The Manhattan Transfer are 'Tonin' up

(Feb. 16, 1995)

Tim Hauser would just as soon forget about The Manhattan Transfer's two-album sojourn with Columbia Records.

With the just-released "Tonin' " LP, featuring cover versions of '50s and '60s classics, the multi-Grammy Award-winning vocal group is back on Atlantic, where they reigned for 13 years.

For Hauser, it's as if they never left.

"We were never unhappy (at Atlantic), in terms of the way we were treated," he said recently from his home in Studio City, Calif. "Columbia just offered us what we thought was a great deal, and it turned out to be a nightmare. It was strictly a business thing.

"After the dream turned into a nightmare at Columbia, Atlantic wanted us to come back, and we were fortunate enough to get out and come back."

When asked who they wanted to produce their "Tonin' " collaboration with pop and R&B greats, the Transfer had only person in mind: Arif Mardin.

"Turns out he was who they wanted to do it, too," Hauser said. "He's such a great producer and someone we've known for over 20 years, when we cut our first album at Atlantic in New York in 1975. He was in the studio at the same time working on the Average White Band's second album, and so we were always up there in the evenings at the same time, and we became very friendly with him."

The "Tonin' " concept came from Doug Morris, head of the Warner labels, after he attended a Rhythm & Blues Foundation awards dinner and saw R&B legends performing on stage.

"We modified it somewhat," Hauser said. "It didn't become a rhythm and blues album per se, but it was still the idea of working with our contemporaries, our peers."

Those peers include Phil Collins, Bette Midler, Smokey Robinson, B.B. King, former Rascals singer Felix Cavaliere, James Taylor and Laura Nyro. The first single, "Let's Hang On," teams the Transfer - Hauser, Cheryl Bentyne, Alan Paul and Janis Siegel - with Frankie Valli of the Four Seasons.

Despite the Transfer's brief stay at Columbia, they continued their streak of Grammy wins. Each of their past six studio albums since 1979 have yielded at least one award. This year, they're nominated for Best Children's Recording for "The Manhattan Transfer Meets Tubby the Tuba."

"Just as we had left Columbia, and before we signed with Atlantic, there was this little period of where we were like a ship without a flag or a country," Hauser said. "This small label (Summit) came to our agent and asked us if we'd be interesting in doing 'Tubby the Tuba.' We loved the idea.

"It was originally written in 1945 by Paul Tripp, who's still alive. He wrote these four stories and because the technology at the time was 78 (rpm) records, it all had to be edited because they couldn't put the full score on a record, much less all the stories.

"Our record is the first time the entire scores of the four stories have been done and presented that way. It's very specific where you say your lines and where the music plays. ... We were rolling on the floor. Janis was about seven months pregnant, and in between takes, she'd be lying on the floor resting sideways. It was really a blast."

BWF (before we forget): The Manhattan Transfer returned in 1997 with the country swing album, "Swing." ... Fans can send e-mail to TMTFANCLUB@aol.com, or check them out on the Web @ www..west.net/~jrpprod/tmt/tmt.html.

'Earthbound' Billy Mann has his feet firmly planted

(July 19, 1998)

Billy Mann has had a humbling career, in more ways than one.

The New York-based singer-songwriter's self-titled debut album in 1995 was a favorite among critics but wasn't a big seller. But then Celine Dion came along, covered a pair of his songs ("You Only Love Once" and "Treat Her Like a Lady") and he's still very much in the game.

He has written songs for Chaka Khan, Diana King, Boyzone, the late Phyllis Hyman and Stephen Bishop. More impressively, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame legend Carole King has taken him under her wing and helped nurture his gift for prose. She also co-wrote a track and played piano and sang backup on Mann's recently released DV8/A&M album, "Earthbound."

Mann can't believe his good fortune.

"My publisher hooked me up with Carole on my first album," Mann said recently, "and she really dug it and wanted to write with me, which of course flipped me out. She's a really generous human being. I can't say enough good things about her. And she's this multifaceted, multitalented human being who's so generous with her talents.

"I think a lot of times, if you're a new artist, you come out with a new record, you can sort of worry to yourself, 'Ah, am I good enough?' But when you hook up with somebody like Carole and they lend you that confidence, they take away that idea in your head, 'Am I on the right track?' "

The Celine Dion experience also allayed any fears he might have had.

"She recorded one of my songs from my first album and now she's up to 23 million copies," Mann said, "so I can't say, 'My first album wasn't a big success, so therefore the music wasn't good.'

"It's the ultimate in art-meets-commercial vindication. It was the same song as the one before but why does it sell 20-some million copies on one person's record and wouldn't sell a million on my first record? It's the whole myth that the music industry portrays, that these people have magic ears on what's a hit and what isn't. It's all a bunch of shit. It's half talent and half lottery ticket."

"Earthbound" lives up to the challenge. It has a quiet, reflective quality, which explains why Mann is often compared to Cat Stevens and Jackson Browne, and it has an inspired, heartfelt optimism. Mann chose that path, even though he suffered a devastating personal loss two years ago.

Shortly after Mann proposed to his girlfriend, Rema, in 1995, doctors told her she had cancer. They married a few weeks later. She died within a year.

"It's still hard for me to talk about it," Mann said. "I know this sounds anecdotal, but I wouldn't trade a day of my life. I feel like I was very lucky that I met somebody and felt that kind of intimacy with a woman.

"We don't live in a world where we're comfortable with dying; there are other cultures that celebrate dying and religions that have a whole handbook on what to do when somebody dies. But it just humbled me in a way that's everlasting. I realized how not unique I am, how none of us are unique. Nothing that I've been through is in any way unique. The difficult part is that I was in my early 20s and fell in a love with a girl and the two of us planned on spending our lives together and it got cut short, and you don't expect that. It doesn't fall into the handbook. The people around me rallied."

The album title came from a psychic he had seen on a TV talk show.

"I had heard this psychic saying you don't want the people that you lose to be earthbound," Mann said, "that you don't want your grief holding them back from going to where they have to go. You have to let them go, and it's a very difficult thing to do."

BWF (before we forget): For more on Billy Mann, visit www.billymann.com or www.msopr.com.

Joe Mardin makes a name for himself

(Sept. 27, 1998)

In high school, Joe Mardin didn't need any career counseling. The son of legendary producer and Atlantic Records senior vice president Arif Mardin knew his calling early on.

Any kid hanging around Atlantic's recording studios, even during summer vacations, couldn't help but get involved in music.

"At a certain point, I used to spend all my free time at the studio when I was a teenager," Joe Mardin said recently. "Friday nights, I'd be there, and over the weekends, I'd sneak into rooms and mix tapes or watch sessions. I remember when (Aretha Franklin's) 'Until You Come Back to Me' was recorded; I remember being there and watching it when I was probably about 9. I had a wonderful childhood."

Even though his father has had a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame career, Mardin didn't want anything handed to him on a silver platter. He wanted to earn his wings.

His first break came in 1984 when, as a junior at Berklee College of Music, he and classmate Alec Milstein were working on a project with Arif Mardin. At the same time, his father also was producing Chaka Khan's Grammy-winning "Feel For You" album. She overheard "Caught in the Act," one of the Mardin-Milstein collaborations, and insisted on using it for her album, without changing a note.

That opened more doors. In the past 12 years, Mardin has worked as producer, arranger, background singer, drummer and keyboard programmer for such artists as Franklin, Roberta Flack, Vanessa Williams, Anita Baker, Bette Midler, George Benson and Culture Club. He also conducted and arranged a 50-piece orchestra for "In From the Storm," BMG Classics' symphonic tribute to Jimi Hendrix.

Mardin wears another hat, that of a label owner. Two years ago, he launched his NuNoise label specifically to release the self-titled debut album for the alternative rock quartet Danielle's Mouth, fronted by singer-guitarist Danielle Gerber. Mardin also happened to be the group's drummer, but for the untitled follow-up album, to be distributed next year via Atlantic, Danielle's Mouth essentially became a solo project for Gerber, with Mardin serving as producer.

"We've been working on the demos in my studio," Mardin said. "Danielle's a real singer with a huge range of emotion. Great lyrics, very poetic, but this silky-smooth voice she has contrasts with her guitar-playing style, which is kind of raunchy and blues-influenced. You have this great bittersweet-and-sour mix happening with her artistry. The last record, that was backed up by a rock band. On this record, it's a slightly different twist, more drum loops, more R&B-influenced on the bottom end."

Mardin has devoted so much time to Danielle's Mouth that he hasn't begun to think about what's next on his agenda.

"It's funny," he said, "the logistics and everything are weighing down on me so heavy and we have so much work and we have so many songs that we're considering that I haven't even thought about anything beyond this project. We're really trying to turn this into something special."

Marillion's 'experiment' is in its 10th year

(Dec. 6, 1998)

It took several years and many wads of crumpled-up scratch paper, but Marillion lead singer Steve Hogarth finally has written his definitive song about the rise and fall of a rock 'n' roll animal.

"Three Minute Boy," off the British rock quintet's EagleRock/Velvel debut album "Radiation" (released Oct. 27), is a behavorial study of a young man who longs for rock stardom and gets his wish but is faced with more than he can handle emotionally. He's "here today, gone this afternoon, another tune we almost remember."

"Over the last few years, I've been trying to write about what it's like to be famous and also try and articulate the psychological damage that fame does to people," Hogarth said recently. "That's from a point of view from what I've read and witnessed around me, and it's also from a point of view of what I've felt myself and the potential for that self-destruction. In becoming aware of it, I can guard against it. Only up to a point, there's still a degree to which fame unhinges a person. There's a hundred reasons of how that process works.

"Back when we did (the 1995 LP) 'Afraid of Sunlight,' I was trying to examine that with my tongue in my cheek, more pointedly with a song called 'King.' It was inspired by the undoing of O.J. Simpson and the undoing of Elvis and the suicide of Kurt Cobain. I also took a stab at it in a song called 'You Dinosaur Thing,' which is on the solo album I did; that song is about fashion, but it's a song about the star as fashion victim and what a star does after fashion moves on and leaves him out in the cold and the fact that rock 'n' roll stars aren't supposed to get old, that when they do get old they become for the most part a creature to be ridiculed and no longer taken seriously as a creative artist."

The three-minute kid, who spent his youth "staring at the TV watching other people have fun," writes a song on a lark and by some quirk of fate it becomes a massive international hit.

"He becomes a big star," Hogarth said, "and there's that sudden massive change of his own self-image, from being nothing to being everything."

In typical rock fashion, the newcomer is romantically linked with an actress.

"I was really thinking of Liam (Gallagher of Oasis) and Patsy Kensit, how a rock star's girlfriend has to measure up," Hogarth said. "There's a mechanism whereby certain rock 'n' roll stars try to live the life that's expected of them and that's happened again with Noel Gallagher (Liam's brother) here in England; he's bought this sprawling countryhouse and he's trying to build his own version of Graceland inside it. It's become kind of a shrine to the Beatles and to himself."

From start to finish, "Three Minute Boy" is riddled with classic-rock references.

"First of all, there are obvious references in the musical style," Hogarth said. "I was trying to make a marriage between the 'Hunky Dory' period of David Bowie and 'Hey Jude' of the Beatles. The Beatles get a mention in the line 'Now they scream, as they run after him, like a dream, like Elvis and the Beatles,' about these kids chasing him down the street.

"There are many, many references, some are overt lines that I've stolen, like 'All the money's gone' is stolen from side 2 of 'Abbey Road.' 'The girlfriend's gone off with the Jag, gone back to her mum and dad' is stolen from a Kinks song called 'Sunday Afternoon,' where the second verse says 'The girlfriend's gone off with my car and gone back to her ma and pa with tales of drunkenness and cruelty.' It's out of respect to Ray Davies, and there's a nod of respect toward Lennon and McCartney here and there. And the big movement where it suddenly goes from piano into the big change of rhythm, that's kind of a parody of the middle of 'Space Oddity.'

"The whole song is a wrapped-up mishmash of the history of rock 'n' roll and telling the story of this young kid who becomes famous and makes all the same mistakes. That isn't to say it's his fault, because it's very hard not to make those mistakes when the whole thing happens to you. They're not even mistakes, they're just cause and effect."

Hogarth easily could have fallen victim to the rock trap himself when he replaced Fish as Marillion's lead singer 10 years ago. At the time, the artsy rockers - guitarist Steve Rothery, keyboardist Mark Kelly, bassist Pete Trewavas and drummer Ian Mosley - were known worldwide for their 1985 hit, "Kayleigh," and a series of melodically and lyrically complex albums.

Two things were in Hogarth's favor: He was 30 when he joined the band in April 1989, and he had experience in other bands, namely The Europeans and How We Live.

"If it happened when I was 22, I think it would've unzipped me," Hogarth said, "but my skin had become thickened with a few layers of cynicism by then. Also, I had a lot of good people around me, by that I mean the rest of the band, because these guys had already been there and done it. It hadn't really gone to their heads; they dealt with it quite well.

"I suppose I was catching them down the other side of the mountain, because it must've come as a terrible shock to them when Fish left and they all had to come to terms with that. In that sense, that brought them down from their cloud of fame and success and they had to think long and hard about who they were, what they were, why they respected themselves.

"I met them at what was a really good time; I met four guys who were very relaxed. They didn't seem at all worried about the fact that there wasn't a singer anymore and they needed a new one. They didn't seem to be in a terrible hurry, and they didn't seem insecure about the future. They were all like, 'It'll be fine.' "

Best of all, Hogarth said, he wasn't pressured by anyone to emulate Fish's Peter Gabriel-influenced style.

"When I first met these guys, I said, 'What do you want me to do?' " Hogarth said. "What they could've done was put their last record on and said, 'It sold this many million copies, and do you think you can do that? Because if you can, we can all make a lot of money.' If they wanted me to sound like Fish, I wouldn't have joined the band. No amount of money would've been worth that.

"As luck would have it, when I asked them what they wanted me to do, they just said, 'We've heard what you do and we really like it. We just want you to do what you do, and we'll do what we do and we'll marry it all together and we'll see what happens.' Creatively, I had nothing to live up to. It was an experiment. All I had to do was excel within my own idea of what excellence is."

The experiment has lasted 10 years, longer than Fish's reign. Hogarth again cites his band mates' resolve.

"The most important consideration for them," he said, "is being natural, making exactly the music they feel like making at any given moment, saying exactly what they feel like saying without any consideration as to A) what the fans might want or B) what the marketplace demands or C) what the record company wants. I can honestly tell you that none of us give that a thought."

BWF (before we forget): Radiate with Marillion on the Web @ www.marillion.com. ... The Marillion album discography - "Script for a Jester's Tear" (Capitol, 1983); "Fugazi" (1984); "Real to Reel" (1984, live/U.K. release); "Misplaced Childhood" (1985); "Brief Encounter" EP (1986, live/B-sides); "Clutching at Straws" (1987); "B-Sides Themselves" (1988); "The Thieving Magpie" (1988, live); "Season's End" (1989); "Holidays in Eden" (I.R.S., 1991); "A Singles Collection 1982-1992" (1992, U.K. release); "Six of One, Half-Dozen of the Other" (I.R.S., 1992, U.S. release); "Brave" (1994); "Afraid of Sunlight" (1995); "Made Again" (1996); "This Strange Engine" (1997); "Radiation" (EagleRock/Velvel, 1998).

Market has all the right goods

(Sept. 6, 1998)

Tori Amos, Vince Gill, Buddy Guy, Bob Mould and Joe Satriani have little in common musically, but they and other guest-artist judges were on the same page when they crowned New York's genre-bending quartet Market as Musician magazine's Best Unsigned Band of 1997.

They're not unsigned anymore. The group is now aligned with Interscope Records, and its first single, the alluring "M6," has been shipped to radio, well in advance of the February release of its self-titled album.

"You know those goody bags you get at CMJ (magazine's) festival?" the group's DJ, Jimmy Connolly, said recently after a filling lunch at a Southern-style restaurant in the Village. "They had a Musician magazine in there and there was a best unsigned band competition form inside. I'm sitting there going, 'Hey, you guys, there's gonna be a bunch of guitar bands entering this thing; only guitar players read this magazine. Let's enter. Maybe they'll think we suck, who cares,' and we ended up winning. How's that?"

Wall Street investors may be enduring white-knuckle moments now, but Interscope has a solid investment in Market. In return, the band posts a potentially profitable sound - a little bit trip-hop and acid jazz, some melodic pop, a touch of Cocteau Twins and some underlining sly funk.

"Lately, I've been telling people we're the American Massive Attack," Connolly said, "but I don't think even that or any other comparisons do us justice. We like Massive Attack and Portishead and Tricky, but we also like Cole Porter, Dizzy Gillespie and the Sex Pistols. They haven't come up with a name for Market music yet, I don't think. Except (keyboardist) Adam (Kling) came up with 'sex-hop.' That works."

The group's seeds unwittingly were planted in 1993 when singer Peg Jameson, then a film student at NYU, met percussionist Phil Painson at a rooftop party.

"I was doing my senior film and I wanted a song for it," Jameson said. "I had done some studio work and then did some stuff with Phil, but we really wanted to do this one song, so he introduced me to Adam and Jimmy. We went down there and put this track together, did a quick vocal and it was really, really cool. We did other things for a while, kind of our own stuff, but we didn't really know when we did that one track that it would be us forming a project together."

Then came an offer to do instrumental music for a CD-ROM game.

"From there, we took the music from the CD-ROM and burned our own CDs," Painson said, "and I went around to different people and played it for them. People would say, 'That's cool, that's nice, but there's no vocals.' I was like, 'So?' "

Jameson eventually eased her way up to the microphone permanently, her sultry, soul-bearing vocals meshing beautifully with her band mates' slow churning rhythms. They pieced together a five-song EP on their own and, through a friend, gave a copy of the demo to a writer at CMJ. A glowing, one-paragraph review led to immediate big-label interest.

"When we had the demo tape done," Connolly said, "I remember driving home one night really late with Adam and we were playing the tape really loud in the car, and I looked over at him and we both said at the same time, 'This is so dope, man.' That was right before our first shows and everything.

"At first, when we first mailed out the demos, we got a lot of mixed reactions. We had a lot of people telling us it was missing stuff, that there were no guitar solos and 'Can you add a sax solo here? Can you put a drum fill there?' If you keep doing what you're doing, somebody will finally recognize it for what it is.

"When we got the CMJ article, that's when people from California were calling. Geffen called, Epic called, Elektra, Warner Bros. ... from that one little blurb in CMJ. That's when it hit us, 'Oh, man, we gotta do more shows.' "

They plugged away on the East Village club circuit and developed a following. And through it all, Market stuck to its guns, Jameson said.

"We had one person from a label come down and hang out with us in the studio and he kept making suggestions," she said. "Basically, he wanted us to sound like Portishead. We were doing this music before Portishead even came out. This is just the kind of music we all would've done regardless of whether Portishead or Tricky had ever existed.

"We all know lots of people who have their own little studio setups. They're people who didn't really get into guitars as kids and instead got into sequencers, samplers, synthesizers or turntables and decided to create music that way and were into music that was created that way. That's the only similarity between us and Portishead, that we work in a studio."

In the end, Interscope won hands down, Kling said.

"They were the only label out of all of them that was actually giving us some kind of hope, a deal, some money, some anything," he said. "All the other labels were giving us the run-around, like 'Yeah, we wanna do something. A developmental deal,' or 'We want you to do the demo again' and 'We want to hire a producer to work on your demo.' Interscope was the only ones who were feeling it for what it was and not feeling it for what it could be in their minds."

What's their gut feeling on how radio and the public will respond to "M6" and the impending album? Each member states their piece.

Painson: "They have to realize this is good music. It's not offensive to anybody, it's very happy, which separates us from the Brits. We're not caught up in our stuff, we lighten up. We have a sense of humor."

Jameson: "If it gets a chance to get out there, if people get a chance to hear it, it's some pretty seductive shit. People will find themselves hearing the melodies in their head after they've heard it only a couple times. They won't be able to get it out of their heads."

Kling: "I look at Market the way I look at the year. It starts out cold, it gets warmer, it gets hot and it gets cold again, then it gets really, really cold."

Connolly: "We have serious potential to blow up the spot. If radio opens its eyes, I think they'll find we've got a song for each and every station in every different market, and that's part of the way we came up with the name. My other gut feeling is for some more blueberry pancakes."

BWF (before we forget): Shop with Market on the Web @ www.marketnyc.com.

Waiting is over for Amanda Marshall

(April 25, 1996)

The day before her first stint opening for Tears For Fears, Canadian singer Amanda Marshall is calm as a cucumber even after a fire in her Miami hotel knocked out electricity and telephone service and forced her to new accommodations.

Some would see that as a bad omen, but not Marshall, who at 23 is remarkably conditioned for the unexpected. It comes from confidence in herself and her powerful voice, discovered by Jeff Healey at a club in Toronto when she was 17.

"I went down to Grossman's blues club on the advice of Jeff," Marshall said recently. "I met him the night before, and he invited me up to jam with them the next day. It was a natural progression for me from there, I was always involved in music."

Soon, Marshall was signed to Columbia, but they parted ways before an album was made.

"The Columbia deal came and went quickly, three months," she said. "I was really young. I had no clear perspective, no game plan. Had I stuck it out, the record wouldn't have been bad, but I probably wouldn't have been happy with it."

Good thing she waited: She later signed with Sony Music Canada, teamed with songwriters Christopher Ward, Marc Jordan and David Tyson and recorded her self-titled debut album at Tyson's studio in Los Angeles. The LP became an instant hit back home, earning her a Juno Award nomination for best new artist (Ashley MacIsaac was the victor). Her latest single, "Birmingham," peaked at No. 3 in Canada earlier this month.

Now she's taking on the states, where the album (on Epic here) will be out May 7.

Some critics have likened her booming style to Janis Joplin, but she has more in common with Sheryl Crow and Melissa Etheridge.

"It's flattering to be compared to them," Marshall said. "I take it for what it's worth. It's a tool for people to use because I'm a new name ... and I'm also really loud, more so live than in the studio. If you're quiet, I guess you don't get noticed as much."

Marshall doesn't want to fret about the prospects of joining the ranks of Crow, Joan Osborne and fellow Canadian Jann Arden. "All I know is," she said, "is that I just want to do this for the long haul."

BWF (before we forget): Even though her album failed to chart in the United States, Marshall had a 20-week ride with "Birmingham" on Billboard's pop singles chart, peaking at No. 43 in the fall of 1996.

Marshall Tucker Band rambles on

(March 2, 1995)

Singer Doug Gray doesn't need a two-disc greatest-hits package to verify the Marshall Tucker Band's impact on Southern-rock fans. He lives it every day.

Take one concert last year when, in the span of a few hours, he heard from a woman who said her brother died in an accident and they played his favorite Marshall Tucker track, "Desert Skies," at his funeral, and the couple who approached him and said they played the same song at their wedding.

"If that doesn't make you feel strange and at the same time very good about what you've done for people, I don't know what will," Gray said recently from his Spartanburg, S.C., home.

Marshall Tucker fans have waited years for a comprehensive career collection. A few weeks ago, the long hard ride ended, thanks to the release of an impressive 29-cut compilation titled "The Best of the Capricorn Years" (Era/K-tel, 2605 Fernbrook Lane N, Minneapolis, MN 55447-4736).

Some of the band's best work, culled from seven gold- and platinum-selling albums on the Capricorn label, is here: "Take the Highway," "Can't You See" (the single and live versions), "This Ol' Cowboy," "Fire On the Mountain," and their biggest hit, "Heard It In a Love Song" (Top 20 in June 1977).

Next year marks Marshall Tucker's 25th anniversary. In that time, they've seen their share of heartache: Bassist Tommy Caldwell died in an auto accident in 1980, and his brother, Toy (lead guitar), died of respiratory failure in '93. Only Gray and sax-flute player Jerry Eubanks remain in the current seven-member lineup.

"Right now, I'm looking at gold and platinum records on the wall in a memorabilia room I have here," Gray said. "You look at these things and you think, 'You can't give this up,' because people bought records expecting to hear these songs live every so often when they want to.

"That's the reason I continued the Marshall Tucker Band. Not only is it financially successful, but it's warming to me to walk out at a state fair and a little girl or boy walks up to me and says, 'Listen, that's my momma standing over there. She's embarrassed to come over; she got your autograph when she was 9 like me, and my grandpa turned me on to you.' That's when you get to thinking, 25 years is a long time."

BWF (before we forget): "M.T. Blues," a collection of blues-based tracks, was released on Era/K-tel in October 1997. The follow-up, "M.T. Blues 2," was released in the summer of 1998.

Marxman right on target

(June 9, 1994)

All eyes, it seems, are upon London-based rap group Marxman. Figuratively and literally.

The soulful quartet, made up of two Irishmen and two Englishmen of Jamaican origin, have earned the praise of peers, fans and critics for its bold fusion of hip-hop with Irish folk instruments and melodies.

Marxman's debut A&M album, "33 Revolutions Per Minute," is a four-star effort in many corners, not only for its multigenre, De La Soul-like vibe but its biting social commentary.

With a socialist view of the world, the foursome touch on such controversial issues as British involvement in Northern Ireland ("Sad Affair"), colonialism ("Ship Ahoy," featuring vocals from Sinead O'Connor), violence against women ("All About Eve") and heroin addiction ("Do You Crave Mystique"). The first single, "Sad Affair," which questions England's Northern Ireland policy, was banned last year by the BBC.

Considering all that, it wouldn't surprise lead rapper Hollis if authorities were tailing their every move.

"The phone could be bugged," the Dublin native said recently from the group's London studio. "I don't let it affect me. I live a normal life. I haven't changed my lifestyle fundamentally since we started this music business, but I'm conscious of certain things when it comes to ... you know.

"I think they'd be mad to (bug us), we're a musical group. I don't have an AK-47 in the room or anything like that. What they are frightened of are ideas spreading among young people which challenge their authority and lead people to think for themselves. ... On that level, they probably are quite right to be afraid of a group like Marxman."

When stacked up against other hot topics in the world, like the war in Bosnia and North Korea's nuclear buildup, the situation in Northern Ireland is no more or less important, Hollis said.

"But what I do think is that the British government is very good at suppressing information about Northern Ireland," he said, "and it puts pressure on other governments, like America, to play down what's going on because it's bad for British's image internationally, the fact that she's an aggressor in another country."

In August, Marxman played a show in Belfast, a volatile city many artists avoid. It was a humbling experience, Hollis said, because the group only writes songs about the country while citizens there live with violence daily.

"We didn't stay in any hotels; we stayed with local families in their houses," he said. "While we were there, someone everyone knew in the area was shot dead by Protestant paramilitaries.

"This happened only a few miles away from where we were. To them (the residents), it was like, 'Oh, to shame,' because it's happening every day."

The group is adamant about socialism, a system "based on the needs of the people rather than for business and profit," Hollis said. But they aren't trying to shove a philosophy down anyone's throat.

"Many of (the album's) themes are universal," he said. "Songs like 'Father Like Son,' 'Drifting' and 'All About Eve' are written in very humanistic language. That's how we are as people; we don't rant about things. We're not middle-class college kids. We're ordinary Joe's from working-class communities.

"We're not presenting ourselves as better than anybody else or that we have all the answers. We're just very serious about what we believe in and our convictions."

"33 Revolutions" already is old news in England. It was released last year, and since then, Marxman have opened for U2 on its Zoo TV tour in Europe and recently for Depeche Mode. Just as the album hits American stores, the group is finishing its follow-up release and planning U.S. live dates in July.