Among the X-Box generation Dragonforce hold the honour of having recorded what is widely regarded as Guitar Hero’s most challenging track.

For aficionados of the game of the moment, being able to keep up with Herman Li’s fast-fingered fretboard work on ‘Through The Fire and Flames’ is a point of pride. Hence why searching the band’s name on YouTube will bring up almost as many home videos of high scores as it will shorts featuring Dragonforce themselves.

There is some considerable irony here for Li and co, who since their unlikely rise to fame began in earnest with the 2006 release of second album Inhuman Rampage, have not been shy of admitting that their modern power metal was at one time the height of uncool. Focusing on technical guitar work, keyboard solos and fantastical lyrical themes - which perhaps somewhat portentously often drew from the band’s own love of computer games, songs showcased at early gigs would sooner impress dads holding a candle for prog and ‘real’ musicianship than their offspring, who in 1999 - Dragonforce year zero - were only just discovering the distorted and detuned Nu Metal craze.

Save for moving away from the dungeons and dragons lyrics sheet on later recordings the Dragonforce who begin a two-night stand at the 2000 capacity Astoria on 3 October have made few compromises since those days, and Li is happy to give the Guitar Hero phenomenon due credit in bringing metal fans around to their way of thinking.

“I think in a world of trends, where everyone has to look a certain way, the Guitar Hero game throws all that down the toilet,” he says, “all it shows is music and virtual characters that all look the same. So there’s no more image, it doesn’t matter what you look like, where you’re from, how old you are, what’s your hairstyle, how many tattoos you’ve got - and that’s what our music was about in the first place.”

Where Dragonforce are concerned it’s all about the music, man. Image might be treated as little more than a game, but when it comes to guitar, Li’s dedication verges on obsession, making him an ideal candidate for bedroom widdlers’ patron saint. His band’s third album, Ultra Beatdown was released this August, the fruit of seven months self-imposed studio imprisonment, a period during which Dragonforce solitarily oversaw pre-production, recording and mixing, and in so doing stood by a career-long resistance to working with producers.

“We talked about it,” admits Li, when asked if growing fame and high-profile backing have increased pressure to involve outside help, “but I don’t think anyone can dedicate themselves for seven months the way we can to making our album. I’m not good at letting go and letting people look after things... no-one tells us how to write the songs or to change them.”

It’s an attitude that invariably comes with a refusal to chase trends or sales figures. “We don’t play for anyone,” Li continues, “we don’t write music for anyone and we don’t try and get a new audience by playing something for someone. We play what we want to hear and think is best and if you like it, that’s great. If you don’t like it, we don’t care because we make music that we want to hear.”

When the guitarist describes such a high level of perfectionism and drive you must wonder whether Dragonforce are not their own harshest critics anyway. Indeed it’s not long before this most modest axe hero admits to being “very self-critical - there’s never time to go ‘wow - we’re so amazing’, because every time we listened to the record we listened to how we could make it better. I didn’t listen to any other music for seven months, simply because I needed to keep my ears clean and not over used. We have to do that to concentrate, we can’t make an album any other way. We just need to disappear off the planet for a while”.

Taking the attitude of making music purely for personal satisfaction to extremes rarely visited by the countless musicians to utter the cliché before him, Li confesses he “can’t know if people will recognize the development from the previous album.”

“I’m never too confident,” he says. “We know it’s definitely a better album. Inhuman Rampage was a much darker, sadder album. I guess this time it’s much more triumphant and epic. On Inhuman Rampage, I remember now, we actually said ‘we’re going to make it darker’ and I think we lost some of that catchy, triumphant stuff. This time we didn’t really think about it in that way and Ultra Beatdown ended up being a whole different thing.”

If you want him to, Li can catalogue precisely how each Dragonforce opus has developed from the last.

“When we made our first album Sonic Firestorm we thought that was the best thing we would ever do,” he says, suppressing a laugh at the memory. “And then when we made Inhuman Rampage we thought ‘how are we going to beat Sonic Firestorm?’ We beat Sonic Firestorm and now it’s like we need to better this album next time. I realised on this album when it was finished that each album is only a snapshot of the band’s career at that point.”

With this philosophy in mind Li swears “every time we make an album we will always make it harder for ourselves, we’re always trying to do more and make it better. You’re never going to get better if you don’t push yourself. Unless you’re absolutely exhausted at the end of an album then you haven’t done a good album I think.”

That said, can he honestly see that much scope for improvement whilst wearing the semi-official title of six-string pin-up for the era? “I don’t think I’m even very good on the guitar,” Li retorts coyly, in what one assumes must be a piece of twisted humour, until he protests. “I think I could still get 100 times better if I work harder. I don’t really look at myself as being really good on the guitar - or as a guitar hero!”