You & I

Give him a wall, he'll scale it like Spiderman. Give him an air conditioning funnel in the ceiling, he'll crawl it like Alien. Give him a balcony, he'll launch himself from it like a suicidal base-jumper. Give him an audience, he'll mosh his way through them like a human cattle-bar. Give him a pop song, he'll croon it. Give him a gig, he'll tear the living, beating heart out of it and eat it whole.

He is Nick Johnston, the mini-Iggy whirling dervish at the front of New Zealand's most visceral, vital and vibrant pop-punk band since, well, forever. And he's a victim of his own showmanship. 'Our pop sensibility has come lately,' Nick explains. 'We started listening to a whole bunch of different music than that earlier stuff. We'd been listening to Phil Spector and Brian Wilson and Roy Orbison, all sixties and fifties pop. I can relate to that quite a bit. And The Buzzcocks are quite important to us, a lot of energy, what they're doing is punk rock but it's so obviously taken from sixties pop tunes. 'Oh Girl' is very much a straight up Brian Wilson song. I was more interested in the sonics of the song when I wrote it, a real sixties style pop classic song. Up to that point I hadn't written anything melodic, it was all fast and angular and energetic, but with that one I wanted it to be almost tongue in cheek so I put those tongue in cheek lyrics to it.'