From solvent-abusing child rock stars to pop metal supremos - Steve and Jeff McDonald tell the REDD KROSS story to Mark Blake.

There's an old show business saying about never working with children or animals. If in doubt, ask Black Flag, the South Californian hardcore band. Back in 1979 they let the fledgling Redd Kross (at the time going under the adapted name of Red Cross) open a show for them at Redondo Beach. The Kross, fronted by 15 year-old Jeff McDonald and his 12 year-old brother Steve, received a riotous reception; Black Flag found themselves pelted with water melons.

14 years on and Redd Kross are old enough to play their own shows. They recently appeared at the Phoenix Festival, and they have a new album, Phase Shifter, released through This Way Up Records in September. The band's fifth record, it fuses the sound of well-thrashed guitars with some of the sweetest pop'n'roll hammonies this side of Cheap Trick's In Color.

In a Kensington hotel room, Redd Kross bassist Steve McDonald stands in front of the mirror, eating cookies from a plastic bag and running mousse through his shoulder-length hair. He's wearing boxer shorts matched with the kind of socks that normally end up hidden in the bottom drawer on Boxing Day. His guitarist brother Jeff ambles into the room, his own locks dyed a spectacular Morticia Addams black. Keyboard player Gere Fennelly languishes on the bed. There is a Philip K Dick novel on the table and Sesame Street flickering away on the TV with the sound turned down.

"It was a lot of punk and popcorn," laughs Jeff, when asked about the first Redd Kross record, Born Innocent, in 1981. "We were still kids. Everyone was getting into the LA hardcore scene and we watched a lot of our friends and fellow musicians following suit. There was all this fake political shit and a lot of it was very contrived."

"We went back to our bedrooms and back to our Beatles and Rolling Stones records," drawls Steve. "And the record we ended up making was very hizarre. It was a punk album with all these other influences picked up from being teenagers watching too much television. We became underground teen idols."

The band fell apart within months, with drummer Janet Housdon and guitatist Tracy Lea disappearing bach to high school. The brothers carried on sniffing spray paint in their rehearsal studio, and talked their parents - rumours once circulated that the McDonalds were the offspring of '70s folk songstress Melanie - into fronting the money for another record.

"Teen Babes From Monsanto was our tribute album to all the bands we'd grown up on," giggles Steve. "We covered songs by everyone from the Shangri Las to Kiss. We did 'Anne', by the Stooges, and this was in 1984, when no one else was acknowledging the Stooges. We did a Bowie song from The Man Who Sold The World..."

"And the Rolling Stones," clucks Jeff. They exchange band names and song titles between them in the kind of airy LA accents not nommally heard outside the dressing rooms on the set of Beverly Hills 90210.

Then in 1987, having weaned themselves off various mind-bending substances, the brothers cut the highly praised 'Neurotica' album. Guitarist Robert Hecker had been added to a line-up that had previously included Circle Jerks' Greg Hetson, Black Flag's Ron Reyes, and Vicki Peterson, later of the Bangles.

Keyboard player Gere joined up around the time of the 'Third Eye' album. the band's major sublime pop metal major label debut in 1991. She had known the brothers for some time.

"They used to stay in this motel in San Francisco next door to the house where I lived," she recalls. "l always used to laugh because they had such long hair and drove around in this stagon wagon with a U-Haul on the back. I thought they looked so strange."

Dumped by Atlantic Records, and with 'Third Eye' consigned to obscurity almost as soon as it was released, Redd Kross' return to recording activity came earlier this year with a deal through This Way Up and the single 'Switchblade Sister' - a slice of rampant bubblegum metal. But what about the naked women?

Jeff rises to the bait: "The one on the cover of 'Third Eye' was the actress Sofia Coppola, the daughter of (film director) Francis Ford Coppola. The one on the sleeve of 'Switchblade Sister' was from a postcatd a friend of ours found in a flea market. We just thought it was the coolest image - a naked woman with platform shoes, a Flo And Eddie hairstyle and holding a bass guitar! A few journalists - male ones - have called us sexist assholes, but most people aren't taking it that seriously."

With a visual image steeped in dayglo, paisley and all manner of hippy paraphemalia - Jeff even sports a Jellyfish T-shirt for good measure - Redd Kross have the look of Haight Ashbury dropouts and the sound of the Beatles dragged through a fuzz box by Sonic Youth.

"Thurston Moore was a big fan of ours," offers Steve, remembering the patronage of the Sonic Youth guitarist. "He loved us when we were kids."

Redd Kross - The boys done good.

By: Mark Blake