream for the Paul Jones show on BBC Radio 2?

It was. She has also performed with US guitar hero Joe Bonamassa and Deborah Bonham, sister of the late John Bonham of Led Zeppelin, and has the publicity to prove it. The following anecdote may give a little insight into the core of Chantel’s personal and musical values.

“After a gig, a young bloke came up to me and said he’d been playing guitar for three months. ‘Why can’t I do what you can do?’ he said. I thought, I’ve been playing for 17 years, that’s why,” she said.

Chantel, who was jamming with bands in Bradford pubs at the age of 14, strikes me as an alternative to the present age of celebrity and instant gratification, as she talks about being a performer.

“If it’s marketed right, if it’s packaged right, it will sell. It’s similar to the X Factor thing. You audition for Simon Cowell and then you’re a megastar.

“The idea of hard work, learning your instrument, and gigging, gigging and gigging, is out of fashion. The whole thing of learning your craft and nurturing it has gone. You cannot learn to play a guitar in a day, although Bert Weedon did,” she said.

Fans of her playing and singing have put up more than 300 items on YouTube, even though Chantel and her two-piece band have yet to issue a CD. She’s working on that in her studio at home, between concerts.

In January, she played the Skegness Rock & Blues Festival. In August, she will be on the main stage at the Cambridge Rock Festival.

Virgin tried and failed to sign her up after she appeared on stage at the Bradford Mela when she was 14. She didn’t want to sing Nick Drake songs about death and depression.

A star graduate from Leeds College of Music – she got a first-class honours degree in popular music – she was given her first musical instrument, a monophonic keyboard, at the age of nine months. At the age of three she was jumping about the living room to Ralph McTell’s Kenny The Kangaroo, clutching her father’s guitar.

What the man in the red basketball boots and blue jeans was making of all this was anybody’s guess. But he may have perked up when Chantel listed some of the stars whose work she covers: Jethro Tull, Blind Faith, Jimi Hendrix, Fleetwood Mac, Bonnie Raitt.

“She’s a lovely lady,” she said of the Californian blues singer-songwriter. “We met up with her after her show in Manchester. She stood talking to me for 20 minutes. She advised me never to sign away my publishing rights because you never get them back again.”

The rock business is full of stories of stars who lost their mojo, lost their way or lost their bottle. The dusty bottles that had once contained booze on shelving beneath the ceiling of the Fighting Cock seemed to symbolise so many empty or lost lives.

How does Chantel, still £17,000 in debt from five years of higher education, measure success?

“I’ll always be up and coming because where does it end? If playing the Albert Hall is your destination, where does it go after that? You can always play better gigs,” she added.

- Chantel McGregor is playing the Colne Blues Festival on August 28 and Dean Clough, Halifax, on September 1, where she will be playing a solo acoustic set.