by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

"Frank and I were walking in front of Club Med on Ste-Catherine,” recalls Jet Phil, “and I said to him, ‘Plastik Patrik wanted to play here with One-976.’ I said I really liked tiki stuff, and Frank said, ‘Oh, wow, me too, since I was really young!’ By the time we’d walked from McGill to St-Hubert, the band was made up. I’m not joking.”

Think that was fast? Phil and Kelly enlisted some friends (including Xavier Caféïne, Mike Plant of Too Many Cooks and Voivod’s Michel Langevin) and wrote, produced, recorded and mixed a debut album in a mere six weeks. It didn’t hurt that their set list already sort of existed.

“Frank and I found an old menu of exotic drinks from the ’70s. The names of the drinks were so fucking rock! Vicious Virgin, Headhunter—we said, ‘That’s it!’ The look, the sound, it’s all beautiful.”

Other songs boast titles like “Blue Hurricane,” “Cobra’s Fang,” “Smoking Eruption” and “Suffering Bastard,” which aptly describes the morning after a luau liquor binge. But crazy drinks are just part of the tiki experience (don’t forget clothes, food, lounge music and decor), which Phil points out is a perfect balance of silly and sexy, funny and fabulous (kinda like rock ’n’ roll, no?).

Paradise promise that, while they may not have marimbas or Hawaiian steel guitars, they got the vibe down for the show. “We’re gonna have a big tiki totem—huge, actually. We got totems, statues, a forest of palm trees, pyrotechnics, plastic leis and fake grass skirts—everything’s there. That’s the goal—we’re gonna have fun.” :

CD launch at Café Campus
on Monday, Oct. 7, 9pm, $8

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