| Who needs Boyzone when you've got B*Witched? The day-glo youthful pop stars are even doing what the great and the good of Irish-British boybands could never do - sell a few records in the U S of A. Gary Terratzo gets B*Witched. �Lindsay Armaou looks like she's just stepped out of her local hair salon. The eighteen year old member of pre-teen scream sensation B*witched is perfectly crimped, scrubbed to gleaming, and attired in the kind of deep blue denims that have become her band's calling card since they first emerged last year. Lindsay is also B*witched's youngest member and, of course, the vexed subject of their ages has become the only real rumour about these day-glo popettes. But more of that later. For B*witched have done the unthinkable - pulled a fast one on Boyzone and actually broken through in America. "We've been on tour with N-Sync and 98 Degrees and "C'est Le Vie" went to No 9 in the Billboard Hot 100,'' says Lindsay. "It's a gradual process - the single started off at 110 but obviously you have to sell an awful lot more over there than in the UK." Out of the mouths of babes indeed. This Lollapalooza tour with N-Sync and 98 Degrees has seen Lindsay, Sinead, Edele and Keavy (sisters of Boyzone bruiser Shane) take on Fortress America to dazzling success. With a myriad of miracle girl and boybands doing the rounds and old men running the pop charts it was never going to be easy taking on that particular market, but the jetlag and caffeine intake isn't showing yet for B*witched. "It's hard work alright," admits Lindsay. "Basically, when we were on tour, we had a tour bus and we used to travel overnight and arrive in the next place at three or four in the morning and get into the hotel and during the day we'd either have a TV interview in the morning or photoshoots and then that night we'd have a gig. That was it every day. We had one day off every two weeks." Time off was spent reclining by the pool or doing the mallrat thing to resist the perils of burnout. "I don't worry about burnout," says Lindsay, obviously having read her Iggy Pop manual. "But there's only so much you can do for so long. If we felt we were being pushed over the limit we would say we need to slow down, we need a rest, but we're grand so far." The girls returned to the States last week, this time to tour with (spit on me!) Britney Spears and one Joey McIntyre, formerly of New Kids On The Block whose management now look after Lindsay and chums. But who is buying B*witched records, just who constitutes the braying masses who have turned a marketing man's wet dream into touchy feely reality? "I think "C'est La Vie" was a summer hit so there's a mixture there because it was played in clubs and it came out at holiday time," reckons Lindsay. ""Rollercoaster" and "To You I Belong" were probably bought by the younger market, early teens to late teens and slightly younger even, but I think "Blame it on The Weatherman" appealed to a slightly older market." Hmmmm. So B*witched might be shedding their bejeaned skin and turning into a more mature proposition... "We can dance and we can play instruments and that's one thing we did do with Weatherman,'' says Lindsay. "We did an acoustic version of it on MTV. I played guitar, Keavy played percussion and Sinead played the accordion and Edele sang the song and I think a lot of people were impressed by that. But it's not a conscious thing that we want our new songs to be for an older market, it was a natural progression.'' Lindsay was born in Greece where her backpacking mum met her dad twenty years ago. The family moved to the pop heaven of Swords (home to Boyzone's Ronan) in North Dublin and Lindsay met the rest of the girls who would one day be B*witched in Digges Lane dance studio. Visits back home are exceedingly rare these days. "Last week, we went over for a day for a meeting, flew in, flew out, and then I was off to Greece the next day for holidays," says Lindsay. "My mum and dad are over there." |