”It’s getting weird, really weird,” says a slightly troubled Simon Day. “There are just so many hangers-on.” Day, the lead singer and primary heart-throb with Ratcat, is playing table tennis backstage at the Sydney Entertainment Centre, and trying to fathom the band’s runaway success. Ratcat is playing the final show of a two week run through Australia’s largest arenas, as opening act on INXS’s X tour, and there’s an uneasy mix of elation and tension in the air.

The band is riding high on the back of Tingles, their mini-LP which has just hit Number One on the national charts, and the current rocket-like ascent of the single “Don’t Go Now.” While they’re ecstatic about their success and are clearly enjoying travelling first-class with Australia’s funk-rock superstars, the members’ lives are spinning-out as they make the overnight transition from cult heroes to national icons. Suddenly everyone - from the traditional rock & roll media, through to women’s fashion magazines and obsessed fans - wants a slice of the Ratcat pie and the trio doesn’t know where to turn.

”I get home,” says bass player, Amr Zaid, “and these people who come to our shows are there, sitting on the steps of the block of flats I live in. They’re just there so they can say that they hung around with someone from Ratcat. They try to be your friends, but they don’t really know me, and I don’t know them. It makes it really difficult to know on what level you’ve got to relate to people, whether they expect you to relate to them on a pop star level or whatever, ‘cause you now, I’m not.”

Later that evening their words spill into an ugly reality. The band had just left the stage after a frenetic rendition of “That Ain’t Bad” closed their half-hour set, when a solidly built guy confidently saunters past the first line of the venue’s security guards with a video carry-bag on his shoulder and an INXS “Wives” pass around his neck. Detecting the wrong pass the guards radio ahead and with military-like precision INXS’s security staff immediately swoop upon the offender. Initially, he claims he’s there to interview Ratcat, but when grilled further he changes his story, saying he’s a friend of the band who’s been invited backstage. An angry guard escorts him to Ratcat’s dressing room to verify the story, and while Day says that he knows the guy, he doesn’t know how and where he got the pass.

As the guard confiscates the pass and ushers the intruder to the exit Day is abused for forgetting who his friends are. “(Inner city band) Caligula are outside and they can’t get in; you guys are f*cked,” the tirade trails off. Day is upset that someone has lent this character a pass, but more that they’ve broken INXS’s strict backstage procedures. “It’s not our gig, we don’t make the rules and INXS have been fantastic to us,” says Day, shrugging his shoulders.

”A lot of people say ‘you’ve sold out, you’ve sold’,” Day sighs and continues, “but we don’t know how. We’re not different to what we’ve always been, we’ve just stuck to our guns and done what we enjoyed.” “We’ve sold out of the records, that’s all,” laughs drummer Andrew Polin, but clearly the matter hangs heavily on Day. “Like I had this argument with this girl recently,” the singer says, “she took my hat off my head, and I went ‘what are you doing, that’s my hat, you can’t have that’, and she said, ‘you’re public property now, of course I can,’ and I just went ‘what? F*ck you.’ You’ve got to be nice to people, but not when they over-step the line. I find myself becoming really aloof to people, I feel very guarded.”

Ratcat has turned the Australian music industry on its ear, and the world could well be next. A relatively primitive three-piece, Ratcat has succeeded on an agenda of simple guitar-pop love songs and boyish good looks. The surprise isn’t because the band has seemingly emerged from nowhere to sell an amazing forty-thousand copies of their album Blind Love in its first week of release. It’s simply that in a time of precise production values, $100 000 video-clips, lip-synced concerts and Milli Vanilli-like corporate strategies, Ratcat is an unexpected return to traditional rock & roll virtues.

For Australian music, more significantly, Ratcat is also perhaps symbolic of the loosening of the stranglehold of the old-school which has dominated this country’s stages and airwaves throughout the Eighties. Ratcat, along with metal bad-boys, the Screaming Jets, appear to have opened a floodgate that mainstream radio can’t deny, and a myriad of young acts, from the Clouds and the Falling Joys to the Baby Animals are charting in their wake.

True to Day’s earlier insistence, Ratcat’s success hasn’t come through any particular strategy or through changing. For a band that has been a popular inner-city drawcard for five years, Ratcat has managed to overthrow the mainstream charts in a few short months without losing any of its independent smarts.

Soundchecking at the Sydney Entertainment Centre, before the night’s performance, the band tear through ragged versions of Dinosaur Jr.’s grunge masterpiece “Freak Scene” and then their own “Skin,” sounding entirely incongruous with the venue’s usual fare. Later, however, when the band takes to the stage to the serrated edge riffing of “Tingles,” the crowd immediately responds to their feral attack.

Bassist Amr Zaid is wearing a T-shirt which champions Sydney noise merchants Nunbait, featuring an elderly nun being speared by a fish hook. His torn jeans and unkempt hair complete a decidedly non-pop star image. Andrew Polin is hidden behind his kit, furiously thumping away, while Day, in simple black jeans, sneakers and striped T-shirt provides the hook-laden distortion and the voice.

Essentially, there is little difference between this Ratcat set and one two years ago in front of a crammed, sweaty crowd at Sydney’s Petersham Inn or any number of the city’s smaller venues. INXS have generously allowed the band liberal use of their lights and production and Ratcat, with a big stage to fill, move around more than they might have previously and certainly they have honed their set for maximum audience thrills, but it remains a nothing more, or less, than a noisy, energetic pop fuzzfest.

Killing time between soundcheck and performance, manager Joe Segreto brings the band’s latest press and fan mail to their dressing room. Poring over it, Polin stops at a live review which appeared in Melbourne rock weekly Beat and reads aloud a line that concludes by describing Ratcat as “Australia’s first stadium garage band”, one short, neat grab that leaves the band both amused and flattered.

”These shows are full of screamers, it’s totally wild,” says Day and certainly this performance proves him right. The band’s bare-bones sound takes on a surprisingly loud, booming extra dimension in the massive auditorium, tipping the audience into a frenzy. A group of six teenagers have arranged fluro strips into a five meter RATCAT sign and each song is greeted with a hysteria, to match Beatlemania. When Day calls for the audience to provide a “10-1” countdown to ignite the track “Getting Away (From This World),” the response is near deafening. “And the under age shows we’ve played are insane,” Day enthuses. “The kids are so excited seeing a live band, and we’re so close in age to them that I think they get a real buzz from it.”

While the toughness of the band’s sound has enamoured them with males, Ratcat has very quickly become the favourite for teenage girls, who for too long have pursued the likes of New Kids On The Block, starved of hands-on idols. The bulk of the large, and ever-increasing, wad of fan mail the band receives is from sub-fifteen-year-old girls and the primary focus of the letters is Simon, the “spunk”. Out in the crowd, Day’s girlfriend, Mary Ann, sits alone, cutting a lonely-looking figure as the singer is pined-for by thousands of screaming girls. Later, she reveals that she’s had her first death threat from an obsessed fan, and if the threat was idle it still shook her.

The teen magazines, consequently, just can’t get enough of the band - as we go to press all of them feature either a Ratcat cover or a poster pull-out. However, if the band is flattered by the attention they’re also wary of being wrongly portrayed and type-cast.

“We’re definitely riding high on this wave of recognition,” Day explains. “Sure, we’ve always played really tight sets and had a healthy crowd, but television exposure’s huge. Two videos have totally changed our profile.” “Suddenly we’re in a very powerful position,” says Polin. “You’ve got people writing in wanting to know your views and likes and dislikes, you could really corrupt a lot of young people. I think it’s sad in a way because it increases your conscience. I’ve noticed in the other members of the band, and within myself, that it’s speeding-up the growing-up process, responsibility-wise and that’s really…bad,” Polin concludes, and while all three fall apart in laughter, he’s deadly serious. “The media’s a very difficult thing to learn how to manipulate,” Zaid opines. “Not manipulate in a bad way but to accurately get across what you want to get across. Initially, you go with the flow until you can get on top of it.”

The subject has obviously touched a Ratcat nerve. “We’ve got to be really careful from here,” Polin continues. “I used to go to concerts with my elder sister, to see the Ted Mulry Gang, Sherbet, and like Sherbert had some good songs but they become just a teen act and lost all their credibility. I don’t want that to happen to us. That’s the funny thing about where we are at the moment; all these 12 to 16-year-olds are writing to us and buying our records but they’re growing up quickly and a lot of changes take place in your life over those years. It’s very easy to get left behind by that kind of audience.”

It’s an audience which Ratcat never expected. The concept of the band being teen idols, baffles the three musicians more than anyone. Ratcat’s roots are with Sixties garage punk, the Ramones, Jesus & Mary Chain and the Pixies. This tradition is responsible for the heavy irony quotient in Day’s songs, their trash aesthetic and their buzzsaw sound. Ratcat have managed to crossover their underground sound without compromising in the least.

But while they are enjoying success wherever they find it, there is a sense in the band that it’s gone beyond their control. The band’s greatest fear is that they will be perceived as a “teen” band and lose their credibility with their original audience and their peers. “Unless,” Zaid counters, “you can reach something within those people which is a bit deeper than being just a pin-up on the wall. I think we can achieve that by telling people what we’re about and where we come from. If they understand our evolutionary process then they’ll understand that we can still be interesting, still fulfil something in them when they get older.”

Ratcat’s evolutionary process began in 1984, when Simon Day, then 18, was in his final year at Mosman High School, on Sydney’s lower-north shore. Day, an avid fan of punk, who had played guitar since his early teens, “decided during Maths class one Tuesday that (he and bass player Victor Levi) were going to form a band.” The following Friday, with six distortion pedals and a drum machine borrowed from a friend’s mother, Danger Mouse made its debut.

Drummer Andrew Polin, two years Day’s senior met the duo in 1985 and soon joined their rehearsals; the three-piece made its first performance as Ratcat at a friends 21st birthday party late that year. The band began performing on Sydney’s inner-city circuit, attracting a loyal following, smitten by the band’s edgy, accessible songs and garish imagery.

From the outset singer/guitarist Day was Ratcat’s dominant presence, writing the band’s original material and generating its comicbook artwork as part of his studies at art college. Before long, Ratcat attracted the attention of Sydney independent record label, Waterfront, recording the 1987 EP Ratcat, which included stage favourites, the original “Car Crash” and their spitfire rendition of Tommy James and the Shondells’ “I Think We’re Alone Now.”

Levi ultimately departed, being replaced by John McAteer. This line-up continued building Ratcat’s live profile and in 1989 recorded their debut album, the critically hailed This Nightmare. Day’s songwriting revealed a new maturity on tracks like “The Killing Joke” and a surrealistic adventurousness on “The Eyeball Mutiny,” while refining the band’s pop instincts.

During the late Eighties, Ratcat played consistently around Sydney’s small pubs - the Lansdowne, the Hopetoun, the Mosman Hotel - amongst the skate-thrash milieu that included the Hellmenn, the Hard Ons, Massappeal and others. There was a sense of community amongst these bands who felt themselves in opposition to mainstream commercial-radio rock. Their inspirations were chiefly late-Seventies punk and Eighties thrash and Ratcat were much an integral part of the scene. Ratcat manager, Joe Segreto, until recently, represented a stable of some seven such independent acts.

The line-up of Ratcat stabilised in 1989, when Amr Zaid, previously of marginal country-rock outfit the Bam Balams, took over the bass. Zaid, at 23, is Ratcat’s youngest and most reserved member. Softly spoken, Zaid is generally the last in the band to offer an opinion. Where Day’s fan mail refers to him as a “spunk”, Amr’s suggests that he’s a “really nice guy.”

Polin, or “Damage Don” as he is nicknamed - given because of his bleached blond hair (recalling Don Johnson, of Miami Vice fame) and his take no prisoners attitude - is the band’s most outspoken, humorous, and reportedly troublesome, member. “Andrew speaks his mind…with a loud tongue,” Day laughs. “Yeah, but why not? And I’ve always liked talking,” he laughs, “and being in a band gives you that sort of liberty, a chance to speak your mind.”

Day, meanwhile, is possessed of a disarmingly affable nature, and if he remains primarily unaffected by Ratcat’s successes, his wide-eyed enthusiasm is giving way to a certain guardedness. With his straight black hair, which constantly falls over his eyes, the androgynous prettiness of his face and his tall, wafer-thin build - and, more simply, that he is the band’s singer/guitarist/songwriter/artist - it was inevitable that Day was going to receive the bulk of the attention, often to the exclusion of Polin and Zaid.

”Every band or entity needs a focus,” says Zaid, “and Simon’s doing a great job being that. The only thing that bothers me is when people forget that there’s a band and that Ratcat operates as a band, a unit.” “There’s always been a sort of unconscious division of labour based on who can do things best,” Polin explains, “and Simon’s ended up doing the majority of that. And while Amr and I are writing more and more, I think on future albums you’ll still see that Simon has by far the majority of songs.”

Ratcat maintains, however, that it’s a democracy. The rule is that the band has to be unanimously happy with a song or an idea otherwise it doesn’t progress. Zaid says that this often works in Day’s detriment, given that he brings the majority of ideas. “I’ve always stressed to people that we’re a group,” Day says of the band’s internal dynamic. “It’s not me and my band, it’s actually a group. Sometimes I get sick of having to stand up and do all the talking, sometimes I wish I could sit back and watch for a while, but it just doesn’t happen that way.”

This Nightmare sold a respectable three thousand copies, but more importantly it inspired a bidding war for the band between three major record companies. Eventually, Ratcat signed to rooArt records and entered the studio with producer Nick Mainsbridge, recording seventeen songs on a tight budget. rooArt baulked at releasing the band’s album before Christmas 1990, fearing the stiff competition would swamp a young band. Instead, the label released Tingles, a six-track mini-LP of tracks rejected from the album, for the budget priced $4.99.

”The band needed some product in the stores while they were touring through the summer,” says rooArt’s then National Marketing and Sales Mangager, Fleur Sarfaty. “So the idea was to use Tingles as a step-marketing tool; to get the public and radio and television programmers used to the sound of the band and to keep the band’s old fans happy.”

Tingles was released in October and on the back of a concerted marketing campaign and the band’s relentless summer touring schedule - both headlining and playing major interstate supports with the Violent Femmes and the Ramones - it began climbing the charts. Initially, this was despite the resistance of mainstream radio and rock video shows. When those media capitulated and began featuring the track “That Ain’t Bad”, the mini-LP leapt into the Top Ten and eventually the Number One spot. The success of Tingles was a surprise to everyone - the band, the record company, the industry,” Sarfaty admits. “I mean, we always expected that Ratcat would be huge. It was just that Tingles exceeded expectations, not the band.”

Six weeks after the INXS shows, Ratcat are on the Eve of headlining their own national tour. Sitting in a coffee shop in Sydney’s Surry Hills, the trio is in a relaxed, playful mood, having just heard that Blind Love has debuted at Number One on the national album chart, with “Don’t Go Now,” simultaneously reaching the top spot on the singles chart. ”It’s a bit of an anti-climax really,” admits Simon Day, a little embarrassed. “Having a Number One with Tingles was more of a thrill, ‘cause it was the first.” And it wasn’t as though the news was unexpected; over 35 000 pre-release orders were taken for Blind Love, certifying it Gold before it even hit the stores - a feat normally only achieved by artists like John Farnham, Midnight Oil and INXS. ”It’s sort of like a Christmas present that you’re opening when you already know what it is,” says Zaid. “It gives me something new to stick in my Teenage Mutant Ninja Scrapbook,” laughs Polin, who actually owns one.

Blind Love is essentially a consolidation of Ratcat’s strengths. Moving from the infectious buzzsaw/bubblegum pop of “Baby Baby” and “Don’t Go Now” to more atonal noise excursions (“Run and Hide” and “Strange”) and the brooding epic “The End”, the album is, first and foremost, a celebration of volume and adrenalin and Simon Day’s trash pop imagery over style and grace.

It’s success is testament to the band’s persistence and refusal to compromise. As the band sees it, it gives them greater scope for future recording and the ability to take their music overseas. Currently, the band is in London, where Tingles has just been released.

”It’s good to get to that next level and work, even if it’s more full-on than I expected,” says Day, more philosophically. “It’s made it a little less of a struggle, and for all those earlier years it was a struggle. When we recorded Blind Love we allowed ourselves only $10 a day each to live on, we’ll have a little more next time. It’s funny the misconceptions people have,” the singer continues. “Like, some people think we’re rich already (laughs).”

Perhaps Ratcat’s success is best placed in context by a card the band received with its now typical mass of daily fan mail. Sent by Dreamie Time escorts, the card described how two girls, “have been writhing around in ecstacy in anticipation of Ratcat’s success” and encouraged the band to join the duo in celebration.

Given that Ratcat is currently the hottest band in the country, the attraction of groupies should not be surprising. But then Ratcat is a Number One band almost despite itself and maybe the escort agency have them sussed. Despite the band’s newfound celebrity, the card’s closing inscription still insisted, “You Pay, We Play.”