At the start of the summer I found myself sitting at Coventry station drinking a cold beer looking out as the world went past and attempted to use British Rail. Thinking about life, beer and sunshine not knowing quite what the weekend had in store. I was waiting for Malcolm and Tim who were going to join me in a pilgrimage to see the coolest band in the world: Girls Against Boys.

Getting to Leicester from Coventry shouldn’t involve the kind of hassle associated with these events but, thanks to BR, we were embarking on a round trip which would involve seeing most parts of the East Midlands. Our intended destination was the Leicester Princess Charlotte and we sat on the train with Malcolm swigging whisky from a hip flask and Friday evening stretching in front of us promisingly.

First I ought to mention quite why this was such an event. Girls Against Boys have been responsible for some of the most taut, sleazy, exciting music to come out of America and singer Scott Macleod’s side project ’New Wet Kojak’ has produced two of the best jazz-tinged film noir soundtracks to lives we could only wish we were living. They are a band that mix brilliant abstract word play with the dirtiest, sleaziest grooves to have come out of two basses. They have just been signed by Geffen and released ’Freak*on*ica’, an album that Geffen expected great things of. Even if Girls Against Boys weren’t quite so sure.

"Musical climates change so fast," Scott argues on Geffen’s rush to sign them, "The whole thing is like everybody tries to be so fucking conniving and so fucking on it and nobody’s fucking on it ’cause nobody fucking knows what’s going to happen and I’m convinced that in the year 2000 when it kind of drops something’s going to be popular like you never thought, something horrible like some Lynerd Skynnerd spin off. And everybody’s going to be like ’This can’t be the future! This can’t be happening!’"

We sit there, having reached the Princess Charlotte and blagged an interview with Scott and bassist Eli Janney. They are two of the most unprepossessing people we have met. Scott howls with laughter regularly and they both specialise in ironic asides and a self-deprecating humour. They both look like film stars with their jagged cheekbones and stylised hair cuts yet talk animatedly and unpretentiously about what they do.

"Every song starts out just as a groove basically," says Scott, "which we’re in there doing live. Whether Eli’s playing bass or 303 it’s just a case of being in there, in the jam, playing a groove. Usually it just has a couple of parts that happen spontaneously and then we start to break it down and analyse it."

The new album has a lot of samples and electronics on it. "The record company asked us to do it," jokes Eli. Scott adds, "We just get into and get turned on by any kind of different equipment changes or line up changes. I guess that’s how the whole double bass thing kind of happened. It was like Eli played bass on a song that was in the studio, so that encouraged us to try a few songs with two basses, but once we did that we got so inspired by the change of the set up that a lot of songs just came out of it. A lot of the stuff with samples came out of the same thing. We’d played about with samples and experimented in that way which then inspires us to create things. I mean, we could get into ukeleles."

Ukeleles probably won’t come across live quite as well as the two bass, guitar and drums line up do now though. That evening Girls Against Boys prove themselves to be a stunning live band with the dynamics of their sound pushed up to the max and each member pushing the music as far as it can go. It is the soundtrack to a night and a weekend which involves jeans in freezers, heated arguments and an emotional intensity that is mirrored in the music. It signals both the end of something important and the start of something even bigger and we are able to trust that the music has the calibre to complement this.

Girls Against Boys were talking to Ben Ladkin, in October 1998.