MONSTER TRUX!

A TWO-hour drive from Washington, in the fabled Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, there's a small town called Culpeper. Just outside this town, halfway up a small hill in the midst of thick woods, you'll find a cabin, recognisable by the skull-and-crossbones flag rippling in the breeze outside. The windows of this cabin are tar-gunned shut to keep bugs out, but you can still just make out the muffled din emanating from the hi-tech recording studio inside. It's a righteous noise, full of Stooges blues, Stones swagger, funky garage-punk, voodoo mambo-jams.

If the sun's gone down, you'll find a tall, gaunt guitar player by the name of Neil Hagerty inside. He'll most likely be working on songs, tinkering with equipment that monitors local police activity, or peering into the night through infra-red goggles, fueled by caffeine, nicotine and anti-depressants. During daylight hours Jennifer Herrema, a willowy, sulky-looking blonde - the kind of girl all the dum-dum boys want to look like - will be mooching around talking to her cats, working on sounds, occasionally venturing out to visit the local gym.

You have just entered the weird world of Royal Trux. This Mid-Western bolt-hole has been home to the H twins for the past three years. Since the two last detoxed in 1993 (Jennifer's illustrious drug career included two overdoses), the pair decided that living in cities wasn't good for their health, so they relocated. And it was here, outside Culpeper, that Neil, Jennifer and band hatched their new album.

In a rather lousy year for rock 'n' roll, Accelerator is a real shot in the arm: a loose, uncouth, rowdy, ragged amalgam of Grand Funk Railroad and The Sex Pistols ('I'm Ready'), The Velvets, The Stones and the "high, wild mercury sound" of Blonde On Blonde ('Yellow Kid'), The Cramps playing The Tornadoes' 'Telstar' ('The Banana Question') and Sly Stone playing with himself ('Stevie').

Like their live shows, Trux records are low on production values (several of the songs were recorded with just one mike on the drums), but high on energy. And, although the Royals will vociferously argue the point, Accelerator is their first truly great album.

Let us abandon the band's rural hideaway for a moment and catch up with Hagerty and Herrema as they stop off for the Dublin date of their European tour. All five of the touring band (which includes Drag City employee and Plush member Rian Murphy, ex-Slint and Tortoise bassist David Pajo and drummer John Theodore) are having dinner in a Wexford St. restaurant a couple of hours before their rendezvous with the faithful at The Mean Fiddler.

It's Saturday night, the best time of any week to catch these Royals. As you join us, Hagerty (who, alongside Jon Spencer, was a founder member of Pussy Galore) is refuting suggestions that the new album represents any kind of rebirth for the band.

"It's just another stop, man," he drawls. "We mixed the whole thing, that's probably the biggest difference. Having our own studio was the ultimate. I mean it can be dangerous too, but for this record it was good."

"We're pretty disciplined," adds Jennifer, one of that rare breed who can wear shades indoors without looking like a complete dork. Herrema, who once modeled for CK1, is a lot friendlier than her New York doll appearance might suggest. She also smokes more cigarettes than anyone I've ever seen, her lanky frame frequently racked by a series of worryingly nasty coughing fits.

"One of the rules for Accelerator was the way we recorded it," she continues. "It was compressed at every stage and we were looking for a very narrow band width, we wanted it to come in under 40 minutes total."

Neil Hagerty attempts to explain his unorthodox approach to production techniques by referring to Ornette Coleman's theories of harmolodics.

"Oh yeah, man, that's like my whole life, my whole religion," the guitarist affirms. "I just see it as a way things can be related to each other by ways that you can't perceive. You can just dissolve situations and then re-establish their relationship along the same objects. With some of his records, if you get into focus you can really hear it, man, that's what it's all about."

Royal Trux have often been portrayed in the press as cartoon smack fiends, stumbling from one record to another in a semi-permanent narcotic haze. The reality is quite different. Like The Stones and Chuck Berry before them, the band have allied scuzzy blues riffs to a razor-sharp business sensibility. Jennifer and Neil are nothing if not shrewd operators, something Virgin Records found out to their cost when the band and their lawyer walked away from their deal with $300,000 dollars and a new album in their back pockets. No surprise then that the pair invest wisely, are fond of playing the markets, and subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. This is one band that understands the direct relationship between financial independence and artistic control.

"Completely," Jennifer concurs. "It's the basis for allowing us to be free in every aspect of our lives. The plan has always been to owe nobody anything, to never be beholden to anybody. Everything in our lives is kinda based on that. When we buy something we pay cash, we don't want any of those external factors having any kind of relationship to our day to day lives. There was a time when I went to college for a year and I owed a little bit of money to my Dad, and it was the worst thing in the world. After that, it was like, never again. The Virgin contract was structured a particular way so that we never felt like we owed them anything, all the money was given to us upfront. It was like, we've already got the money, all we really know is that we have to give them these records."

"They tried to use that against us later," Neil adds, "to make us feel like we were somehow not being team players. They tried to intimidate us into seeing the wisdom of their complete and total banality: 'Be smart like we are, just give the people a bunch of crap, that's what they like.' But it's not like we took the record company's money and then said, 'Ha ha ha, we're gonna give 'em a bunch of crap.' We sincerely tried to make records that we thought were American records for high school kids with a little extra cash, records we felt we wanted to hear back when we were kids."

Make no mistake, in terms of music, Neil knows the difference between shite and onions, enthusing about everything from "the whole Pink Fairies, Man and Pentangle nexus" to the anti-establishment attitude of the Stiff label. Over the last ten years the band have consistently skirted the perimeters of the US underground, refusing to be corralled with the grunge, lo-fi or hardcore ghettos. It may have taken them seven albums, varying from the loathed Twin Infinitives to the lauded Sweet Sixteen, to hit their current form, but let's face it, few musicians ever scale the peaks reached on Accelerator. The Trux do things their way, and the decision to live in rural isolation is indicative of their reluctance to follow any kind of established industry gameplan.

Still, Culpeper has its own share of misfits, including scores of fundamentalist mentallers, survivalist psychos and even the obligatory nutty cult run by an ex-CIA member. No surprise then, that the Royal couple keep a gun in the house. Indeed, Weirdsville culture may be rubbing off on Neil - that would certainly explain the musician's love of trash TV, particularly Chris Carter's Millennium.

In between making fucked up rock 'n' roll, killing bugs and watching what he calls "bogus" TV, Neil has also found time to write a novel entitled Victory Chimp.

"It was that whole phase of my life when I was trying to get things together," he explains, ordering a salad. "I thought it might be like a handy thing to have, something worthwhile, even if it wasn't that great a book."

Not to worry, Accelerator suggests it'll be a while yet before he has to consider giving up the day job. n

• Accelerator is out now on Domino Records.