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REAL McCoy have enjoyed considerable chart success - both in the UK and the US - in their five-years as a Euro-dance music act.

  On Monday night they played at a packed Lost City club in Tsim Sha Tsui's Chinachem complex, for an invitation-only, hour-long promotional concert.

  The trio have been hailed as 'the runaway success of 1995' by Billboard magazine, and in June had three singles - Another Night, Run Away and Come and Get Your Love in the US top 50 at the same time.

  Another Night stayed in the US charts for 42 weeks and sold over a million copies.

  Front-man, lyricist and producer, Olaf Jeglitza (better known as O-Jay), is visibly tired as he enters the small but immaculate reception room on the second floor of the Renaissance Hotel.

  It is not surprising he is exhausted. The group is in Hong Kong for just two days, having been to Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore and Indonesia on the Asian leg of its year-long promotional world tour.

  Real McCoy only perform about five songs in each showcase. 'It's just a promo',' says O-Jay. 'We want to do a proper world concert tour around the middle of next year.'   Real McCoy's story began a decade ago when O-Jay was hanging around with a DJ-friend in Berlin. They made a remix of a track called Action by The Alliance, and according to O-Jay, people started asking who made it. 'We got in contact with several companies, one of which was impressed with the energy we had, and signed us.'   Four years later he met American Patricia Peterson in a Berlin club.

  'She was beautiful and so I invited her to sit at the table. But after five minutes I found out she wasn't attracted to me,' he laughs. 'But we got talking and I found out she had been in a gospel choir since five. By that time I was writing and producing some material so she tried singing for me in the studio, and ever since then we've worked together.'   In 1990, MC Sar and the Real McCoy - as they were previously known, had a huge hit in Europe with It's Only You. The record went to number one in 12 countries, selling two million copies.

  At this stage in their career, O-Jay and Peterson started to look for more talent to support them on stage, 'so we could become more of a group'. Two years ago, they found Vanessa Mason.

  Mason was just 17 and toured with the band at weekends. It was not until she turned 18 last year that she became a fully-fledged member of the group.

  'We changed our name to Real McCoy,' O-Jay recalls, 'because MC is associated with rap in the US and the new name was far easier to remember.

  'Vanessa is a very young, fresh talent who brings a lot of influence to the group. I'm 30 now and although I try to act young and hang around in clubs so I can listen to the latest sounds, it's good to have someone so young in the band with us. She is a very powerful singer.

  'Our music is somewhere in between dance and pop,' O-Jay says of their new album Another Night - The US Album.

  It contains the lush pop ballad Sleeping with an Angel (which American songwriter and producer Billy Steinberg - the man behind The Bangles' Eternal Flame, Whitney Houston's So Emotional and Madonna's Like a Virgin - collaborated on), plus the sing-along anthem Run Away, and what the PR blurb calls 'the bright techno' of Automatic Lover.

  O-Jay believes he could not make his album too musically diverse because it would confuse people. 'You can't do everything in one pop band,' he says.

  Instead, O-Jay writes and produces for other artists as well as concentrating on his own act. 'This is the option you can take if you want to write different styles of music,' he says.

  'Because English isn't my native language, I have to write songs with a dictionary in front of me and the girls help me out with the grammar. The people I meet usually inspire my music,' he says.

  'Sometimes I hear a song I like so much, I try to go one step better. You have to challenge yourself,' he says.

  Real McCoy's next album, O-Jay hopes, will be released at the beginning of next year.

  As part of the Asian leg, the world tour will take in Hong Kong, but he is determined to return to the territory at a later date.

  'I come from a city where a lot of change has taken place after the wall came down.

  'So I'm really interested to see what Hong Kong will be like after 1997.'   In the future, he sees himself taking a behind-the-scenes role in the music industry.

  'In five years' time I'll still be making music, but maybe producing and writing for other artists.' 



Runaway success