Chicks of the Trade

there's something disconcerting about walking into the lobby of a city centre hotel and finding your prospective interviewees wearing school uniforms, with their graffiti-adorned málai scoile beside them on the floor. When they produce a bag of brightly coloured sweets that they bought for you, you'd be forgiven for thinking this was all some bizarre Freudian nightmare. But it's not.
The band in question are Lucy (16), Annie (17) and Isabel (17), a trio of teenage guitar punk popsters who go by the collective name of Chicks, and their debut EP, Criminales, Coches, Pistolas Y Chicas (Criminals, Cars, Guns 'n' Chicks), is four tracks of the most infectious guitar pop and lovely vocal harmonies that you're likely to hear this year.
Still, though, at the ripe old age of 24, spending time in their company made me feel like the zimmerframe, pipe and slippers were just around the corner, and I almost rushed out to buy some thermal underwear on the spot. Matters weren't helped at all when I offered them some of their own sweets.
All three Chicks have been at school together since they were seven years old. Fed on a strict diet of science fiction - Star Wars, anime and Marvel (they hate Star Trek) - it was only last year that they decided that pop music was where their talents lay.
"We decided to start a band but we couldn't do anything about it for a while," laughs Annie. "We didn't have any gear and we couldn't play, so it was a concept."
It was Lucy's brother, Mik, who taught all three Chicks to play, and so with borrowed gear, Chicks were born. They kind of wormed their way into a recording deal with Dublin independent label, Supremo Records, thanks mainly to the silver tongue of Annie.
"I was on work experience in Tower Records about this time last year," she recalls. "Philip (one of the owners of Supremo Records) was working there at the time. The band was still just a concept. I was telling him that we had a band and that we had loads of songs and had played lots of times in the Attic, which had just closed down. He asked for a demo, and it was like, 'Fuck', so we wrote and recorded three songs and gave him a demo the next week."
So they lied their way into a deal?
"Well, we wouldn't say that," laughs Lucy. "We confessed to everything before we signed the deal."
The deal in question is for three EPs and an album, with the second EP due for release in the summer. "It's gonna rock," says Annie. "We're putting our punky tunes on it."
Their debut release was recorded last December in four days. "We were locked in and they just came and threw us a few chocolate bars for breakfast, dinner and tea," says Lucy, deadpan.
The video for 'Let Me Go', the lead track on Criminales . . ., received its first airing on national TV recently on Network 2's Top 30 Hits, and at the time of writing the song was at number 31 in the Irish singles charts, not bad for a debut offering. It also received a highly coveted Single Of The Fortnight accolade in these very pages, which was "a pleasant surprise".
So how do they balance the rock 'n' roll life with double maths classes and exams?
"It's not that hard. We practise every day after school and get home about seven or eight o'clock, then do 20 minutes homework," smirks Isabel.
Chicks have a number of gigs lined up over the coming weeks, with the girls traipsing the length and breadth of the country for dates in Belfast, Dublin and Cork. Prospective venue managers better watch out, though. Their rider for future gigs could include such demands as copies of their favourite comics in Italian, "just to be awkward".
When they're not concentrating on writing and recording three-minute pop songs or doing their homework, Chicks get their kicks by "ODing on energy tablets and Dextro", according to Lucy, with Isabel admitting that she overdid it on cough sweets the day before. Rock 'n' Roll Babylon here we come.
But what about the music? A heady brew of infectious guitar hooks and sugary vocals that calls to mind echoes of . . . "Don't compare us to Ash or Kenickie," says Annie. When I ask as to why she doesn't favour comparisons with Downpatrick's finest or the Kenickie crew, the answer is blunt in the extreme:
"Cos they're shit." n
* Criminales, Coches, Pistolas Y Chichas is out now on Supreme Recordings and Chicks play the Empire Music Hall, Belfast, with Cuckoo on May 29th; Metropole Hotel, Cork (again with Cuckoo) on June 6th, and Virgin Megastore, Cork, June 7th at 3pm.