"You don't want to end up like an Irishman stuck to an African rhythm . . . "

"Wasn't there some guy had a piano standing sideways up the wall in his flat?"

"We're doing a lot of European festivals this year. Belgium. The biggest festival in Belgium."

"Belgium's a small country."

"Big people, though . . . "

Even though just three of the seven band members are present, a conversation with Kila is anarchic, playful and prone to sudden shifts in mood and tempo. It's uncannily like listening to a Kila album, in fact: a sort of verbal equivalent of the music's exhilarating mix of jazz and jigs, Balkan curlicues and African drums, not to mention exotic-sounding raps in a language which, on closer inspection, turns out to be Irish. It's not, however - at least, not first thing on a muffled February Monday - quite as flamboyant as a Kila gig. In live performance the band has been known to incorporate stilt-walkers, acrobats, silly hats and swimming costumes.

My God: who are these people? "Two groups of brothers - Ronan, Colm and Rossa O Snodaigh, and Lance and Brian Hogan - and two people tagging along, Eoin Dillon and Dee Armstrong. We all have our main instruments - Ronan bodhran, Dee fiddle, Colm whistles, Rossa percussion, Eoin the pipes, Lance guitars and me the bass. Ronan and Colm are the main vocalists and we all do the doo-dahs at the back," is Brian Hogan's succinct summing-up.

But that, of course, is only half the story. The other half has to do with the influences soaked up along the way: somebody played with Michael Flatley, somebody else with Hector Zazu, there have been close encounters with film soundtracks and street theatre and just about every Irish rock band you could think of, from Revelino to The Fountainhead via The Frames.

So they're not all from a trad background, then? "No, only me," says uileann piper Eoin Dillon. "If even. I learned the whistle as a kid. At secondary school, when the teacher saw I could already play, he asked me if I wanted to do the pipes. He had a big set I could hardly get my fingers around. I was dying to get my own set; and eventually me ma won a hoover, and she sold it and bought me a set of pipes. She remembers the first day I got them, too - this fella across the road came running out shouting `what's that f***ing noise?' "

Brian and Lance Hogan, meanwhile, came from the Dun Laoghaire rock scene. "Hence the hair," says Brian, brandishing his flowing locks. "We grew up in the pubs of Dun Laoghaire. I wanted to be a rock'n'roll star - trad wasn't really an option. I was a mad Queen fan. AC/DC. Abba. I was an Abba demon, as a kid." So when they joined up with the O Snodaighs, was it something of a shock to the system? "Absolutely. I was used to three chords, drums, bass, guitar and a singer. Nothing else was a band, as far as I was concerned. These ideas came like fresh air to me. And trad is so completely daunting when you first try to play it - but you just have to sit down and learn the tunes. It's an education."

"It's a sickness," I think I hear somebody mutter - or did I just imagine it? Eoin is explaining that the idea of an exchange between traditional and other forms of music is not as new as the postRiverdance generation might like to think, how you'll often hear a saxophone in a ceili band; how, if you listen to old tapes from the States, you'll hear a fiddle player who might have worked with a blues guitarist putting a blues spin on the music. And didn't Ronan - who has just arrived, having cycled from Bray to George's Street against the wind - teach himself to play the bodhran by playing along with Status Quo records? "I did," he confirms. "It was good crack. The crowd went wild - every time."

Status Quo constitutes just one of many stages along Ronan O Snodaigh's road to percussive perfection, which also included the purchase of a bodhran in an Istanbul music shop. A Turkish bodhran? "Well. A skin stretched over a frame," he says. "Anyway, as soon as I saw that Turkish drum I had to have it. I'd been practising Lambeg playing, and I'd been using a big African drum - if you play at the rim it sounds like a bodhran, but because it's such a big drum you can get lots of welly out of it when you want it, you know? I've got three drums I practise on, and none of them are perfect. But I think if I just keep playing them, at some stage I'll know exactly what kind of drum I want - and then I'll get someone to make it."

A Turkish bodhran would actually be one of the less outlandish instruments listed on Kila's various album credits. Where do they find them - and how do they learn to play them? "We play at a lot of WOMAD festivals," explains Brian, "and they have stalls which sell instruments from all over the world. Take a charanga - a Peruvian guitar. You can't learn to play it like a Peruvian does, because they've been playing it since they were five. All you can do is apply your knowledge to it and hopefully get some sort of good sound out of it. You play with respect for their tradition, but within your own; it's the only way you can."

Not all Kila tracks are instrumentals; some have lyrics, mostly penned by Colm and Ronan O Snodaigh, many of them Ronan's extraordinary Afro as gaelige raps. "The words are in rhythm as I write them," he says, "and in songs such as An Tiomanai and Tine Lasta from the new album, Lemonade and Buns, it's just - like, a bunch of codes. `Do this, watch out for that, don't do that, don't step there, don't let that happen.' That kind of thing." As of last week, non-Irish speakers can tune in to English translations on the Kila website (www.kila.ie). "It's interesting, the translation," says Ronan. "In Irish one word will lead to another word. So when you're doing it in English, you wonder, `why did I say that after that?' "

On the cover of Lemonade and Buns the band dress up in frilly frocks borrowed from a passing theatre company. "It's a bit of a laugh," says Eoin. "It doesn't make any sense at all, but it takes some of the seriousness out of it." The album's title was intended to be equally frivolous, but it caused considerable consternation in America, where "buns" may still be gently rounded objects, but aren't usually consumed with afternoon tea. But then Kila have always had a wacky way with album titles, from the early exuberance of Mind the Gap to the laid-back vibe of Tog E Go Bog E. "We've had complaints about that, too, of course," says Brian. "It's grammatically wrong; in Irish, `take it easy' should actually be `Tog go Bog e'."

Those who are inclined to complain possibly haven't heard Ronan's account of the precise provenance of the phrase, though; "I was living in a squat in London, and there was a big Jamaican guy living next door, a Rastafarian, and after about a year he invited us in for a smoke. So we were all there sitting on his livingroom floor, and his wife and kids came back from somewhere and started freaking out. And he just turned around and said, `Tog e go bog e, mon' in this brilliant Jamaican accent."

For the present, taking it easy just isn't on the Kila agenda. Over the past couple of years they've performed in a 10-storey tower block in Tokyo and a cowshed in Corsica. They've toured Canada and Australia and have played at all sorts of festivals from a communist retrospective in Portugal to the Dead Sea Jazz Festival. This year's plans include gigs in Spain, France and the States as well as a big concert as part of the Irish contribution to Expo 2000 in Hanover in the summer.

It's all a far cry from their first gig at the Baggot Inn 12 years ago. By the end of this year, the name Kila will be familiar to an awful lot more people, both in Ireland and the wider world - though they still won't know exactly what it means. "When we came up with the name," says Eoin, "we didn't have a meaning for it at all. We were just toying around with sounds.

"Then after a gig at the Brazen Head, this Frenchman asked us did we have a name, and Ronan came out with Kila and it stuck. Since then we've heard that in Indian it means a fort, or something; and in Scots Gaelic it's a girl's name which means something amazing like `whose beauty can't even be described by poets'."

"And in Finnish it means `wedge'. And in Czech," adds Brian with an angelic smile, "it means `hernia'."

Kila play Dolan's Warehouse in Limerick next Friday, and kick off an Irish tour at the Black Box, Galway on April 13th. On April 27th they'll be at the Empire in Belfast and on Friday, April 28th they'll play the Olympia Theatre in Dublin as part of the Green Energy Festival; other dates to be announced. The album Lemonade and Buns is now available on the Kila Music label.