The band stripped bare

They take their name from a childhood slang term for naked women, they're proud to call themselves a novelty act, they're fat and wear ill-fitting baggy shorts, they undress a lot on stage, but perhaps most bizarrely of all, they cite The Proclaimers as one of their main influences.

There's even more to the Barenaked Ladies: in their native Canada, they outsell U2 and Michael Jackson; when they put their mind to it, they can produce melody-driven, harmony-infused mini-miracles; their lead singer Steven Page sounds incredibly like Paul Heaton (a good thing, by the way) and Brian Wilson is such a fan that he has covered one of their songs on his new live album. The fact that the song in question is called Brian Wilson just adds to the craziness of it all.

Although pumping out good quality stuff for the best part of a decade, Barenaked Ladies never really got past the Niagara Falls until a "freak hit single" episode last year with a song called One Week. The album it was taken from, Stunt, did the quadruple platinum business for them in most countries around the world and, tiring somewhat of the "novelty" tag, it was a very different band who reconvened in the studio to record the new work, Maroon.

"First we got Don Was in to produce the album, which was a real buzz considering who he has worked with (The Stones, Iggy Pop, Paul Westerberg, Wilson) and second, we grew up a lot very quickly," says bassist and keyboard player Jim Creegan. "It's not that this new album is very dark compared to the previous ones, it's just that there's been lots of `life' in our lives and now we're reflecting that".

As introspective as an album by people in their 30s who wear shorts can be, Maroon is a fascinating piece of work. Tracks like Helicopters and Tonight Is The Night That I Fell Asleep At The Wheel are emotionally direct and even verging on political awareness. What gives?

"It's funny because early on in our career we were known as The Fat Canadian Housemartins, mainly because we used to sound a bit like them and we always rushed to embrace the "fun" aspect of being in a band," says Creegan, "but suddenly with the last album we started to be big in places other than Canada so I suppose that made us want to show more of what we could do. But we wanted to make an album that wasn't a downer to listen to - and I think we've got the balance just right on this one".

What's with the Brian Wilson connection? "We wrote this song very early on called Brian Wilson which was just a tribute and we put it on our debut album Gordon," he says, "then with this album we found out that Brian Wilson was recording in the same studio as us and he's a really good friend of our producer, Don Was - they worked on I Just Wasn't Made For These Times together, so he drops in one day and he sat down and played us his version of our song Brian Wilson, which is going on his new album. To be honest I was so excited I can't remember how the song sounded at all."

Did he have any advice for you? "Yes, he said to us: `Remember guys, don't eat too much' and that was that."

Maroon by the Barenaked Ladies is out next week on the Warners label.

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