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SCMP Reporter

Boyzone and Backstreet Boys, step aside: bubble pop has just been taken to new heights. This time, it is not a bunch of British and American boys crooning about love. It is Danish, and it is about Barbie.

 Who are these Danes whose latest single is about an American doll?  They call themselves Aqua and are the hottest thing to come out of that country since the pastry.

 'We exploded on to the market,' said lead vocalist Lene Nystrom.

 'It was incredible. We didn't have time to realise what was happening.'  'What was happening' was that Aqua was taking Europe by storm with its bubbly European techno-pop. Its first single, Roses are Red, spent months in the Danish charts before going platinum.

 Its follow-up, My Oh My, debuted at number one on the singles charts and six days later went gold.

 With lyrics about Barbie and princesses, it is not surprising that three of the band's four members got together while working on the soundtrack for a Danish children's film.

 Almost four years ago Soren Rasted and Claus Norreen enlisted the help of Moroccan-born Rene Dif, who had come to Denmark to work as a DJ.

 'Soren and Claus needed a rapper: someone I knew suggested I talk to them. While doing the soundtrack we started talking about doing more pop, more danceable music,' Dif said.

 'I got the job to find the girl.'  The 'girl' was Nystrom, who at the time was hosting a game show on Norwegian TV.

 Dif heard her sing and, after a name change and record company switch, Aqua was born.

 Its sound is within the scope of traditional European pop: several tracks on the album were produced by the team responsible for Ace of Base and Real McCoy. But it is the group's image that sets it apart.

 The foursome are an explosion of technicolour. They look as if they have just stepped out of a cartoon, an image they are determined to maintain.

 'I can freak out and do what I want,' said Rasted. 'We like to be ourselves.'  An image worthy of inspection by the fashion police was, however, not in Aqua's original plans.

 'It was the Roses are Red video that started it,' said Dif. 'It had a bright background, we had colourful clothing on and it looked funny. Our image developed from there.'  Nor was the image a marketing ploy devised by the group's record company. 'We are very much in control of our image, it's an expression of ourselves,' said Dif.

 Their bizarre taste in clothing and hairstyles is also a reflection of the music. The European quartet pride themselves on being out of the ordinary.

 'The lyrics have to be different from normal songs,' said Norreen. 'We have songs about Barbie, lollipops, princes and princesses.'  Nystrom adds, 'It's another dimension, a fairy tale.'  And, like all fairy tales, there is a moral to this story.

 'The message is that we don't like to take ourselves seriously, we like to have fun. There's a lot of irony, you can hear that in the songs,' said Nystrom.

 It was the need to have fun that led the quartet to write Barbie Girl, the third single off their debut, Aquarium, which is also the title of the album's most intriguing and irritating track.

 With lines such as: 'I'm a Barbie girl . . . wrapped in plastic, it's fantastic', one would hope they were being facetious.

 'The idea for that song came up in the studio, I thought it could be fun to put voices on to the dolls.

 'Ken and Barbie are sacred in the US: we thought it could be funny to do a song on them. We use humour and irony to form our songs,' said Dif.

 Although the band played together in real time on some of the tracks, much of the preliminary work is done by Norreen.

 'I get an idea for a melody or a sound, and then I work together with the band. I write most of the lyrics. I don't want to do a song like the one before, I like to have different arrangements. The melody is the most important thing,' he said.

 Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the band is its different musical influences. Nystrom prefers to listen to the likes of Live and Suede, Dif is a fan of hip-hop and funk, Rasted cites classical rock as his preferred musical genre. And here they are doing techno-pop.

 'That's what is good about us, that we all like to listen to different types of music,' said Nystrom.

 Judging by their success, it also has to be taken into account that this version of bubble pop is working, simply because it is mindless and 'happy'.

 'In Scandinavia, people were listening to a lot of rock music, I think now people are tired of listening to depressing music,' Nystrom said.

 The quartet also attribute their success to supportive producers and record-company executives.

 Now the band has achieved considerable success in Europe, it is focusing on Asia. The foursome made their first trip to Asia in May, featuring at Midem Asia 97's Dance Night.

 The animated quartet will be back in the SAR next week, performing their quirky dance music for two nights at JJ's. Judging by Hong Kong's fetish for everything kitsch and cute, combined with its passion for dance music, they are bound to have you humming Barbie Girl for days.

Aqua at JJ's, Grand Hyatt Hotel.

August 19 and 20, 10pm. For inquiries, call 2588-1234 ext. 7364 



Roses are red, Aqua is new