Make no mistake: there is dirt to be dished. But today Jon Lawler, The Fratelli's frizzy mopped frontman, is keeping his mouth shut.

“I’m sick of fighting with people, man,” groans Lawler, who last year cemented his reputation as an A-grade badmouth, by dismissing Arctic Monkeys as all hype, no pants. “I’ve made a promise: no more bad-mouthing other bands. So far, I’ve kept to it. Hopefully I can make it all the way to the end of the tour.”
Still, we must persist: eyewitnesses tell us that, during a 10-date jaunt around the UK late last year, The Fratellis came very close to inflicting grievous harm upon support act, The Horrors, who are reported to have sabotaged the headliners’ drum kit (and were last seen attempting to assault an HP snapper with a mike chord at Dublin’s Ambassador).
“Nah, The Horrors are okay,” says Jon after a sharp intake of breath. “I haven’t got a bad word to say about them. There you go – that’s what you can print. I wasn’t happy about the NME taking over the tour, though. That was supposed to be our tour, and then they went and hi-jacked it on us. Not happy at all.”
As you join us, Lawler – who, along with the other two members of the Glasgow band, has adopted ‘Fratelli’ as a novelty second name – is reposing in a Belfast hotel room. Anxious to change the subject, he reaches for the TV controller and channel surfs, settling, eventually, on Countdown.
“They’ve got Des Lynam in to replace Richard Whiteley,” he mutters. “The creepy thing is that he keeps going on about Whiteley, as if he wasn’t dead. He won’t bloody stop mentioning him.”
Reticence, though, isn’t really in Lawler’s nature – as will be clear to anyone familiar with his band’s debut album, Costello Music and, in particular, the jaunty radio hit ‘Chelsea Dagger’, a wink and nudge paean to a naughty society gal. As soon as the conversation moves on, his demeanour brightens markedly.
“It’s great we’ve a song that's struck such a chord with audiences,” says Lawler – oh, alright, Fratelli – of ‘Chelsea Dagger’s ubiquity. “Maybe we’ll get sick of playing it one day – you can already see that it’s the one song of ours that everybody in the crowd knows.”
The moment when the craziness descended is inscribed in his mind.
“It was T In The Park last year. We were on at the same time as The Who. And we drove up to the tent and we could see that all the exits had flooded out with people. That’s when we realised, man. Walking on stage was like being struck by lightning.”
For all their rumoured mutual dislike, The Fratellis have one thing in common at least with The Horrors: the band’s three members (of whom only one, bassist Barry, is really called Fratelli) came together while hanging out at an amusement park.
“Sounds romantic, doesn’t it?” says Lawler. “But it wasn’t. It was fucking horrible. It was on the outskirts of Glasgow and must have been the most miserable place on earth. Sometimes I wonder if we didn’t start the band just to get out of it.”
He breaks into a filthy laugh when asked about the time he was mistaken for Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand. “It was at the Oxegen festival. It was a fucking horrible day, pissing rain, and we were backstage looking for a bit of grub. There was a Hard Rock Café there – the manager came up and told us what a huge fan she was of our music. We were getting ready to sort the bill at the end and she said to one of the waitresses, ‘They don’t have to pay – they’re big rock stars. They’re Franz Ferdinand.’ It just cracked us up. You know what was really funny? None of the band had said a word to her. It was our mate Barry who did all the talking. And he’s from Dublin.”