The Kills' debut EP on Domino is good old-fashioned sleaze. One tune ("Wait") lifts the raucous chorus from Bugsy's penultimate number - the one where all the kids start pelting each other with cream pies, but VV drawls her lines with such salacious intent, you start to feel a sweat coming on. This is rock as libido: the partnership of VV and Hotel is so close, so vulnerable, so scraggy-arsed and smouldering, you feel start feeling perverted even listening in. Guitars wails and howl, feedback drops from the speakers, and a drum machine provides the sheer, animal beat. "Gum" sees VV imitating a phone sex saleswoman, breathily asking, "Do you like me to chew gum? Tell me. I'm doing this for you. I like to chew gum, but I'm doing this for you. Would you chew gum for me?" over a "plastic pervert clown kids disc player"... First track, "Cat Claw" - the one with the MTV-championed $40 video shot in the basement of VV's aunt in Detroit - is as raunchy and seedily repetitive as anything even Royal Trux and The Velvet Underground managed.
VV's real name is Alison (former singer with Florida punk-poppers Discount, once responsible for an album's worth of Billy Bragg covers). Alison has an obsessive personality - pretending to be French, lemon health drinks that she drinks to the exclusion of food for six months, avoiding the outside doomed model Edie Sedgwick, and now music: "If you don't eat for 90 days, you're high. It's like people get really obsessed from starvation, you just get high from it, you crave it."
She's embarrassed by talk of her old band - she joined when she was 14, toured America for seven years: "The Kills is the most perfect scenario I've been in. I feel I can do anything I want. I've never felt that with any other project. I always ended up causing huge massive fights and now I'm not causing fights. I feel really good about that."
Hotel's real name is Jamie (ex-London art punks Scarfo). Jamie was driven to form the Kills after becoming increasingly disillusioned with present-day music: "It feels like music's getting exciting again but you can't really tell, it's early days. There are records that I'd be absolutely destroyed if they got burnt in a fire, Velvet Underground, I just can't imagine that kind of legend being built around a band now. Everything's too click of a fucking mouse now. Everyone's face is everywhere. You can make a CD for 50p and get it to a million people at the click of a mouse."
It's the business the Kills hate more than the music, though. "In 1977," Jamie spits, "it was enough to look different, go on a TV show and say 'fuck' and you'd be on the front of the newspapers. 25 years later, that has no impact at all. In fact, it's probably fair to say it's just seen as cheap publicity."
"It feels like you're doing something wrong," Alison explains. "You don't feel in any way like you want to call your mom up - I got six Capitol Records business cards in five minutes the other night, mom, how fucking great!"
"I don't feel arrogant," states Jamie. "To be arrogant you have to be aware of what's going on around you. We don't listen to that many new bands. All my favourite bands are the ones I have friends in."
"Who are your friends?" Alison teases.
"OK," sighs Jamie. "I lied, I don't have any. But, you know, we didn't think anything about Libertines until we met them and now I'd go and cheer them on - same with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. We already liked The White Stripes, but when Jack came to see us, it was like 'yeah!'"
"I could hardly stand up after that," swoons Alison.
So how did The Kills come to be the New Rock Kids On The Block? You must have courted someone.
Jamie: "We went for the opposite approach. We tried to keep it down."
Alison: "Not give our music to anyone, record it in secret."
Jamie: "All we did was burn one CD and give it to Rough Trade shop like, 'Let's fucking do it at a really grass roots level'. Domino's still independent, which is why it was at the top of our wish list - plus, they had a great roster."
Everett True
The Black Rooster EP is out on Domino now.
