The Stool Pigeon

“By the way,” says CSS singer Lovefoxxx, “the first time we played in Newcastle we got a review in The Stool Pigeon, but we didn’t know, and it said, ‘We could be witnessing the beginning of the end for CSS.’”

“It was only because the sound was crap,” adds her bandmate Caro, “and the stage was like a half moon.”

“But, it was October 2006,” says Lovefoxxx, “it was only the beginning!”

It is now August 2008, and The Stool Pigeon is once again witness to CSS. But this time it’s neither the beginning, nor the beginning of the end. This is a band in full bloom: two albums, Cansei de Ser Sexy and Donkey, completed, two years of worldwide touring behind them, and they can tell a genuine rock’n’roll story of a swindling manager who was fired last year amongst revelations that the bands’ fees were being paid straight into his bank account. Read any amount of recent press and you will learn that he left debts so large that the band had to tour for four straight months to pay it off. At one point, times were so bad they couldn’t afford to go to the doctor or buy bottled water. Today, they are reluctant to talk about him, bored of confirming or refuting that most of the songs on Donkey are aimed in his direction.

“It’s something that I’ve learned,” says bassist and main songwriter Adriano. “Next time I’m not going to talk about the songs; I’m just going to say, you know, ‘Go figure.’”

It wouldn’t take that much figuring to imagine songs like ‘Rat Is Dead (Rage)’ concerns their recent troubles, and the temptation is to keep probing for reasons why Donkey feels so much angrier and more personal than their previous work. But it’s been a few months since the album was released, and the feeling from the band is that they’d rather concentrate on the present. Given the kind of exposure they’ve had since arguably becoming Brazil’s most successful pop group, they must be tired of giving the same answers, and indeed, ask them how they chose the title of the album and they bray at you like a pace of the animals in question. “It’s just our friend,” Adriano speed talks, rushing you through the subject, “the way she understands English is funny. She always says, ‘You’re late, you donkey,’ or, ‘You, you’re a donkey.’”

To his credit, he doesn’t say anything that sounds rehearsed or made up. He can’t be bothered to answer the question, and that’s that.

“I really think that this album was like an unwanted pregnancy,” Adriano continues, giggling, “like we were pregnant with the album and we didn’t know and suddenly it was done. There was this volleyball player in Brazil and she was pregnant and she didn’t notice until she was giving birth.”

Luisa, the quietest member of the group, pipes up: “She thought she had gas, or air.”

“I think they call it gas,” says Caro.

“We call it inner farts,” says guitarist Ana.

“Anyway,” continues Adriano, “we were pregnant with the donkey, like the volleyball player, and now we have a donkey.”

At this, the entire table bursts out laughing. There should have been a warning attached with this interview, some kind of message from journalists who have fallen along the way: keep up with CSS or you will find yourself seriously confused. They talk rapidly over each other, finishing sentences, offering alternate English words, pealing with laughter at the memory of some shared experience. They also have one of the most extensive collections of in-jokes you will ever come across. In our short conversation we span shit gigs, weird friends, My Super Sweet 16, Peter Andre (“is that the guy who looks like a meatball?”), the Oscars (“we want to go, but we want to be on the ground floor, and we want a table”), Mariah Carey riding a horse, and of course, the most poignant source of comedy: other people on YouTube.

“There’s this tranny called Big Vanessa who’s in a police office, ’cos she broke a messenger’s bike, ’cos he wouldn’t pay for a blow job,” says Lovefoxxx, in hysterics. “He had to give her 40, which is like 10 pounds, but he paid her 12. And he’s going, ‘I never saw her,’ and she’s saying, ‘Me and my friends saw him many, many times. This is a big faggot. He sucks the dick of the faggot on the street. He sucks the dick of all the faggots.’”

Tiny, wide-eyed, and physically shaking from laughter, Lovefoxxx doesn’t seem like she could come up with such outlandishly filthy language and, in fact, her child-like enjoyment of the story somehow strips it of any offence it might have caused. But, of course, that’s the beauty of CSS: they can invite you to lick their “art tit” and call Paris Hilton a bitch, and they can swear and curse and tell newspapers that they hope cancer catches up with their old manager soon, but somehow you just laugh along with them, because no matter what they do, they make it look like fun. Such commitment to good times is what they started the band for in the first place, and despite a couple of angry songs they’ve managed to stay remarkably true to their brief.

“We never conceptualise anything,” says Ana, “and we never make statements. We just do things that we feel and have fun, treat everything we do like an inside joke.”

It is, they say, a philosophy that can be summed up by “entertaining people, entertaining ourselves”, and the most interesting aspect of it is that it covers more than just the music. From Adriano’s early silkscreen posters, to Luisa’s photographs on the album inlay, to the glass donkey that Lovefoxxx made for the cover, you can be sure that every detail of CSS has been brought to you by the band themselves, right down to the cardboard cut-outs and balloons in their stage set.

“Like John Waters,” says Lovefoxxx, referencing the deepest of the band’s obsessions. “He has no message with his movies, just entertaining people, entertaining himself, with his friends.”

There is one thing, however, you can expect never to see in a CSS stage set.

“We would like the Spice Girls’ old backdrops,” confides Lovefoxxx, “but we don’t have access to them. You know rich people... they don’t like to give anything away to the third worlders. It’s not fair trade.”

Stifling the inevitable giggles, she adds: “But maybe Coldplay will support us in this.”

“Yeah,” says Adriano, “because we are a cause. Chris Martin, if you’re reading this, support us for a cause, support the third world.”

And with that, the band are hysterical again, and the rest of the interview is undecipherable.

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