The interview with Luscious Jackson was due to start five minutes ago, and I'm trying to convince myself that I'm a fully functioning member of this planet. I've been thoroughly briefed regarding the New York trio's machine-gun wit and devastatingly accurate ironic artillery, so I prepare for our encounter in the only sensible way with three too many beers, two-and-a-half hours' sleep and a high-speed jog through midday Kensington traffic.
"We're not feeling very cohesive today," explains drummer Kate Schellenbach. My relief at catching Luscious Jackson at their most sluggish, however, is shortlived; when their coffee arrives, Kate, bassist Gabby Glaser and guitarist Jill Cunniff begin - very neatly, very ruthlessly - to roast me alive. Luscious Jackson don't do quotes; they do bullet-holes, passing the weapon around during sentences, finishing each other's thoughts, straight-faced, in superquick time. Challenging them to a game of quip tennis would be difficult under normal circumstances, never mind in this sleep-deprived state. Take the exchange, for example, which occurs after I suggest that LJ's lyrics hint at turbulent love lives.
Jill: "I've just got married."
Gabby (without missing a beat): "She got married to my ex-husband."
Jill: "We don't talk about it. It was pretty turbulent."
Gabby: "She married Mick Fleetwood. We tried the three thing, but I kept smelling Jill's perfume on him, and it became too much."
Kate: "I just felt totally alienated by the whole thing."
Gabby: "Stevie Nicks was trying for Kate."
Kate: "But I'm not into camel dancing."
Attempting to keep pace is pointless.
Occasionally Luscious Jackson come back down to join me in the world of the hard-of-thinking, and talk about their new album, Electric Honey. "We've been told it's the best music in the world to run to, do a striptease to and clean the cooker to," Kate says. It seems more optimistic than their previous album, the moody, jam-orientated Fever In Fever Out.
"I'm feeling more optimistic," quips Jill. "My husband's doing my laundry as we speak." Some other information about Electric Honey: it's the funkiest, sexiest, most self-assured record of the summer. It features Debbie Harry speaking a feminist reprise of her intro to X Offender: "I saw you standing on the corner/ You thought you looked so big and fine/ Little did you know I didn't have you on my mind." Its interlacing of disco, punk, funk, hiphop and sisters-together attitude seems so obvious you wonder why no-one invented it earlier.
Last night, Luscious Jackson staged a phone-in competition, during which listeners were required to guess what the title of their latest single, Ladyfingers, referred to. "Some people thought it was an ugly plant," Kate laughs. "Other people thought it was a sex tool, or okra. It's actually the cake you get at the bottom of tiramisu."
Jill: "I'm not singing about cake, though. It's about a light touch, sweetness." Kate: "You didn't think it was perverted when you were singing it, but we come to Europe and it's like: `What's this about lesbian sex?' " A bit like 1994's Deep Shag single, then? "Yeah. Of course. That was about Jill's carpet."
If Luscious Jackson talk as though they can count off their bandmates' thought patterns, that's probably because they've lived like sisters since the early 1980s, when, as underage punkettes, they would blag their way into New York's most cutting-edge punk, reggae, hip hop and new wave gigs. All three claim that their musical tastes were more or less moulded for good at 14. Before they were out of high school, Kate had drummed in the pubescent version of the Beastie Boys, and Gabby had spent two summers working in London, in a bar and a factory that made punk badges. Gabby likes to try out her English accent now and again, which, it has to be said, is abysmal.
They're a well-travelled band, but they'll always be New York girls. "We don't have to travel; all the cultures and ethnicities are at home," insists Jill. Their best songs - City Song, Devotion, Energy Sucker - are a great advert for the urban sprawl, smelling and tasting of the communal buzz (rather than the loneliness) of the endless metropolis. Here is the warm, sensuous antidote to the emotionless industrial alienation of Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson.
When I tell them I'd read that they moved to the suburbs to record Fever In Fever Out, they give me the sort of horrified look that they probably normally reserve for the question "What's it like being women in rock music?" Jill growls: "You must have read that in an English interview. They tend to make those up." Kate: "No, but honestly, I live on a ranch and raise free-range chickens. It's this amazing place I found in Manhattan." Oh, good. It's wind-up-thebrain-dead-journalist time again.
COULD they live in London? "Oh yeah," replies Gabby. "But I hear the pollution's killing people." And it isn't in New York? "The cars give off fewer fumes in America," claims Kate. "But I live in the meat-packing district and the rotting smells are really bad in the summertime. I nearly tripped up on a side of beef the other day."
Originally labelled The Beastie Girls and signed to the Beasties's Grand Royal empire, Luscious Jackson has found its connections with the sexist hooligans-turned-PC geeks something of a ball and chain. And, as they'll be sure to tell you, they don't sound anything like female Beasties. Where the Beasties yelp, Luscious Jackson purr; where the Beasties rock, Luscious Jackson groove; where the Beasties goof around like nerdy schoolkids, Luscious Jackson bask in their own radiant sexuality.
The biggest thing the two groups have in common is their penchant for basketball (LJ's name is taken from that of a former pro player), which Gabby and Kate play every week in the winter. Plotting my revenge for earlier, I take the opportunity to adopt the tactic of provocation. Shouldn't girls be playing netball? I ask.
"Oh yeah?!!" exclaims Gabby, attacking my shoulder. "We'll take you on right now!" offers Kate. Jill queries: "What is netball anyway?" It's like basketball, but you don't have to run as much. "I know why that is. They used to believe that if girls did strenuous activities their uteruses would fall out," explains Kate, who seems to have an insight into areas of human knowledge beyond that of any drummer I've ever met.
"There's a lot of bad information out there," philosophises Jill.
"And most of it," says Kate, "comes from people who live in the suburbs."
Electric Honey is available on Capitol Records from EMI