WIDE ASLEEP IN AMERICA

It's true confessions time. In a lifelong career in the music industry, most of which, I'm told, seems to have consisted of free lunches, I can safely assert that only once did somebody end up in hospital after having dinner with me, and that someone was Junkster's frontwoman Deirdre O'Neill.
It started innocently enough at Tante Zoe's restaurant just after noon, before escalating into a Leopold Bloom-like odyssey through Dublin, taking in a visit to Sun Studios, the Bankers pub, the Hot Press offices, the International Bar, two receptions at two separate locations, a Mexican Pets gig at Barnstormers, a miraculously coherent interview on Moloney After Midnight and an early morning visit to a seedy nightclub in Leeson Street.
When two days passed without a call from Ms O'Neill to thank me for my generous conviviality, I rang her office only to be told, somewhat accusingly, that she had been rushed to hospital the day following our "lunch", having collapsed on the street through exhaustion and too much alcohol. Rock chicks, don't you just love 'em?
This time round, the Zena Warrior Princess lookalike with the vari-coloured hair is taking no chances, being chaperoned by the band's bassist Graham Darcy for our dinner date. Since our last get-together, Junkster have been safely resident in the USA, recording their debut album, touring across the country promoting the singles, wooing the masses and even staying out of hospital, though sometimes only by the skin of their teeth.
"Yeah, it's been great," she tells me, "we've been gigging all over the place; New York, California, Florida, Alabama, even Canada. It's been our first experience of the comforts of the tour bus and we've been making the most of it thanks to a great driver called Johnny Paladino who seems to specialise in working with new bands."
The winners of this year's Heineken Hot Press New Band Award have trespassed on the American Dance Charts and are already big in Alabama (which at least makes a change from Japan), so does this mean Junkster are now consorting with next-big-thinghood?
"That's what freaks us out a little," she candidly admits. "Sure we've done very well in some places in the States. It's brilliant to play to a big crowd in say, Alabama, where they know all the words and you spend two hours signing autographs afterwards. We actually felt like The Beatles for a while. We met these two fans called Randy and Candy who had actually travelled hundreds of miles just to see us."
But has it all been like that? Deirdre makes it quite clear that whatever about Randy and Candy it's not all dandy. "That's Alabama, okay, but the next gig might have only twelve people at it. Sure, 'Slide' was a hit in the dance charts, but we're under no illusions. It's a bit of a pain when the media at home starts exaggerating this success into something it's not. That stuff does us no favours at all. We're very happy with the way things are going, but we've a long way to go yet before we make any kind of a serious breakthrough."
I demand to know more about the bad stuff. Any tales of playing to twelve people at a gig? Any tears?
"Well," she tells me, "There was this time we drove hundreds of miles from Philadelphia for a big Halloween gig. Unfortunately we arrived totally shagged and things ran late. Everything went wrong. We played shite and there was hardly anybody left by the time we went on. At four o'clock in the morning I started crying. At that point I wanted to break up the band and go home."
As a break from the USA they also had the dubious pleasure of seeing Spain in the company of BP Fallon whom O'Neill describes as a "medicator and a vibe-master".
"My best memory of that trip was BP, who has no Spanish, outside a nightclub haggling over the price of some chewing gum which he wanted to buy because the brand was called T Rex."
Junkster recorded their debut album in Bearsville Studios, owned by Sally Grossman, widow of Dylan's former manager, in famed Woodstock, in upper New York State.
"It was a magnificent place to work. The studio's steeped in history, right in the middle of a forest which is full of deer who are totally tame. They feel totally safe with humans around and they come up to you and take food out of your hand. Even though Henry Rollins was recording next door!"
While Dee (as she often refers to herself) may have been enthralled with her visit, the people in the somewhat genteel and bohemian Woodstock probably have less fond memories of their Irish guests. Graham Darcy admits that they wrote off an Explorer Jeep during their visit, in between a lot of pulling down of trousers, although, he hastily adds, the trousers pulled down were always their own. In an incident involving a bottle of Jack Daniels, guitarist Aidan Lee (who has developed into a party animal of Olympic standards) slipped and damaged his hand.
But did you learn anything from all this, I ask?
"Oh, yes, " she assures me. "Most importantly we learned to live with each other, to tolerate each other's quirks and not to get on each other's nerves." Quirks, apparently, like stealing food off each other's plate, a la Led Zeppelin in their wildest moments.
But there's more bad news when they mention a collective body-piercing experience that went horribly awry. Having met up with a couple of allegedly professional "pierce artists" in Florida, they all decided to partake of a little body-renovation while under the influence, including Aidan, who got his nipple pierced. This was all hearty fun at the time, especially their stubborn pretence that it didn't hurt. But they were all seriously pierced off when they all woke up in agony next morning.
As Deirdre recalls, "It could have been really serious. Some of us started turning septic, and for a while it looked as we'd have to go to hospital and cancel some gigs."
Part of Junkster's junketting experience included an American tour with Sneaker Pimps. "We got on great with them, but I think they handled it all very badly. In the end their keyboard player just left without even telling them, and we could detect a lot of tension between them all the time which we were able to deal with a lot better."
Junkster have had knickers and boxer shorts tossed at them while on stage to the extent that they're now planning to launch their own merchandised underwear to sell at gigs. This sounds like it could be as lucrative as the homing pigeons business.
Just like real tourists, when they visited Dallas they made a point of going down to Dealey Plaza, the immortalised scene of the assassination of JFK. "It was like a film set," reckons Graham. "It was exactly as you've seen it on telly and in the movies. Of course they've deliberately kept it as it was to attract tourists like us anyway, I suppose."
Another surprise highlight was their visit to the Universal Studios lot in Hollywood, where O'Neill was innocently guided on one of the sets. It was only when some of the production crew started laughing and pointing that she realised that this was the actual Zena, Warrior Princess set! She'd been set up!
For some reason, I begin to wonder if their music might just be a soundtrack to their partying lifestyle. "Yeah!" she jubilantly proclaims. "It enabled us to go on holidays for a whole year!"
But amid all this rubbernecking, the Todd Terry remix of 'Slide' soared into the Billboard Dance chart, 'Mr Blue' was added to the playlist on over eighty stations, while 'The Only One' has had even more radio ad-ons than its predecessor. Shucks, it's even been played on Irish radio; I've heard it myself.
They also learned that if you're going to lie in the USA you have to do your homework. "Yeah," she says, "Aidan claimed he'd designed our entire website until he got quizzed on it and it became all too obvious that he didn't know as much as he claimed!"
But then again, Americans expect Irish to be good at everything to do with music. "Most of the time the Irish can do it because we're a nation of bullshitters, so we can beat the Americans at their own game," says Aidan.
But what impressions did they form about the music industry, I ask? "It's unbelievably radio led. If you're not on the radio most magazines won't want to write about you, and MTV won't touch you no matter how good your video is unless you're on American radio."
What about all those nice gentle people who run the music business, what did they make of them?
"It's very corrupt. It's all about money," says Deirdre. "Do you remember Eleanor McEvoy wrote a piece for the Hot Press Yearbook a couple of years ago about record companies and the lies they tell artists? Well, she got it absolutely spot on. Her piece is one of the smartest things about record companies that any band could read. You should print it again some time. The amount of undiluted bullshit in the record industry is truly remarkable. I've had the naiveté beaten out of me in a very short time."
To look to the future, I ask them what's the worst thing that could happen to Junkster at this point on their evolutionary scale.
She who could be Zena ruminates for a while before committing herself: "Actually, the worst thing that could happen to us right now is for the album to go to number one." For once this is a case of not false, fanciful modesty, but a practical attitude to the absurdity of being famous for fifteen minutes like, say, the over-hyped No Sweat, to pluck one example out of many.
Nor do they want to follow the lead of a band like Garbage. "We don't want to go down the road," explains Graham, "of using a-dats and stuff. If a band is going to get tied too much to a pre-arranged format they might just as well get the promoter to play their album through the PA and go off and have a drink. If some bands want to do it that way, that's up to them, but Junkster want to be a genuinely live band with some space to allow for a bit of spontaneity, even if that leaves you open to things going a bit wrong every now and then." n
* Junkster's self-titled album will be released in Ireland through BMG on 8th May They play Heineken Green Energy on 3rd May with Kula Shaker at Dublin Castle.